I hope this email finds you...

It didn't feel appropriate to say happy full moon. I hope you are surviving as best you can, given the truly harrowing political climate in the US and around the world. Things feel quite heavy these days.

I have a big birthday coming up in August, and I can't help but reflect on how different I thought the world would look by now and how, despite my considerable privilege, it still feels like I'm struggling at almost 40 years old.

This is really about complaining so much as being frustrated with the regression and contraction in our political system in the US. To have the resources and opportunity to solve so many problems, but to instead focus on creating new ones and finding new ways to oppress people is not really the future I hoped for.

I've really tried to keep it light in this newsletter over the past few years, focusing on hope and self-care during moments of great hardship, but my heart is really heavy this week.

The role of creatives is to continue to go deep in these moments, and I have done my best to do just that. I think I have written some of my best work ever, but as someone with an abundance of empathy, it's hard to feel the full joy of it when so many people are hurting. There is always more work to do.

If you are struggling, please seek out support, spend time with friends, and people who love you. It's important to still find moments of joy among the chaos.

For our reading this full moon, I drew the Knight of Wands Rx, and I think this is our reminder that the fastest path to burnout is trying to do all the things. For many of us, when we see things wrong in the world, we want to be activists on all fronts, but that is not sustainable. Our goal is to pick something we are deeply passionate about and focus on that.

This doesn't mean that we ignore everything else happening, simply that we channel our limited energy into trying to help one specific problem. The big picture can be overwhelming, but taking on one area of activism can allow for a greater impact and more momentum. It keeps you from getting discouraged too quickly.

The Knight of Wands Rx is also about leaning into your natural gifts and talents when working toward your goal. In other words, it's not just choosing a cause that you're passionate about, but finding a way to work on it that brings you joy and satisfaction. Maybe that's making art, maybe it's managing protests, maybe it's providing legal aid or some other kind of support to people in your local community.

Whatever it is, the Knight of Wands Rx reminds us that in moments of challenge, we have to find ways to sustain our inner fire, and that means taking good care of ourselves and our gifts.

Wishing you peace this full moon.

What you'll find in the rest of this email:

• A FaRocation giveaway from me and my FaRo friends
• THE POISON DAUGHTER COVER REVEAL AND BLURB
• A Pick a Card reading
• A DIY Tarot Reading
• A LEGACY OF STARS art
• TBR Stack
• A Writing Update
• Villains and Vixens Preorders

Something to look forward to:

Looking for a quick summer read? Pining for the escape of the BookIt days of your youth?

Sadly, I am but a humble indie author, and I can't afford to buy all of you the personal pizzas you deserve for enduring this truly atrocious time in history.

I can, however, provide you with a little temporary escape: The FaRoCation event!

This July, I'm teaming up with 30 other romantasy, PNR, gaslamp, and monster romance authors to bring you the perfect vacation TBR. 31 surprise ebooks, with no strings attached, delivered straight into your inbox 😍

With a variety of genres and heat levels, our featured reads will have something swoony for everyone. Stories aren't announced in advance - you'll have to join to find out!

To get your daily dose of magic and romance, sign up before July 1st through www.farofeb.com/farocation​

THE POISON DAUGHTER COVER REVEAL:

It's here. After many, many iterations from the very talented and very patient Charlotte Slegers we have the cover for THE POISON DAUGHTER. (You can also check out my reveal teaser video over on Instagram here.)

THE POISON DAUGHTER is a standalone dark fantasy romance coming October 3, 2025. The preorder is live, and there will be some fun goodies for preorders closer to release. So hang on to your receipts.

Here's the blurb:

Every person Harlow Carrenwell kisses dies immediately, and that’s the way she likes it. The poison-lipped youngest daughter of Lunameade’s magical founding family has used her power to annihilate their opposition.

Her first husband is in the ground. Her new betrothed is next.

But the merry widow has a secret. When she’s not acting as an assassin at her parents' whims, she moonlights as a vigilante for abused women in their walled-off city.

Meet a man. Lure him in. Kill him with a kiss. Until one night Harlow kisses a mark and he doesn’t die.

Worse, her invincible partner in passion is her new betrothed, Henry Havenwood, and now he knows about her double life. Instead of selling her out and bringing the rival families to blows, he does something much more sinister—whisks her away to wed in his wild mountain fort.

Harlow doesn’t trust Henry, but the only way to protect her family and the city of Lunameade is to figure out what his family is planning.

Cursed with a husband she can’t kill and trapped in a fort miles of vampire-infested woods from home, Harlow’s survival requires her to do the impossible: Make the man who knows she’s a killer fall in love with her anyway.

The Poison Daughter is a standalone dark fantasy romance that combines the vigilante justice for abusive men of Promising Young Woman with a Romantasy Style arranged marriage and a dash of vampires.

If you are interested in an ARC and you are not already on my street team, you can fill out the interest form here.

I can barely contain my excitement about this book. This one is very personal for me, and it was also a real leap of faith to trust myself to pull it all together. It's a hard feeling to articulate. I don't think I've ever been more proud of something I've written.

I'm also delighted to say there's already been a lot of interest in this book, so I'm crossing my fingers that we have some fun stuff to announce this fall.

Full Moon in Sagittarius - This full moon in adventurous Sagittarius asks us to find a way to reconnect with our passions amid the ongoing storm.

Take a breath and choose the card you feel most drawn to. The card you choose represents how you can best reignite your inner fire. Then scroll down for your reading.

REVEAL TIME - The card you chose represents how you can reconnect with your inner fire.

The 6 of Wands - Put down the phone. Now is a great time to take a social media hiatus. The overstimulation is real (don't give me that look. You know I'm right.) Now is not a time for spinning your wheels on socials. Now is the time to escape the grind and focus on your offline life for the sake of your sanity.

The Hermit Rx- You might feel drawn to retreat from the world, but this lunation is asking you not to completely hide away. A quiet, low-key night with friends or a partner may be exactly what you need to recharge. A good conversation with people who know you well might be just the medicine to make you feel empowered.

Ace of Cups - This card is an invitation to be curious about new opportunities for creative expression. It's a great time for a new project or to say yes to something that feels a little scary, but a little exciting. Inspiration comes from unexpected places, and don't be afraid to get out of your comfort zone and find some joy in the weirdness.

A LEGACY OF STARS Last Art Drop:

It took a minute, but A LEGACY OF STARS audio preorder is finally up on Audible. It's also available on libro.fm and everywhere else you listen to audiobooks. The audiobook will be out August 19, 2025.

If you have read the book, I would be so grateful if you would review it on Amazon. I'm sooooo very close to the ever-elusive 100 reviews, and I would so appreciate the support.

And as a little treat, I'm so excited to share an early newsletter reveal of this one last piece of art by Amira Naval of a rain-soaked, post-battle Teddy and Stella in the treehouse (IYKYK). It's so perfect.

TBR Stack:

The Dread Descendant by Lauren Cate Leake - Would you read a book that combines magical dark academia with Bridgerton vibes!! BECAUSE I WOULD!

Maeve Sinclair is a high society Magical who studies Practical Magic at a magical university. She’s content in her studies until Malachite Peur, the youngest Supreme in history with a bad boy past, makes the tempting offer to train her in Combative Magic instead. With dark magic duels and enchanting ballroom scenes, forbidden love has never looked so good.

You can click the gorgeous cover below to check it out on Kindle Unlimited.

What I'm Writing:

THE POISON DAUGHTER - Line Edits

Well, I have good news and bad news. Which do you want first? Bad? Okay.

The bad news is that I am still not finished drafting BALLAD OF THE HEARTLESS. It's going to be a sprint to the finish before I leave for vacation, which is not how I prefer to finish a draft. However, I tend to do my best work when I'm on a deadline since it helps me keep momentum and forces me not to get hung up on problems. This will likely be a draft where I jump around a bit. I used to do that a lot more than I do now, and I think it might help wiht this project.

Sometimes, it's necessary with a more complicated story because dropping into a different part of the story allows me to see all the options to connect the scenes together. Regardless, I will be getting back to this story tomorrow.

The good news is that I received all of my beta feedback, and it's GLOWING (shoutouts to Lauren, Anastasia, Whit, and Fil for reading). TPD is by far my best-received book yet at both critique and beta stages, which makes me even more excited (and terrified) for it to be out in the world.

Putting down Ballad for a bit has allowed me to focus on beta edits for TPD. What does that look like? This time, it mostly looks like smaller scene-level changes and clarifying certain things about the world-building, history, and magic system. It looks like combining the more general story notes with the specific line-level notes and figuring out what to change and how to change it.

I usually print out all the kindle notes I'm sent and highlight the things that need to change in different colors, depending on how critical they are. This time I changed it up by cutting out the critical notes and putting them in chapter order, so I didn't have to flip between stacks of paper. This took a bit but ended up making the changes muuuuch easier.

This is what my edit board looked like (Don't bother trying to zoom in a snoop, you creeps. It's blurred out):

The changes were minimal, but the book is loooong, so it still took a bit to get it right.

I finished up the tweaks on Saturday, and now I've moved on to line edits, so let's talk about line editing.

What even is line editing, Sheila?

I will start with the caveat that different authors consider different things line editing, and many authors don't really do an official line edit. This isn't a good thing or a bad thing so much as a preference.

For me, line edits are the final stage before I send a book off to my editor, Erin. They are the step that makes my prose send good (or just better than how it was in draft stage).

The problem is that what makes prose good is largely subjective, so I would consider this the stage of author and character voice. This is where I add my own certain something to a story (a lack of commas and a lot of em dashes....like a lot. AI ain't got nothing on me). This is where I go through my story and try to vary sentence structure, remove word echoes, describe rooms and clothes etc, and it's also the stage where I make sure that my character voices are distinct. This is especially important because TPD is written in first-person present, so we aren't constantly seeing the character's name in the chapter.

Harlow has had a super strong voice from the very beginning of drafting this book, and Henry has remained pretty distinct from her. The tricky part at this stage is checking their emotional arc, making sure ot slow the story down or speed it up at the right moments.

In my opinion, line-level writing is what separates a good book from a great book. At its best, beautiful prose can transport you right into a lived-in world, it can give you chills when you see the first hints that the characters are falling for each other, and it can give you the gut-punch moment of revelation that a character experiences. At its worst, it can be downright distracting, dragging you right out of the story.

There are a few things I pay particular attention to at this stage for my books.

Character voice - this is things like how much a character shares externally vs how much is going on in their internal life. It's their word choices and cadence of thinking and speaking. It's how a character talks to themself and how they talk to other people. It shows you how they see the world and how they understand their place in it, which in turn tells you something about what they want, how they intend to get it, and how they will handle it if they can't.

This is Xander only ever calling her "Cece" both in his head and out loud. This is Rainer's rich internal emotional life and complete inability to verbalize it. This is the fact that Cece hardly ever curses in the series, except for a few specific moments when she's furious.

Pacing - This is more on a scene level at this stage, but one of the most potent things I've learned is how to slow a scene down or speed it up. It's the pause between two characters when you think they might kiss. It's the longer sentences to slow down the pacing of a scene where big emotional revelations are swirling. It's the quick staccato sentences in a fight scene that help you feel the breathlessness of action.

Emotional arc- This is a look at where the characters are both within the scene and in their larger growth arc as well as how the romantic arc play into that. Easy peasy lemon squeezy, right?

Wrong. This is often the part of editing that takes the most nuance and critical thinking. Sometimes I spend a few days thinking about a single scene. So many of the biggest emotional punches in a book come from really being specific and intentional about the emotional temperature of a scene. I believe that I should always be doing my worst, so I'm forever asking myself the most important question: Is this devastating enough?

It's the way they grapple with their fear and longing. It's how and when they show that they understand each other and why they feel safe. It's the thing that makes people yell at me when they see "Don't go where I can't go" or "It's all I have" or "Come on, give me the best maybe of my life".

Intimacy - This isn't just about the spice. It's about how the characters show vulnerability, how quickly or slowly they allow each other into their personal space/history/emotional world. It's a lot of nonverbal things: a hand on a low back, an offer of a jacket before someone says they're cold. This is Cece reaching for Rainer's hand when she's nervous, and Rainer stroking his thumb over her inner wrist. It's Cece playing wiht Xander's hair. It's Teddy knowing Stella's favorite flower and leaving her berries for after her meal.

These nonverbal cues let a reader know that there's been a change in the state of the relationship between characters without either of them explicitly saying it. It reveals the power dynamics between them and how they are grappling with that change in their relationship.

How does one tackle all of this?

At this stage, I listen to the book out loud as read by the truly terrifying Word robovoice named "Samantha". Hearing the words out loud not only helps me catch typos and find missing words, but it also helps me get a feel for the rhythm of the story and clarify any confusing sentences. Sometimes I have to come back to a scene because something nagging at the back of my mind knows it's not quite right.

That's the part of me that added a small tweak a half hour before I sent out THE GODLESS KINGDOM arcs. There always seems to be something I'm grappling with until the last minute

Free author pro tip: I also try to pull marketing quotes at this stage and make a list of them so I can make related content later, and for the love of god, so I don't have to read it again after the 39638623 reread.

So what's next?

Copy edits - this is the stage where we fix up grammar issues and typos and make style choices about the book, like when to use an em dash and which words should be capitalized. It's my ADHD's time to shine, and frankly, we probably could have used past drafts as a diagnostic tool.

In a couple of short weeks this will be sent off to Erin, who will add the roughly 27823687 commas that I missed and ask me questions like "why did you spell this made up word so many different ways?" and "do you want to capitalize Divine?" and "Seriously, do you want me to explain how commas work again?". She will surely lament my inability to understand when you use lay, laid, and lie. And I will retain what she's taught me in her notes for approximately five minutes before reverting back to my chaos.

Villains & Vixens Event Preorder:

My preorder for Villains and Vixens is up. You can click the image above to access it.

I will have hardcovers and paperbacks of all of my books. Sadly, I will not have any event special editions for REASONS. But I'm trying to come up with some other fun goodies to offer.

If you are planning to purchase books from the event, I BEG you to preorder.

It's really hard to estimate demand for events, and I'm always guessing, so the only way to guarantee you get what you want is to preorder.

You do not have to buy books there if you are bringing your own with you. I will sign any of my books you bring from home.

This preorder is open ONLY to those attending Villains and Vixens and will be open through June 30th.

I can't wait to see you there.