Seasons of the Moon

I just hit "publish" on Gray Moon Rising.

Ohmigosh.

It's going to be ~12 hours before it's actually available, so now I'm sitting at my desk hitting "refresh" on Amazon instead of being productive. I've poured all of my time, energy, and love into this series, and I am so, so anxious about ending it.

I updated the first three books in the series yesterday, so I took a little time to read through what I had written. Six Moon Summer was drafted in November 2010, so it's been quite some time since that book was on my desk. And what a long eighteen months it has been.

When I wrote the first book, I had no idea it was going to become a Thing. I was just trying to stay sane. I hadn't written anything in nine months, I had a brand new baby, and my entire life felt like it was upside-down.

In a good way.

Getting to escape to the dark forests of Gray Mountain was a relief. I wrote it while nursing my son at my desk (stacked on two Boppees--protip for you writer moms out there), or whenever my husband managed to bounce the Helpful Newborn to sleep for five minutes, and it was so nice. It's probably why the contents of the book are so gloomy, though. Being a new mom is hard.

But it did mean that I got to spend time with Seth. :)

     Rylie was so absorbed in the life and colors of the woods that she didn’t notice she had company until he stepped in front of her. “Hey, hang on a second!" 

     His voice was deeper than she expected. Seeing him closer than before made her realize he wasn’t just dark-skinned and broad-shouldered—he was also really cute. He had a strong nose and full lips, offset by shaggy brown hair slanting over one eye. A single fang hung from his pierced left ear.

     “Hi,” she said, her cheeks growing hot. “Are you from the boy’s camp?” 

     He gave her a long look up and down, face to feet, like he was sizing her up. “My name is Seth.”

I intended for Six Moon Summer to be a standalone. How much could I have to say about a werewolf girl and the werewolf-hunting guy she crushes on?


Quite a lot, it turns out. Readers demanded a sequel to Six Moon Summer, and I acquiesced.

September 2011 rolled around, and I released All Hallows' Moon, which has a lot more of Seth's background, and it introduced Eleanor and Abel. Those two characters really surprised me. I didn't expect to find Eleanor so deliciously hate-worthy, or Abel so darn lovable. He started out pretty scary, actually.

     Footsteps approached, and a man spoke. “Are you going to introduce me, Seth?”
      The newcomer looked like Seth, but taller and older, like he might have been in college. His facial scarring wasn’t as scary in the daylight. The shadows of night had twisted his face into something more monstrous.
      But even with a smile just like Seth’s, Rylie could remember seeing Abel on the road in the dark, holding a rifle loaded with silver bullets.
      “Oh yeah,” Seth said. He sounded totally normal. How could he be so casual standing between a werewolf and a hunter? She felt like she was going crazy. “Rylie, this is my brother, Abel. Abel, this is Rylie. She’s a friend of mine.”
      “You make friends fast, little man,” Abel said. It stretched his scar when he smiled.
      She could imagine raking her claws down his flesh, leaving him ragged and screaming. That was how he had gotten the scar in the first place, wasn’t it?
      Rylie gazed at him mutely, unsure of what to say.

I thought Abel was going to be a really good antagonist, but it turned out that Seth loved his brother too much for me to really make him a bad guy. He might have bad intentions, but Abel is actually really good--and by the time I released Long Night Moon in March, I was kinda loving him. Hard.

But Long Night Moon was a really curious book, emotionally speaking. It's definitely the darkest of the series. Like, if Star Wars had werewolves, Long Night Moon would have been The Empire Strikes Back. Yet I wasn't in a dark head space when I wrote it. The story naturally flowed in that direction. I was really worried everyone would hate all the unhappiness, especially given the nice ending of All Hallows' Moon.

Everything went bad for Rylie in book three. Really bad. But things went really good for the series! Apparently, everybody adored poor Rylie's suffering, because the book kinda went nuclear--it sold 1000 copies right off the bat and has a streak of sixteen (sixteen!!) five star reviews on Amazon. It's been almost four months since it came out, and I still have people pop up to tell me that it's their favorite. The love for Long Night Moon is seriously staggering. (And, weirdly enough, it has outsold All Hallows' Moon. Don't ask me how that works.)

So when my last book was received like that, and I was suddenly faced with the task of ending the series...

No pressure, right?

The Helpful Newborn who inspired me to write Six Moon Summer in the first place isn't really a baby anymore, by the way. He's a toddler tyrant who looks like this:

Objects may be less innocent and harmless than they appear.

So twenty pounds of baby, three YA books, and a lot of stress later, Gray Moon Rising is done. And I mean done-done. Everything is out of my hands and into Amazon's.

I am not nervous.

Seriously. Um. Cough.