I'm so stinkin' excited,
y'all! Just this week I signed TWO more contracts--one with Dreamspinner Press
and the other with Dreamspinner's YA imprint, Harmony Ink. (Yup, the revise and
resubmit has been revised, resubmitted, and accepted <3)
Here's the new estimated
release schedule as it stands:
The Most Beautiful Words
in the World
(OCT 2014)
Twelve-year-old Autumn's world is shattered when her beloved Great-Pop, Tommy Johnson, suffers a stroke that leaves him comatose. With everyone around her resigning themselves to the inevitable, Autumn is the only one not willing to give up. She and Great-Pop have more secret stories to share with each other, after all. More stories about Roy McMillan—the great love of Tommy's life whom he lost fifty years ago.
Autumn struggles to keep Great-Pop on this side of death's door. But how can she compete with the beautiful and mysterious Valley—a place of surreal magic where the sun never sets? Especially when there's someone familiar in the Valley who will do everything he can to keep Great-Pop from returning to her.
Bowl Full of Cherries
(EARLY DEC 2014)
Porker, Fatty, Tons-of-Fun, Roly-Poly: Crowley Fredericks has heard it all. He’s dropped a lot of the weight since his high school days, but he’s still a big guy, and the painful words follow him. Rejected—again—because of his weight, Crowley’s starting to think that maybe love just isn’t meant for huskier men. And then his roommate, Tyler, invites him home for Christmas in snowy Susset and everything changes.
Averell “Rell” Lang is one half of the Lang Twins. But where his brother Tyler is snobby, elitist and the consummate ‘hipster’, Rell is funny, laid back, and yes, maybe a bit of a slacker. The twins couldn’t be any more different. So when Tyler brings home his roommate for the holidays, Rell expects the worst—a Tyler clone. What he gets instead is Crowley. Beautiful, funny, fascinating Crowley. Rell’s never looked at a man this way before, and what he sees in Crowley Fredericks has nothing to do with his weight.
Can both men overcome their hang-ups to unwrap more than Christmas presents this holiday season?
Alchemy Ever After (with Siôn O'Tierney)
(LATE JAN 2015)
The city of New Alexandria is filled with marvelous wonders: the largest library known to man, powerful magicians-in-training, mechanical follies, and much more! Yet it is not this thoroughly modern metropolis that lured Idrian from his hometown, but the promise of learning the new art of alchemy. Master Maketh is a scholar combining the spectacular new technology of the era with the ancient art of magic, and he’s taken Idrian in as an apprentice. Together, they are animating a living sculpture from ice. It is the culmination of years of research, and Idrian cannot wait to unveil it alongside all the other marvels being presented at the annual Spring Festival.
But after witnessing his master in a passionate embrace with one of the students from the New Alexandria Academy of Engineering & the Magical Arts, naive Idrian's mind is no longer strictly on things alchemical. When his warm touch accidentally awakens the consciousness within the living sculpture, Idrian learns lessons firsthand about passion and physicality.
I'll Always Miss You
(MAR 2015)
Isa Zaman could
forgive his parents for taking in a friend of the family's son if only he
wasn't the most boring teenager in the universe. Macklin Cormack’s only
interests are "reading and the outdoors"? Yeah, right. Isa's
convinced that "Mackie" is either a pyro or a klepto. Plus, as a
white kid, Mackie looks ridiculous in the Zaman’s Arab-American household.
Forced to share a bedroom with the new intruder, Isa keeps butting heads with
Mackie, until a hilariously absurd fight breaks the tension between them.
Isa’s just starting to
figure things out: this new house guest, his cultural identity, school, and
girls, when the whole family is suddenly uprooted from their home, for reasons
Isa can't understand. They move from their tiny apartment in the city to a
giant, old house in a small town, hours away from all he's ever known. Oh, and
the new house? It's probably haunted, or so says the ten-year-old next door who
can't make facial expressions. As if things weren't weird enough, Isa's
friendship with Mackie just took a strange new turn, down a path he's not sure
he wants to follow. Mackie Cormac? Not near as boring as Isa imagined.
~ ~ ~
My life's work, right
there... I know it seems like I squeezed out all these novels at once, but
actually, all my releases have been in various stages of completion
for the last decade.
Now what?
Writing, of course! I've
got more stories to tell and hopefully I'll be able to get back into the swing
of things soon.
--Raine
