Once again, my grateful thanks goes to Janina Franck for her amazing work on this third cover!
I'm particularly excited to share this cover because it means that I'm caught back up again! As of June 2nd, the first three Tales of the Zodiac Cusp Kids will be out in the world and I'm back to anticipating the upcoming release of Something Found in August!
I admit, I also feel a particular sense of accomplishment for completing anything at all during this time of hunkering down and social distancing. Douglas Adams' title, and oft-noted blue period, The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul hasn't been far from my mind of late.
It's a tough time, emotionally, physically, courageously right now. Daily tasks are both more of a challenge, and ironically sweeter as we ponder, curse and treasure the minutiae of what it is to be human. It's a time when we're particularly aware of how vulnerable we are, how precipitously the human race teeters on the edge of survival even when all the safety mechanisms of society are working at full capacity.
In Something Lost, Angie works with two girls from Whitehall, the neighborhood group home for troubled kids, to find a runaway.
Running away from home always held a sort of magical allure for me as a kid, and I know I wasn't alone in daydreaming that fantastical adventure that takes you away from the family who doesn't understand you to the wider world where your true worth can be known. At the crappier and more realistic end of the spectrum, running away generally means going from a bad situation to a worse one, most particularly when running away isn't running away at all.
The world is full of monsters, natural and unnatural, and this story has them both in spades. Thankfully, the world is also full of heroes, and not just of the Princess of Themyscira type. Angie, David, and Jenny rely on a whole community of helpers in this story, from foster parents and police to kindly neighbors, faithful believers, brave kids and really, really good dogs in order to prevail.
The really exciting thing about Something Lost is that it presages huge crazy exciting changes for the Zodiac Cusp Kids, as well as Lorraine and Mr. Rakow. It is becoming clear to them all now that the stakes are higher than they imagined. But they're learning what we all must, without the struggle of loss, they cannot move forward to the next step, which is the discovery of Something Found.
And for me, this small, now completed act of creation is the reminder I needed that despite this long dark tea-time we're enduring, life continues rolling us forward into the next adventure, and the next, taxing our wits and our courage and giving us all the opportunity to be the heroes of our own stories.
Thanks for reading. Now go wash your hands and get ready to be awesome!