Black Rose was the book I’d never write. It began as a bizarro cross-over fic between Tombstone and Van Helsing while I was in high school. For whatever unhinged reason, my dad always believed in it. He always asked: when are you going to finish Black Rose?
I kept telling him: Dad, there’s nothing to finish. There’s no story.
And then one day, against every odd, there was a story.
But it's not quite that simple.
(Here's Dad seeing the cover art of Black Rose for the first time. Yes, we all cried)
Back up a little. A little more. Perfect. Did you know I couldn't read? I'm still a garbage reader. My mom used to read my school projects to me, yes, even college text books, so I could keep up. When Black Rose was in development, Mom and I traveled to Nevada to visit every location in the book. She kept it a secret from Dad. We made up a story about a different book getting picked up as my debut, it was pretty hilarious.
So, what placed the spark in me to finally write Black Rose? Come forward in time to 2020. Our community went through the CZU Lightning Complex Fire. My parents and next door neighbors got back in during the fire. They used buckets of water, a stolen tractor, a generator, and a fire pump. My dad, at 70 years old, drug a fully charged fire hose up the mountain to rain water over my salvaged cabin while the fire crew back burned. My parents defended my home from a thirty foot wall of fire literally fifteen feet away from my door (their whole story is available in Gerald: a Memoir).
I knew I needed to give them something. I was haunted by the image of my dad with his huge brain surgery scar (from head trauma) dragging hundreds of pounds of hose up the mountain side. I know a book is just that, a book. It can never repay what my parents did for me. But I needed Dad to have the book he always, for some absurd reason, loved.
And so I wrote it. It's a sadder book than the original concept. But the power of belief is at it's core. The belief that we can do more than we think. The belief that we can change our fates. The belief that we can do the impossible.
Belief is the most potent magic.
Thank you Mom, thank you Dad, Thank you everyone at Graveside Press, and a huge thanks you all of you, dear readers. I am so grateful to all of you.
Black Rose is available wherever books are sold. Your support means the world to me.
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