My second novel, Hot Wax, goes on sale September 9, 2025. With fewer than a hundred days to launch, I’ve been crossing them off on the calendar one by one. But the truth is that I’ve been waiting for this for nearly ten years.
I finished the first draft of the first version of Hot Wax in April 2017, when my debut novel had just come out and I was still full of hope and foolish illusions, which shattered almost immediately. If We Were Villains sold so poorly that my own publisher used their right of first refusal on my second book to do just that: refuse. They didn’t even ask to see revisions.
That might have been harder to take if I had loved Hot Wax less. I knew it wasn’t perfect—it was far too long, had too many subplots and too many points of view, was just too much for a market that makes literary merit synonymous with quiet, plotless prose invariably described as “poignant” or “lyrical.” But I also felt unshakably certain that it could be so good, if I could only get a good editor to take a chance on it.