Immersion Project

It’s been a while. 2020 broke my COVID calendar. To stay out of the funk, I’ve played with a number of things: cleaning out the garage (whew! that was a three month task – hadn’t gone through some of that stuff since we moved in fifteen years ago), rearranging furniture, sorting through the junk drawer (you know…THAT drawer), teaching myself to make whoopie pies and American Buttercream by watching the various baking championships, and binge watching Forged in Fire (for authorial research purposes of course).

I immersed myself in a lot of things, which really helped with the chaos and the want to see friends (not on a computer screen), go to the movies, and not miss our annual family trip to Vegas.

But I kept coming back around to a place in my head that I love: Port Liberty. It’s a quiet suburb, a coastal town with a boardwalk, and oh, did I mention the Giant Squid? Port Liberty is a suburb of New Arete, a superhero metropolis full of capes, villains, and just plain ordinary people trying to get a job done. New Arete is also the home of the pulp action, tail twitching, four fisted hero duo Dorado and Dark Claw (from my short stories in the anthologies Clockwork Oracle and Next Stop on the #13).

Problem one: Who do ordinary people go to when all the capes are too busy saving the world and posing for photo ops, and the PD is busy cleaning up the mess? Enter Jo Lee Reilly, ghostwriter, home baker, and amateur sleuth…and the Port Liberty Cozies started to form.

Problem two: how do you write a cozy if you don’t know the town? You draw a map of course. I immersed myself for about a month and a half laying out the town, figuring out the businesses Jo Lee frequents, and the people she hangs out with… You’re going to meet a lot of quirky characters over the next few books. And I hope you’ll enjoy them.

In the mean time, welcome to Port Liberty. Here is the product of my Immersion.

Looking forward to sharing this part of my multiverse of fusion with you! Hope you’ll come along for the ride and enjoy it as much as I do!