We need to talk about The Last Confessions of Mara Dyer and Noah Shaw.
On this, the 11th anniversary of the year I started writing The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer, it’s time. Past time, for many of you, but I have my Reasons for keeping quietish. They will satisfy some of you but not all of you and so I’m just going to get to the heart of the thing, which is this:
I desperately wanted the final chapter in Mara and Noah’s story to come out last year. But as I worked and worked, I knew in my heart of hearts that the book still wasn’t right. I’ve also had several (exciting!) MADNESSy and un-MADNESSy projects on my plate, and because burnout is real (especially when you’re sick), and because sometimes you just have to take a different path (or twenty) to arrive at the right destination, I couldn’t make it happen.
Which brings us to 2020. As the pandemic was gearing up in New York, I learned that my six book series would be getting its fifth editor! Each of my editors have added their own unique stamp on each of the books in the series, but only two books of mine have been been fully edited by the same person (Becoming & Reckoning), before leaving my publisher for either the FBI (true story) or another publishing house (much more common in this business!). But still, The Mara Dyer Shaw Confessions marches on! There will be much revising and adapting to be done, no doubt, but I am genuinely excited to see what the future holds for my dear book.
As for those Amazon release dates—they’re placeholders. They’ve always been placeholders, which I explained way back when folks asked why the Retribution pub dates shown on the Feeds (Amazon/B&N/Book Depository/Goodreads/etc) kept changing. I honestly don’t know why they exist, it has something to do with the Amazon Gods needing Input, maybe, but I wish they didn’t, because they disappoint readers and having disappointed readers is hard on me, an author. (FYI, even the jacket copy on Amazon is placeholder stuff that doesn’t reflect what will appear on the published hardcover. I know this because, fun fact: for each of the hardcovers in the series, I’ve written my own jacket copy! (The paperback copy, which I adore, I can take no credit for, alas).
So! Those are the technical reasons we needed to talk about. The non-technical reasons are that there’s never been a fixed publication date for most of my books because as time passes, as editors come and go, and as seasons change—I change too. These characters are part of me, and this series is something I’ve been working on for at least part of every year of the past decade of my life. As I evolve, Mara and Noah and Daniel and Jamie and everyone evolves, and so my drafts evolve. But the books (thus far) also have taken place in the span of like, a year in Book Time, so making my internal changes feel true and consistent with who my characters were and have become, and making sure it’s all consistent for my always-endgame for them? It’s been a journey.
Because books are permanent and unchangeable, and because I believe my characters and readers deserve the rightest and fittingest ending, since I don’t plan to return to this universe, I don’t want to get the ending wrong. I kind of live in constant terror of getting it wrong. Of explaining these kinds of things, especially the inside baseball stuff, wrong. Of being too real with you online, or not real enough, because the public slice of everything, even publishing, is just that—a slice—and never the full truth of the thing. Not being able to share the full picture with you sometimes makes me feel like I’m lying—to you, to anyone—and that’s a terrible, horrible, no good very bad feeling to have. So I tend to run dark, leaving big gaps of SILENCE instead.
So on this anniversary, I want to thank you for your patience with my silence. Thank you for your patience with my timing. I know that you want snippets and details and stuff, and I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to know that there are readers out there who care about these books and characters and this world even when I’m not Extremely Online to see you and interact with you. I’ve been trying to ration online time generally and snippets in particular, in no small part because I’ve seen people get tattoos of words I put out there released that were cut from final drafts, and felt EXTREME GUILT about it. I’m the kind of drafter who has to write books every wrong way until I get one that’s finally right, and it makes me anxious knowing wrong words are out there and can never be taken back. (Anxiety is a recurring theme, here, if you couldn’t quite tell).
I’m so grateful to my publisher for understanding my desire to get the books to be the best version of themselves that I can make them, along with my past and future editors who help me get there. All I want for all of us is for the ending to be worth it. I’m doing everything humanly possible for me to make it all worth it. Thank you for sticking with me while I do.
(Gorgeous art by the immensely and forever talented @aegisdea)
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