Can You Believe It’s Been Over a Decade?

It’s February 3, 2026 when I sit down to write this. I uploaded the final document for The Profane Series #3: Up in Smoke to Amazon and D2d three days ago and hit publish for the first time in 8 years (not counting that little Profane short story I wrote back in 2024)

I realized this morning as I was getting reading for work that I published my very first novel B&B #1: The Duality Paradigm almost 12 years to the date, January 30, 2014 to be precise. The close symmetry of these dates feels nice in my heart. Especially after the long years I spent struggling over Up in Smoke. This was the first novel I had to completely scrap and start over. I started the initial draft–was it 40k words? 60k?– not long after A Sanguine Solution came out back in 2018 but very quickly became frustrated with it. There were emotional beats I wanted to hit with this story and I couldn’t seem to land them.

I took time off to write Death Days and Essex Colony–both released through NineStar Press and currently out of print. Neither of these novels sold well enough to pay the bills and feeling the crushing weight of credit card debt, and a good deal of self doubt as to my own skills as a writer, I decided it was time to get a real job. I ended up working as a bookseller in a used book store from 2019 until COVID shut us down. Laid off from that job, I took the opportunity to go back to school and finally finish my BA in Creative Writing. I set aside the stories I had written and published and worked on completely new, mostly epic and high fantasy, short stories. I worked tenaciously that last year at school to regain my confidence and to build a writing routine. I sat down the summer after graduation and started writing a completely fresh draft of Profane 3. I was rocking it.

Only then in October 2021 I moved across the country to live with my now-husband. And the writing routine fell by the wayside. There was just so much to do including looking for a job when my savings started to run out.

Burnout in the Midwest

It was 4 long years working minimum wage jobs as a barista, a baker, a pastry chef, a barista again, running my own indie bakery, and then winding up as a prepared foods cook for the local Co-Op where I could breath again and recover from the worst emotional and physical burnout I’ve ever experienced. And for the first time in years I felt a spark of desire to dust off Profane 3 and finish it. Not for the money, but just for me.

There was a point in the last 5 years when I seriously debated with myself if I would ever finish the series I had started (Profane, Pacchia, Professor Littman’s etc), and I won’t lie for a time there I truly believed it was time to walk away. Maybe start writing under a pen name completely unrelated.

That is why I say writing Profane 3 was ultimately for me. I ghosted everyone online. With the destruction of Twitter I completely fell off online writing spaces. I don’t know where the cool kids hang out anymore. I don’t know if there is a single soul out there who remembers my stories and desires to read the endings. But there came a moment this past summer where the burning desire to finish the novel arose in me and I dusted it off, read through, and sat down to talk about it with my partner DT, to talk through the writer’s block I had faced so many years ago.

Mores the pity the obvious answer to this writer’s block was that I was trying to fit 2 books worth of plot into 1 book, and that’s why I couldn’t ever write the ending. Because it’s not the ending. There’s going to be 1 more Profane novel (it’s even got a title: Bad Blood), but I promise this one won’t take me 8 years to write.

New Book Release…Talk about burying the lead.

Today I’m here to talk about the book that I just hit publish on: Profane 3: UP IN SMOKE. I’ve made some choices in this books that needed to made. Once upon a time it felt as though you couldn’t get a publisher to buy speculative queer anything. Once upon a time it felt as though you couldn’t sell a queer book unless it was explicitly a ROMANCE novel. But my stories in the Occult Seattle universe have never fit precisely into the Romance mold. They have people falling in love (sort of), but they’re more about the gritty day-to-day reality of detectives and investigators in an Urban Fantasy setting. With spicy sex.

In trying to keep myself driving (mostly) in the Romance genre’s lines, I often failed to satisfy strict Romance readers (I’m eternally sorry for this) and failed to always satisfy myself as the writer. My protagonists are messy people who strive towards happy endings and make mistakes along the way. In the sense that this series started it’s life as M/M romance, it has wandered somewhat off that beaten path, while still containing angst, love, and spice. To finish this book, I embraced the fact that this series has always been an angsty URBAN FANTASY MYSTERY and I hope that for those who enjoy this genre, you enjoy this book.

Just in case you missed it: I do highly recommend you check out Profane 2.5: Heart Eater. It’s a short story set between the events of Vapor Trail and A Sanguine Solution.

If you’re completely new to my Occult Seattle work I’ve created a SUGGESTED READING ORDER that you can view on my website with buy links.

As always, you can join my mailing list if you want to receive notifications of new releases (that’s all I really post there). You can also follow my youtube channel which I have also resurrected and will contain a lot more writing/author life content going forward. That is the best place to stay informed about what I’m writing and working on and upcoming publishing details.

 

If you made it to the end of this post, thank you for sticking around.

xoxo Lia