I went to a psychic in Cassadaga, Florida once with my mother. The medium told me that I would be “known in a book”.

Since that brush with the other side, I’ve often thought about my book. Like any writer, I started novels and abandoned them. I even spent 5 years working on a fantasy series with a writing partner. That creative endeavor ended in a lot of tears and a half-finished manuscript that’s laying in a drawer in NYC.

But Spring 2020 was different. I was fired from my job in advertising exactly at the moment that I became sick with Covid. I spent all of April in bed or on the sofa, barely able to shower. Even though I’d lost my sense of taste, something inside my brain was cooking. I saw a video of the clear water in the Venetian canals during lockdown, and it triggered the memory of a dream from many years before.

In that dream I was a femme fatale in an emerald green dress. I murdered my lover and swam away from the casino in Venice, on my way to kill another lover in front of another insta-worthy vista.

One night, during a Covid-induced insomniatic haze, I started to think about this vixen from my dream. Could she be the basis for a book? In the quiet witching hours I sketched out the initial plot for Mermaid of Venice. Like most other people on planet Earth, I’d heard J.K. Rowling’s story of the fateful train ride in which she imagined Harry Potter from start to finish. The genesis of that beloved series seemed like bullshit to me, but the following day, I could not stop thinking about Gia Acquaviva, and in a few hours, I, myself, had the skeletons of six books plotted.

Book One in the series launches on March 15. I’m in the anxious final weeks now, counting the days before it hits the market––and feeling overwhelmed by the million things I want and need to do.

I write this post knowing that it might be quite some time before another soul reads it, but I have confidence in myself, and I know that my readers are out there. We just don’t know we’re searching for each other yet. I can’t wait to meet you.