Feel free to skip straight to the 10 reasons you want to read Cricket and Grey.

I kind of sprang the whole serial fiction thing on you.  No preamble or explanation or working up to the decision.  I apologize.  It’s just that for a whole year I’ve been trying to write pitches and though I did accrue 11 rejections I dropped the ball many months ago.  Partly because I was so sick of trying to write a good pitch.  You can’t sell a good story with a bad pitch.  But there’s no question that the whole pending move thing got in the way of my writing as well.  I finished writing the book last June.  13 months ago.  I haven’t worked on any fiction since then.  I did try.  I tried to write Baby Girl Six and discovered that though I want to write that story – I wasn’t ready.

So once I made a decision to self publish (about 72 hours ago) I burst out of the gates without further hesitation and started re-editing Cricket and Grey.  Once the first chapter was cleaned up I just posted it on the blog – BOOM.  DONE.

So here’s the plan: I’m going to publish one chapter every Monday afternoon until I reach the end of the book.  Each chapter will be available to read on my blog for one month.  Then I take it down.  Meanwhile I will get it formatted so that you can buy it for your Kindle or Nook or whatever electronic book device you have.  I’m not sure of the price range – probably between $3 and $6.  I will also format it for print on demand.  To get a hard copy of the book is more expensive so it will most likely be between $10 and $15.

Once I’ve got all those formats covered and the book is available in every way possible – I will begin working on the second Cricket and Grey book.  Either that or I will work on Jane Doe.*  If anyone reads Cricket and Grey and wants to read a second book I suggest you speak up and say something – these are the two projects I have queued up and I could go either way.  Cricket and Grey is meant to be a four book series (winter, spring, summer, and fall).

10 Reasons You Want to Read Cricket and Grey:

• Cricket is possibly the first ever small -breasted, all-over freckled, red-headed medium height heroine who won’t make me you want to strangle her for being too perky and optimistic and singing ALL THE FUCKING TIME.  This heroine carries an M&P pistol, gets in fist fights with burly men, but also cares about healing people and animals.**

• This story features an obese Mormon crime boss and a buxom Mormon teen-bride.

• Grey is exactly the kind of hero you need on the post-oil semi-apocalyptic scene: he appreciates fine catgut suturing, plays the bagpipes, likes girls who get in fistfights with burly men, knows how to evade federal agents, can build a fire in the rain, doesn’t turn his nose up at stale bread, is not hero-tall and buff (5’11” and strong but not rippling with enormous sweaty muscles), and bathes regularly.  He’s a Scot, what more inducement could you possibly need?

• There are lots of guns.  Not only are there lots of guns but I did a lot of research to include all these guns and even went shooting for the first time in my life (twice in one year!) in spite of the fact that I’m pretty anti-gun myself.  But this story isn’t about me so my stance on firearms is not important.  What’s important is that I got to spend many hours reading about semi-automatic pistols in order to choose the right weapon for Cricket.  I also got to consider the relative merits between an M16 (sexy, as far as assault rifles go) and an AK-47 (reliable and has a sexier full name if you love Russians like I do*** – Avtomat Kalashnikova).  I know you want to catch me out in weapons errors.

• This novel includes the words pemmican, orchid, harem.

• Horse drawn smuggled goods – how can anyone possibly resist Clydesdales as a get-away vehicle?

• I really love the main villain and I think it shows.  In fact, the whole story ended up changing so that my favorite villain could have a bigger part.  This was unexpected.

• There are a lot of scenes over meals consisting primarily of old bread, pickled and canned goods made by the people eating them, and some freshly hunted animals.  I had to find out how to pluck a bird and my main source for this information came from my favorite hunting food writer Hank Shaw of Hunter, Angler, Gardener, Cook. 

• A big theme in the story is about our need for modern medicine and how we’ll all get on when all we have is what we can grow and forage to heal ourselves.  Know how to set your own bone breaks?  Yeah, me neither.  But it’s an interesting thought, isn’t it?  Instead of stockpiling military grade assault rifles to prepare for an apocalypse I think everyone would be better served stockpiling band-aids and ibuprofen.

• When this book is made into a movie there will be no parts in it for the following actors and “actors”: Angelina Jolie, Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Lopez, Brad Pitt, Miley Cyrus, Ben Affleck, Rihanna, Beyonce, Kristen Stewart, any other singer-turned-actor, Milla Jovovich, or any other model-turned-actor, Tom Cruise, Daniel Craig, Anne Hathaway, Natalie Portman, Michele Williams, Uma Thurman, Sarah Jessica Parker, Hugh Grant (sorry Hugh), Scarlett Johansson, Ryan Reynolds, Megan Fox, or Kate Hudson.  (The list is exhaustive so I’m going to end there and you may add to it after you’ve read the book)

So what the hell are you waiting for?  Read the first chapter now!

Cricket and Grey (winter): Chapter One

(So did it work?  Did I convince you to read it?  Wait a minute – you’re still here because you’re mad that Grey isn’t like FABIO?  You all know I’m a Nathan Fillion girl not an oily bulgy long haired hunk kind of girl.  Okay, picture Nathan Fillion but younger and Scottish.  Naked.  Now go read…)

*I’m back to calling it Jane Doe because nothing else works right now.

**So maybe if you love little orphan Annie you might hate Cricket.  I loathe LOATHE that story and every single version of that obnoxious little red headed girl and I have nightmares about her curly fro.  (I’m not kidding at all)

***Seriously, I’ll take a Russian over a Frenchman ANY DAY OF THE WEEK.