I've talked before about my struggles finding title for my novels. How it took me years to come up with "Litany". I'm happy to say not only do I have a title for book 2 (EVERY SKY A STRANGER), but also book 3 (COMPASS FOR THE LOST).
Having a title gives me an instant ten-thousand foot view of the story and keeps me focused.
I'm making steady progress on "Every Sky" and I'd like to share a brief snippet with you.
Melissa closed her eyes and stepped through.
Shadows and light pulsed against her eyelids, somehow searing through them directly into her mind. It was like and unlike the scintillating scotomas that had plagued her since she’d seen her first portal as a young child. The gleaming wagon wheel spun lazily in her visual field. There was no blinking this away.
No pretending this was just an incipient migraine.
There was a sense of motion, even though the connection to her body felt thin, distant. A rushing in her ears that she felt rather than heard. All of her senses now crosswired to other senses. Some were the normal five she understood. Others were strange and she struggled to integrate the bizarre input. She could taste individual frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum and the spin of the earth in space was distinct in her awareness from the position of her own body.
Without anything to measure herself against, Melissa felt impossibly small and massively large at the same time. Her body winked in and out of phase like a pulsar. And she had lost all sense of time. Was she moving or just experiencing the planet’s motion?
It was strangely beautiful. Strangely comforting to truly have no control. No choices to make. And no chance to make the wrong choice in this liminal space that existed free from the web of consequence.
Until the night of the homeless count in Boston, Melissa’s whole life had been spent avoiding a minefield of ifs and thens. Of making safe decisions that deliberately narrowed possibilities until her life had become as colorless and as empty as her apartment.
She had thought it would keep her safe.
But isolation was not safety. It was stasis. And life was nothing if it wasn’t growth and change.
She could almost hear Julian saying as much in his soothing therapist's voice, warm and resonant, his kind eyes seeing what Melissa most sought to hide. Would there be a Dr. Julian Maxwell in whatever new reality waited for them on the other side of this portal? What about a Melissa Klein?
As her thoughts chased themselves round and round her mind, the rest of her seemed to still. Her senses shrank down into the meager ones that she’d been born with. Her body had proportion and mass again. Her inner ear gave her confirmation of up and down.
The glare of a bright light seared her eyes. She blinked rapidly to clear her doubled vision. Just as Melissa realized she was standing, her legs buckled and she stumbled, her knee striking something hard and sharp. She hit the floor in a haze of throbbing pain and lay there catching her breath.
"Graceful, much?" she muttered, waiting for some reaction from Reina or Thorne, but there was only silence. Frowning, she rubbed her sore knee, rolled to a sit, and stared at the offending coffee table. Her coffee table. Her glass coffee table in her living room. The breath caught in her throat. Her knee was a distant ache.
"Reina?" she whispered.
Her cell phone rang, loud as a siren in the loft of her living room. She drew it from her pocket with shaking hands and set it facedown on the table. Counted the rings until either the caller gave up or got sent to voice mail pergatory. After a moment of silence, it started its chirpy song again. Melissa turned the volume off.
She dug her hands in the soft nap of the rug beneath her. The sofa would be more comfortable, but she still didn't trust her legs. Something had gone very wrong. If she was here, where did Reina and Thorne end up? And how did she get here anyway? Was her car still parked by Martin's place?
Parking laws in Boston were brutal. It would be ticketed, booted, and towed. If it survived that long. “Oh, God, my car.” Of all the things to worry about, she couldn’t stop thinking about it. A silver Lexus she had paid cash for after her parent’s wills had been settled. The first new car she’d ever owned, christened with a scuffed back quarter panel from a careless driver in downtown Boston the first week she had it.
Laughter bubbled up from deep inside and once it started, she couldn’t stop it.
The car was parked outside Martin's building/the car was parked in her garage spot.
It was a silver Lexus/it was a gray Mercedes.
She remembered racing downtown, past BMC, past the tents at Mass and Cass./She hadn't left her condo since she got home from work, opened a bottle of pino, and poured a glass.
Wait.
What the hell?
From the draft of EVERY SKY A STRANGER, forthcoming 2026