“Out of the Ashes”: Double Meaning

All six of the Phoenix Institute titles, the four novels, and the two Charlton City novellas, are available everywhere once again.

They’ve all been retitled. You can read all the descriptions for the books and buy the award-winning superhero romance series over at Amazon and all ebook retailers.

(You may still see some print editions using the previous titles. Those are used editions and thus, haven’t been revised. I’m working on print editions under the new titles.

Rise of the Firestarter (formerly Phoenix Rising), Dark Inferno (formerly Phoenix Legacy), The Immortal’s Ghost (formerly Ghost Phoenix) and Out of the Ashes (formerly Phoenix Inheritance).

For those who’ve read the books before, know that Dark Inferno and Immortal’s Ghost were significantly revised, especially at the beginning. It’s not that the other beginnings were bad–but I found that I could solve a couple of what seemed to me clunky plot problems by reworking the beginning of the books. The other two novels are basically unchanged, save for the new covers.

The novellas are also unchanged, save for the new covers. I debated about whether to put the hero, Detective Aloysius James, on the cover. I’m a believer in own voices stories but I’m also a white woman. I didn’t want to get kudos or feel like I deserved a special pat on the back for having a non-white hero.

Al is Black because he lives in a city with a large non-white population. If he were white, he may well have been part of the white savior complex, a problem in fiction.

Al is who he is because that’s the way the story has to be.

Al deserves to be on the cover. I hope he and Noir’s story gains a wider audience in these new editions.

The re-issue does feel like my career is rising from the ashes, a bit, as I’ve spent the last two years learning how to indie publish. I’ve not yet mastered indie marketing but, hey, one step at a time. (New things are coming! More in the next blog post.)

But there is one book in the Phoenix Institute series, Out of the Ashes, that has a special corner of my heart still.

It features, for the first time in my writing, pets and children. Charlie, the son of the hero and heroine, is autistic. There are some incidents in the book with Charlie that are based on things that happened in my life, some that are an amalgam of incidents that happened to my kids or happened with other families I know. (The incident at school that happens at the beginning of the book, though, yep, that one was real.)

I wrote this book when one of my kids was struggling. I was heartbroken, he was hurting, the future looked bleak, and I wrote this one out of hope and love.

Now, after enormous amounts of hard work on his part, he’s a young man with a bright future ahead of him. Just like I’m sure there will be for Charlie in the book.

Yes, there is such a thing as a real-life happy ending.