A New Short Story For You - LOUCHE 49!

the cover of the infinity anthology

I’m so excited to share that my new short story, LOUCHE 49, in the Infinity Anthology, edited by Catherine Coulter and published by Suspense Magazine, is available today!

LOUCHE 49 is a thrilling tale of revenge and redemption, following a female assassin—Tempeste Ranier—who goes undercover to investigate her mother’s murder in Paris in the early ‘80s. Inspired by the classic French noir thriller film ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS, the story is a dark and atmospheric exploration of the seedy underbelly of both the City of Lights and Nashville and deep dives into how the actions of our past reverberate in the present.

The prompt — a story with a number in the title — was fun, as this title, LOUCHE 49, quite literally leaped into my mind the moment I saw the description. I’ve learned not to mess with those kinds of intense moments, and I’m excited for you to see what the title really means.

I’m thrilled to have my work included alongside so many talented authors. I mean, just look at this lineup!!!

Thank you to Catherine Coulter for editing, and the team at Suspense Magazine, especially John Raab, for pulling us all together into this incredible opportunity, and of course, to all of you for your support and encouragement. I can’t wait for you to experience the twists and turns of LOUCHE 49, and I hope it will leave you on the edge of your seats until the very end.

Release Day for It's One of Us! 💚

IT’S ONE OF US  is here at last!

The germs of this story have been floating around in my brain for over a decade, sparked by one of those tragic-comedic life moments: my husband and I were in the middle of some rather grueling fertility treatments. One fateful day, he was locked alone in a room in the clinic with a magazine and Sweet Home Alabama blasting out of the speakers (not his first choice). That evening, as we laughed at the absurdity of our situation, he told me this had the makings of a novel... but I’m a thriller writer, and fertility is more of a women’s fiction story. I didn’t know how to marry the two until recently. Enter the complicated forensics of sibling DNA, the moral ambiguity of the sperm donation industry, and a killer on the loose, and poof, the story came together.

My protagonist, Olivia Bender, was such a dream character to write. She came to my mind fully formed one day: a sad, lonely woman with sable hair in a cream cable knit sweater and rolled-up chinos, walking barefoot down a chilly beach, having just suffered a miscarriage. I had to know who she was. It turns out, she’s a dynamic architectural designer who owns her own firm, shares her gifts with the community, and is struggling with the same fertility issues my husband and I went through.

And then... twist. That’s what I do, I take the story and turn it into a pretzel.

Olivia is placed in an absolutely untenable position by the circumstances of the novel, and all I could think was: What would I do in this situation? How would I react? I think this book has a great philosophical core of uncertainty that I hope many, many readers will connect with. What would YOU do? How would YOU react? What would be YOUR path forward? Do you agree with how Olivia handles the situation, especially as it spins out of control? And what about the rest of the characters? We hear from all the people affected: The Husband. The Mother. The Daughter. The Brother. The Cops. The Murderer. I love books that force you to examine your own motivations and morality, while exploring the same in the characters, and this one will, for sure.

This story is certainly identifiable as one of mine, from the creepy opening to the high-stakes life and death struggle, the push and pull of a police investigation against the domestic backdrop, characters you want to root for, and characters you’ll love to hate. And of course, the Nashville setting. But I think this story has a different kind of nuance and tackles questions that are much closer to our realities than the more fantastical world of some of my other psychological thrillers. I think readers will see themselves reflected more in these characters than anything I’ve done previously. It’s not a scary, leave the lights on kind of thriller. It’s scary in a different kind of way. It’s quiet and insidious and morally complicated. And, if I’ve done my job correctly, completely addictive.

And there’s no denying this is, at its heart, a story of loss, specifically, the kind of loss that comes from infertility and miscarriage. When you’re in the throes of trying, and not succeeding, to have children, it feels like the world is caving in around your ears. I couldn’t write a book about what it’s like to have children, but I can write with some authenticity about what it’s like to lose them. And even more importantly, to survive those losses. Survive, and thrive. I am hoping to normalize the conversation around infertility and send a clear message that there is life on the other side of these tragedies. A joyful, wonderful, complete life.

I hope you love IT’S ONE OF US! It’s available now wherever you like to buy books, and the audio is read magnificently by the one and only Julia Whelan.

eBook

KINDLE | NOOK | APPLE BOOKS | GOOGLE PLAY | KOBO

Hardcover

AMAZON | BARNES & NOBLE | TARGET | BOOKS-A-MILLION | INDIGO | BOOKSHOP

Audiobook

AUDIBLE | LIBRO.FM | HARLEQUIN AUDIO | KOBO

If you’d like a personalized copy, please check in with Parnassus books, where there are goodies to go along with your order!

And please come see me on tour!

Release Day for These Cold Strangers 🥶

These Cold Strangers book covers on a treelined foggy background

I could not be more excited to share that my short story, THESE COLD STRANGERS, is now available from Amazon Originals! What’s so fun is this is a part of a themed collection called We Could Be Heroes, which digs into what it really means to be a hero. Do you need a cape and the ability to fly? Or is it something deeper, smaller, but no less extraordinary?

The collection features five original short stories written by a couple of folks you might know... Lisa Scottoline, Lisa Unger, Janelle Brown, Victor Methos, and me! They’re all available today—the full collection or as individual stories—and in both digital and audio!

Here’s more about THESE COLD STRANGERS, which is read by Brittany Presley, who beautifully narrated Her Dark Lies, too.

From New York Times bestselling author J.T. Ellison comes a chilling tale about how a reporter’s deep dive into a viral video challenges her preconceived notions of what being a hero really means.

When she recognizes the heroic stranger in a sensationalized news video, Addison Blake plans to use the information to her career’s advantage. That means returning to the hometown she left behind ten years ago, but her ambitions are more important than the ghosts of her past. She’s focused on breaking this story—as long as it doesn’t break her first.

J.T. Ellison’s These Cold Strangers is part of We Could Be Heroes, a darkly inquisitive collection of short stories that examines heroic intentions versus their real-life consequences. Read or listen to each in a single sitting.

Get yours today!

KINDLE | AUDIBLE

And some background for you about this cool program:

Amazon Original Stories is Amazon Publishing’s imprint dedicated to short nonfiction and fiction by bestselling authors and new voices. AOS stories are intended to be read—or listened to—in a single sitting (5,000 to 20,000 words). Each story is available free to Prime members and Kindle Unlimited subscribers, and $1.99 for non-subscribers. Every download includes a free Audible edition as well.

Amazon Original Stories has published stories by Pulitzer and National Book Award winners and international bestsellers, in categories ranging from memoir to suspense to true crime to literary fiction. AOS stories have won the Hugo, Audie, and O. Henry awards and have been nominated for the Edgar, Locus, and Thriller Awards. They have been selected for the Best American anthology series four times and optioned for film and television. An overview of all published titles can be found here.

2022 Annual Review

A clean, fresh lined notebook on a wooden table with the words 2022 Annual Review

Welcome to my Annual Review! My year is not complete with giving myself a performance review, examining what went right, what went wrong, how well I lived up to my themes and goals. These reviews have morphed for me, something to do with the pandemic, no doubt, into a more general positive or negative view, examining my level of satisfaction with my performance instead of the nitty gritty quantifiable details that I used to focus on. I’m mellowing in my middle-age, and what used to be important is no longer as vital. It’s interesting to realize and watch this transition through the years. Also, I’ve altered both my approach to new work and my definition of success, and that, too, changes this rumination.

So with those caveats as a guide, let’s do this.

Looking Back on 2022, The Year of Choice

I had two overarching goals that I publicly claimed for 2022.

• I want to write more.

• I want to spend less time on things that take me away from that goal.

So how did I do?

Actually, not too bad. I stayed home, skipped all the conferences, and spent the year filling the pipeline. I typed The End on 9 projects that were in various stages of completion. I started 2 that will be wrapped in 2023. I planned 17 more possible projects, across three pen names. Trust me, I certainly won’t write all of these. I just spent an afternoon dumping all my cogent and half-baked ideas into a single file, and that’s the number that emerged. As for the third pen name—I have some stories that don’t fit with my hard-hitting thrillers or my urban fantasy, (romance, speculative fiction) so they slot into a special place. I seriously doubt they will ever happen, but I need to acknowledge them.

This creative mind dump is such a good exercise, and I encourage all creatives to do it at least once a year. The goal is simple:  get every idea in play into a single place. It’s similar to my outlining method, really—plopping every thought, scene, piece of dialogue, and character description into a document before I start a book. Offloading helps me think more clearly.

But I closed the year feeling dissatisfied with my performance. I focused, yes, and got a lot written, a lot finished. But I made several decisions that bit me in the butt and learned a couple of very hard lessons, which makes looking back on this year more frustrating than I’d like. Both personally and creatively, my value structure has changed, and my work needs to reflect that. This is something I’m very excited to explore in 2023 and beyond.

Now, here’s something funny for you. Drafting this review, I was surprised to see my annual word spreadsheet was a bit anemic. As much as I wrote, as much as I finished, the word count was among my lowest in years.

Guess what? I was missing an entire project. A *big* project. So my crappy word count suddenly leaped by over 30,000, I was a little happier with my year-end results. I started to dig deeper and realized my book count was off, too. I’d read twice as many books as I recorded.

Feeling a bit better, I updated my spreadsheets and then had to give this all a lot more thought. First, I’ve put less value on tracking this year, which on the whole, I think is healthy. But no matter what I do, my satisfaction with my work is tied to output. I didn’t hit my goal, but I didn’t fall as short as I thought I did. There was an unreasonable amount of relief in this realization, so clearly I have more work to do on myself to stop attaching so much importance to the data. Speaking of…

NITTY GRITTY: AKA NERDOLOGY

2022 Total Words: 295,896
Fiction Total: 178,300
Non-Fiction Total: 117,596*
Fiction Percentage: 65%
Books Read: 81
Creative Projects as J.T. Ellison: 7
Creative Projects as Joss Walker: 5

*(Excludes Email and Trello, which total 210,000)

Major Projects Worked On:

JT Novels:

IT’S ONE OF US (2023 Standalone)
THE WOLVES COME AT NIGHT (Taylor Jackson #9)
#LEGACY (2024 Standalone)

JT Short Stories:

These Cold Strangers
X House
Louche 49

Joss Walker Novels:

MASTER OF SHADOWS (Jayne #2)
THE KEEPER OF FLAMES (Jayne #3)
DISCOVERY OF MAGIC (Jayne Bundle)

Joss Walker Short Stories:

A Betrayal of Magic
Guardians of Silence

Some other cool things:

• A WORD ON WORDS was renewed for Season 8, and Season 7 was nominated for an EMMY

• TOMB OF THE QUEEN won the Silver Falchion for Best Fantasy at Killer Nashville

• IT’S ONE OF US got a starred Library Journal and some astounding blurbs

• Appeared on Cal Newport’s podcast, and interviewed some astounding authors myself

Some not cool things:

• Jameson’s illness continues

• We got COVID—twice!

• I have some long-term heart issues post-vaccine and COVID

• No genuine time off after April, and no social media sabbaticals

But all in all, 2022 was a decent year. Frustrating on many levels, but we’re healthy again, safe, sheltered, and loved, which is really all that matters in the end. R.L. and I are having an awful lot of fun with the Jayne books and stories, I’m totally locked in on the psychological standalones, I’m very pleased with IT’S ONE OF US, and my creative spirit is feeling satisfied, and ready for the next steps.

---

The Year Ahead: 2023, The Year of Ritual

With perpetual changes to my publishing schedule, changes in the industry, the pandemic shifts, and changes to my personal ethos, I’ve lost many of my daily, monthly, and annual rituals over the past few years. This year, I intend to reclaim the valuable rituals that helped me build my career and kept me laser-focused over the past decade. This includes daily goals, project-specific deadlines, and a reinvigorated creative flow. I have plans, people. So many plans. I also have a new bellwether: will it matter in five years? If the answer is no, I ain’t doing it. There is great freedom in this question. You should ask yourself the same.

The “first word you see” tests abound this time of year, and the one I took on New Year’s Day gave me these three words:

Transformation
Abundance
Confidence

These are exactly the values I want to focus on in 2023. I’d decided on Ritual as my annual word in early December, when we’d canceled our annual holiday party. I just didn’t have the energy to host a shindig of that proportion. But as we got closer to the holidays, I realized that having something important to us to look forward to has to take precedence. This party is our annual ritual, and we had to respect that. (It was epic, by the way.)

That got me thinking about all the things we’ve given up these past few years, the ways our day-to-day and month-to-month lives have altered, shifted, changed, and not always for the better. Boom, Ritual was born.

But ritual is more than daily habits and parties and social media sabbaticals. It’s about travel, togetherness, unplugging completely, and respecting breaks. It is about reclaiming my time, reclaiming my space, reclaiming my creativity, and doing what’s right for me and my little family. It’s about saying “No, thank you” often and with great joy and zero guilt. It is about the transformation that comes from expectation, the abundance that comes from daily work, and the confidence that comes with being older and wiser, knowing that rituals are vital to a happy, healthy life.

I have a lot I want to accomplish in 2023. My top line goals: read 80 books, write 200,000 words, publish a bunch of great stories, tape another season of A Word on Words, stay focused on what matters, and get back on my bike. All while staying healthy, getting plenty of rest and exercise and sunshine and time off, and taking care of my people. All achievable, I think.

In the first quarter, I’m planning to finish drafting the new standalone, taking the Jayne series wide (meaning the books and stories will be available wherever you buy books instead of just at Amazon), editing Jayne #3, plotting Jayne #4 and some stories with R.L, and gearing up for the release of IT’S ONE OF US. I will be on tour for IOOU, too, so be on the lookout for the dates in my newsletter and on the website.

The second quarter will be quieter, with a family trip to the homeland and quick trip to NYC for Thrillerfest. And more writing, naturally. There may be a secret project or two that crop up around this time, and of course, we’ll need to talk about Taylor!

Quarters 3 and 4 are quieter still, with nothing but writing and editing planned, plus a business trip with the hubby. I’ve front loaded the year on purpose, because I absolutely loved how not having engagements in 2022 gave me so much freedom to create. Here’s to more of that!

This is all wonderful for me. But what about you? You, my friends, are about to be bombarded with the abundance of last year’s theme: Choice! I chose to stay home and write, and now you get those stories. Looking at my release schedule, where 2022 was a desert, 2023 is a lush frangipani-laden garden of delights. Here is what I currently have on the schedule:

J.T.

• These Cold Strangers - Amazon Originals: We Could Be Heroes Collection (February 7, 2023)

• HER DARK LIES mass market paperback (February 21, 2023)

• IT'S ONE OF US hardcover (February 21, 2023)

• THE WOLVES COME AT NIGHT (Taylor Jackson #9) (Spring)

• Louche 49 - Infinity: A Suspense Magazine Anthology (March 21, 2023)

• X House - In These Hallowed Halls: A Dark Academia Anthology (September 12, 2023)

Joss

• Guardians of Fury (Guardians Volume 2) (May 23, 2023)

• THE KEEPER OF FLAMES (Jayne #3) (June 27, 2023)

• THE PROPHESY OF WIND (Jayne #4) (October 24, 2023)

Think that might hold you for a while???

Yep. 2023 is gonna be a big year! Here’s wishing the best for us all. 🤠

---

---

For the past several years, I’ve been doing annual reviews of my life and work, based on the format from Chris Guillebeau’s wonderful Annual Review on his blog, The Art of Non-Conformity. Chris’s system is exceptionally detailed, more so than I really need, but the gist is there. It’s a great system for those of us who are self-employed and want to do an assessment of our work for the year. Here’s the link to the actual post. Go on over there and take a read. I’ll wait. 

And if you're interested, here are the links to my previous annual reviews for 2009 (Too Damn Much), 2010 (Evolution), 2011 (Depth), 2012 (Simplicity), 2013 (Pencil), 2014 (Making Do), 2015 (No), 2016, (Lent), 2017 (Flow), 2018 (Joy), 2019 (Enough), 2020 (Content) and 2021 (Choice).

Smatterings: For Love of ASMR Rooms

Thunder booms. Lightning flashes. the rain pummels the windows. But inside, you are safe, warm, womblike in the library. The fire crackles, candles flicker, the sconces on the wall glow gently. A clock ticks, and the susurrus of a pen scratching on paper lulls you into an almost hypnotic state. In this place, you can enter a flow state that allows your mind to genuinely focus on your tasks. 

ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response, is a relatively new phenomenon. And, from my quick bit of research, it doesn’t work the same way for each person. That makes total sense to me--what I find lovely and relaxing in person (cozy interiors with snow or thunderstorms outside) might cause someone else great distress. The whispering ASMRs meant to comfort make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. There are thousands of ASMR rooms to choose from, to each their own.

I bring this up only because I’ve been doing work with my life coach recently focusing on rewiring myself to let go of internal blocks and accept the flow state, and I’ve combined it with my favorite ASMR rooms this week to great success. Here are a few of my favorite ASMR feeds if you want to give it a try yourself. Just be warned, it truly is hypnotic, and you might just create something magnificent!

Royal Library

Writing Library

Thunderstorm at Hogwarts

Everything from My Ambience especially Crackling Fireplace

I think you’re going to love working with some of these in the background. Let go and let it flow! Onward…

---

Links 🔗

I’m up this week on A WORD ON WORDS interviewing Patti Callahan about her new book ONCE UPON A WARDROBE. I rarely get a chance to interview close friends on the show, and Patti and I have a tendency to finish one another’s sentences, which made for a fun, intimate conversation. 

An interesting piece about the influx of AI in the audiobook sector. What do you think?

Scott Young talks about goal setting and the science of achievement.

Susan DeFreitas spent a year reading Ursula LeGuin novels, and it blew her mind.

Another Worlde story, but with a nice look at all kinds of word puzzles.

The February Newsletter went out this week, with some fun news…

---

Reads 📚

A good reading week in between the Olympics coverage. Finished THE WIFE STALKER (5 stars for creativity), moved on to Jennifer Armentrout’s FROM BLOOD AND ASH, dabbled a bit in SWAN DIVE by Georgina Pazcoguin, and made good progress on a galley from thriller author Adam Hamby. 

Happy Valentine’s Day! ♥️ I hope you’ve had a great weekend with a wonderful book!