What I am currently working on ...
Verita
(currently at 3,276 wds)
Verita, the story of Verita Segreto, who has spent a lifetime crafting herself into a national monument of moral superiority. As a right‑wing pundit, she built her empire on televised condemnation: unmarried mothers, feminists, queer people, sexually active young women, all targets in her crusade to "restore American values." Her voice became a weapon, her certainty a shield, and her legacy a fortress she believed impenetrable.
Verita's empire is built on a lie.
When rising writer Sarah Donnelly, a principled liberal with no patience for hypocrisy, is assigned as the ghostwriter for Verita's memoir, she expects a miserable job. What she doesn't expect is the unraveling of one of the most carefully guarded secrets in modern political history.
From the moment Sarah steps into Verita's grand, plantation‑like estate, the tension is palpable. Verita is dismissive, intrusive, and openly bigoted. A woman who demands obedience while offering none in return. Yet she is also aging, ill, and desperate to control the narrative of her life before death silences her. She hands Sarah access to her diaries, believing she can manage the story even from the grave.
She is wrong.
Inside the brittle pages of Verita's earliest journals, Sarah discovers a young woman nothing like the venomous figure she knows. A hopeful college student, politically progressive, passionately in love with a young Black man named Caleb. Their romance is tender, transformative and doomed.
When Verita becomes pregnant, her father's hidden racism erupts with violent force. He forces her to undergo an illegal abortion, demanding she claim rape. The lie destroys Caleb's life, and ruins his dream of becoming a lawyer.
Verita buries the truth so deeply that she eventually buries herself inside the persona she creates a woman who condemns in others the very sins she was never allowed to grieve.
As Sarah reads further, she realizes Verita never knew the full extent of her father's brutality. The gasoline‑soaked boots. The missing hours. The young man whose life was shattered not by a lie alone, but by a father's hatred.
The discovery ignites a moral fire in Sarah. She confronts Verita in her hospital room, demanding accountability. Verita clings to her worldview, insisting she "owned her sins" and that modern women refuse responsibility. Her denial is both infuriating and tragic, the last defense of a woman shaped by fear, shame, and indoctrination.
Determined to uncover the truth, Sarah searches for Caleb, hoping to understand the full consequences of Verita's lie. What she finds forces her to confront not only Verita's past, but the generational damage inflicted by silence, racism, and moral posturing masquerading as righteousness.
When Verita dies, her children accuse Sarah of exploiting their mother. The media attacks her integrity, but Sarah comes prepared. On live television, she releases a final video Verita recorded, a confession meant to outlive her body, if not her pride.
In the recording, frail and wrapped in a quilt, Verita finally speaks the truth she spent a lifetime denying. It is not redemption but it is reckoning.
Verita is a story about the cost of lies, the violence of moral hypocrisy, and the courage required to confront a legacy built on the suffering of others. It is a novel that asks whether truth can survive the people who fear it most and whether exposing it can ever truly set anyone free.
Holding Tomorrow
(currently at 31,332 wds)
*Book 3 in the Tomorrow series
Clinging to hope and renewal, only to see it shattered when her lover, Tomorrow, is diagnosed with a terminal illness, Cate is convinced a former act of violence has stolen Tomorrow's chance at survival. Launching into a relentless quest to confront the men who will cost her everything, her pursuit drags her through the bitter truths of the legal system and the confines of a woman's place within it, transforming her into something far more dangerous than fear alone.
Tomorrow watches helplessly as her own death sentence becomes the undertow pulling Cate deeper into fractured dreams and desperate choices. Their love story unfolds as a visceral exploration of resilience, metamorphosis, and the unbreakable bonds between women.
At the center of this storm stands Dottie, the steadfast glue holding them together. She walks the razor's edge between friendship and devotion, supporting Cate as she frantically searches for justice where none exists.
Holding Tomorrow is a haunting, urgent tale of love, loss, and transformation. A journey where strength becomes both weapon and salvation, and where devotion is tested against the relentless tides of history.
Before Tomorrow
(currently at 33,134 wds)
*Prequel to the Tomorrow series.
Before Tomorrow traces the lifelong bond between Dottie Carson and Cate Perchard, two girls who grow up inseparable in 1930s New England and discover, slowly and painfully, that their deepest sense of home has always been in each other.
When a secret romance with a classmate ends in tragedy, Dottie confesses to her mother that she prefers women. In an act of protection, she is sent to Provincetown, where she finds a vibrant queer community, unexpected mentors, and the first real taste of freedom she's ever known. That freedom comes at a cost as it leaves Cate behind.
Cate, meanwhile, is pulled into a life she never chose. After her father's sudden death, she becomes the emotional caretaker of a cold, controlling mother and is pushed into a marriage with Frank Harris, a charming but unfaithful man who offers her stability but no real affection. Motherhood brings her joy, but not belonging. Her letters from Dottie become lifelines, glimpses of a world where women can breathe, choose, and love without apology.
Years later, the women reunite in New York and open an antique shop together. The intimacy of their shared days rekindles everything they once buried. A snowstorm traps them overnight, and the years of longing finally break open into a passionate affair that reshapes both of their lives. For Dottie, it is the fulfillment of a love she has carried since childhood. For Cate, it is the first time she feels wholly seen, desired, and alive.
But the world they inhabit is not built to hold them. Cate's guilt grows alongside her joy, guilt for her daughter, for her marriage, for wanting a life she has been taught she cannot have. When a private investigator hired by Frank follows them on a trip to Martha's Vineyard, Cate's two worlds collide. Believing she must protect her daughter from scandal and cruelty, Cate ends the affair and returns to the safety of convention. When she finally appears at Dottie's door, it is not to reclaim their love but to reclaim their friendship, leaving Dottie heartbroken, grieving a future she had once dared to imagine.
At its core, Before Tomorrow is a story about forbidden love, the cost of conformity, and the quiet bravery of queer women navigating a world determined to deny them. It explores the ache of longing, the weight of sacrifice, and the enduring pull of the one person who feels like home, even when the world insists she cannot be.