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 Happy Birthday to me! 🎂 And an even happier book birthday/release day to Quiet Deviations, my first short story of 2026! Woo-hoo!! I'm so nervous about how it will be received, but like all of my work, I have feelings and fears --this is the best way to get them out. (This excerpt is a little shorter than the original one). Information is below, along with purchase links. Overdrive and Hoopla are ebook libraries. You'll need a public library card to check out books at no cost to you. Thanks for supporting my work! Chapter 1 –  The Right to Remain The Archive smells like dust and quiet ambition, the way libraries always do, but here it’s cleaner, almost sterile, filtered light sliding across the frosted glass of my office window. I like my office. Always have. It’s small, slightly cluttered with journals, a mug with a chip on its rim, and stacks of returned books I haven’t yet reconciled with the shelves. The frosted glass keeps the world at a distance, and the Archive’s puls...

    Chapter 1 – The Right to Remain The Archive smells like dust and quiet ambition, the way libraries always do, but here it’s cleaner, almost sterile, filtered light sliding across the frosted glass of my office window. I like my office. Always have. It’s small, slightly cluttered with journals, a mug with a chip on its rim, and stacks of returned books I haven’t yet reconciled with the shelves. The frosted glass keeps the world at a distance, and the Archive’s pulse is just soft enough not to drown me. I boot up WorkReady. My little corner of the system hums to life as the login prompt fades. Overnight reports populate the screen, automated actions tallied, flags raised and resolved. The LOST items queue is first: books overdue by one month automatically fined, marked as vanished if no one returns them. The system never misses a beat. I like that. Reliability is a small comfort. I hover over the first report and nod to myself. Another stack of overdue fiction, some travel g...

 I can now share more information on the upcoming short story under the Seraphine Vale name.  Title: Quiet Deviations: A Short Story  Official Release Date : 2/1/2026 Blurb:  Milla Braxton works in a library designed to forget nothing. In Aria, a nation founded as sanctuary, every citizen is guided by WorkReady—a system built to optimize labor, behavior, and risk. It assigns work, measures usefulness, and quietly decides which lives remain legible. In the library, it catalogs stories, flags language, and removes what no longer fits the future it is building. Most people trust the system. Milla used to. When a book vanishes without record or appeal, Milla begins to notice the silences—gaps in the shelves, in the logs, in the way her colleagues speak when WorkReady is listening. The system isn't malfunctioning. It is refining. And it is learning to do so without human consent. As rules tighten and oversight becomes intimate, Milla finds herself choosing between obedie...

 I'm having issues with someone else who publishes works under the name Seraphine Vale on Amazon. That person is not me. I don't want to redesign ebook covers and make these edits in my drafts just to change my pen name. That's tedious enough--I don't have an editor to help me out with these things, so what I'm going to do with it is this:  I will no longer publish my work under that name on Amazon, because it makes it very difficult to find there with the other author under that name. Since I love both of my pen names, I'm not going to give up on them. Seraphine Vale's work will be available on online retailers but not Amazon. This will not hurt me because I don't sell as much on Amazon as I do on Hoopla, for example. In hindsight, I should've done some research for the availability of the name. (I'm very sorry to inconvenience my Amazon readers.)  My next book will be available on February 1st, 2026--which is my birthday. It will be under the S...

The first days of a new year always feel tender to me. Not loud. Not triumphant. Just… open. Like a room with the windows cracked, letting in air you didn’t realize you needed. 2026 is already shaping itself into a year of careful attention—attention to who we are, who we’re allowed to be, and how easily those things can be taken for granted. I’ve been thinking a lot about safety lately. Not just physical safety, but the kind that lets you breathe without bracing yourself. The kind that doesn’t ask you to shrink, translate, or justify your existence. Writing has always been my refuge when the world feels sharp around the edges. When systems feel too big, too cold, too sure of themselves. Stories let me imagine gentler structures. Kinder ones. Or at least places where resistance begins quietly, with a person noticing that something is wrong. I’ve been working—slowly, deliberately—on a new story set in Aria. Some of you may recognize the name. It’s a place I return to when I need to beli...