Well, I can formally say it…it’s heeee—rrrre! I am excited to announce the release of my latest book, OUR SEASONS, now available online at Amazon.com in both paperback and Kindle formats. And in just a matter of weeks, signed copies will be available on shelves at my current independent bookstore partners, who also stock signed copies of my first book, THE MUSE UNLOCKED . I am presently reaching out to other bookstores in Florida about partnering, so I hope to team up with locally-owned, independent bookstores in other markets, as well, where I can refer readers who prefer to shop local! In the meantime, you can click here for a list of where my titles are currently available.
OUR SEASONS is a departure from my first book, a contemporary romance. With this latest book, I have set out to create a thematic literary collection of short stories and poetry. I’ll have much more to share about the origins and various sources of inspiration behind the book very soon, but OUR SEASONS is for me a bridge between my debut novel and the process of writing the sequel to it. The experience of writing my first book opened up so many places inside of me emotionally and that on top of simply getting older has led this scribe to become much more pensive and introspective. The result is a look at a lifetime, the seasons we have experienced and perhaps those still to come and what we anticipate lies down the road. Each season within the book features a unique story with characters, mood and setting quite different from one season to the next and as you’d expect they take place during the season they represent and mirror our own lives with the different transitions and evolutionary planes we travel as we get older. After each short story that launches the season, there are 13 poems to follow, with each season’s final poem being somehow tied to the short story, serving as a set of literary bookends, structurally. So the book is comprised of 4 seasonal stories and 52 poems to symbolize a year in the life and overall, attempts to capture the many shades, textures and hues that paint a lifetime of experiences and emotional milestones — birth/death, love/heartache, discovery/loss, growth/regret, daring/fear, hope/despair, friendship/solitude — and everything in between.
Perhaps what I’m most excited about is that each short story that launches a new season was inspired by a particular work of art — public art, specifically — that I either discovered and researched or had previously experienced personally during my own travels. During the process of building the stories, I visited the communities highlighted to experience the art that I feature as well as its surroundings. Much like my first book, I wanted to transport readers so they too could feel immersed in the setting as fully as possible, maybe even inspire them to hop in the car and take a drive over to one or two of these spots to experience it in person for themselves. And I would be over the moon to hear from readers who read my stories and find themselves doing exactly that, so please share if you do!
Throughout the course of the book’s launch, I’ll be sharing much more about the stories behind the stories, and I’m very excited to announce that you will also hear directly from some of the artists themselves! I will be sharing my conversations with them about their work that led to my stories that eventually resulted in this book. So I can’t wait to invite you to learn even more about OUR SEASONS over the weeks and months to come.
In the meantime, please clink glasses with me and if you dare, embrace your own seasons as you embark on the short stories and poetry that make up my new literary anthology. And this indie thanks you in advance from the bottom of her heart for your support. Cheers! *clink* ~ Chris
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