Announcing: My Third YA book!
Very happy to announce there will be one last book in the TJ-verse coming!
I’ve been vaguely wanting to write a story for Chandani for a while now. If you need your memory jogged, she’s the best friend of TJ Powar, and also comes up in REASONS WE BREAK as a side character who causes much confusion, chaos and amusement. It was during writing RWB that I realized I really, *really* wanted to write a book exploring her character. She just needed the right story, and after years of trying to figure it out, here we are. With her aiding an academic misconduct scheme to keep her own future and dreams alive. Chandani Sharma on the wrong side of history? Likely place for her to be.
It’s so weird where writing life takes you. A year before writing TJ POWAR, I never would’ve imagined writing a lighthearted YA contemporary. And then, while writing TJ POWAR, I never imagined that I’d write two spinoffs from that book's universe. I mean, I was just vibing writing that book. I didn't expect it to come to mean so much to me.
But there was a magic when I was writing TJ POWAR that I recognized even then. I dearly loved that cast of characters. Later, writing REASONS WE BREAK, even *more* characters came up that I wanted to know more about. I am unlikely to write books about all of them, but so many of the side characters have inner lives and backstories and futures that I have mapped out in my head. And some of them, I am writing about. Like in the case of this next YA.
This book will be more similar in vibe to RWB than to TJ POWAR, I think. The second lead for Chandani’s book, aka her love interest, is one that people will also be familiar with if they’ve read RWB. They had a lot more interaction in my initial drafts of RWB but I had to cut them because of how long the book got. However, I noted it for later. So here we are.
The plot for this book is something I’m sure I’ll talk more about in the future, but to briefly comment on it, it was inspired initially by a 2023 news story from Stanford—a freshman journalist at the university’s independent newspaper uncovered a research scandal, which was so big that it led to the president of the university stepping down. The more I read about that story, the more eyebrow-raising details there were, and the more questions I had. And on and on down the rabbit hole of academic corruption/research misconduct I went… it’s fascinating stuff.
Of course, this will be a standalone. That means you won’t have to read either of my previous novels to read this one. HOWEVER,,,, I think people who *have* read my previous novels will get a kick out of this one! Not only because of the leads, but some of the other returning characters...
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And if you’re thinking to yourself, “i'm not really into these spinoffs” well i’ve got something completely separate coming too. I look forward to sharing that when I can! because that one is super special to me too.
feeling very grateful that i get to publish more books <3 this industry is hard, so each and every one feels like a miracle. thank you for following along!
