Hello First name / friend!

 

I'm incredibly pleased to announce that The Earl who Isn't, the final book in the Wedgeford series, is now officially out. You can purchase it! I hope you enjoy it!

 

I absolutely love Lily and Andrew. Andrew is one of the heroes that I think is, in many ways, the most heroic hero I've ever met, and it's precisely because of what he does on a day to day basis, and how he does it. Often, romance heroes have a goal and it's something like “get revenge for my father” or “build an empire” or something along those lines. Andrew is a hero whose goal is much simpler: to build a place that feels like home.

 

Lily, by contrast, has a printing press and intends to print poetry that will win hearts and change minds. She is confident, brave, socially awkward, and incredibly vulnerable.

 

I love them together and I hope you will, too!

Note: at the time when I'm scheduling this, the print versions have not yet fully propagated, but they are available, and if you click on the Amazon / B&N versions, hopefully they should be visible there!

 

There's an additional note about audio at the end of this newsletter--keep scrolling!

Nobody knows that Andrew Uchida is the rightful heir of an earl. Not his friends, not his neighbors, not even the yard-long beans growing in his experimental garden. If the truth of his existence became public, the blue-blooded side of his family would stop at nothing to make him (and anyone connected with him) disappear. He shared one passionate night with the woman he loved…and allowed himself that only because she was leaving for Hong Kong the next morning.

 

Then Lily Bei returns, armed with a printing press, her irrepressible spirit, and a sheaf of inconvenient documents that prove the very thing Andrew wants concealed: that he is actually the legitimate, first born son of the Earl of Arsell.

 

What’s Andrew to do, when the woman he’s always desired promises him everything he’s never wanted? Andrew’s track record of saying no to Lily is nonexistent. The only way he can avert impending disaster is by stealing the evidence… while trying desperately not to fall in love (again) with the woman he shouldn’t let into his life.

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There's a tea that shows up in this book that, to the best of my knowledge, never existed until I made it, and my weekly tea readers got a sneak peak at it.

 

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One of the scenes that didn't happen in The Duke who Didn't, the first book in the Wedgeford series, is this:

 

A scene where Jeremy comes to town, a duke that nobody knows is a duke, and starts asking whether he should enclose the common area and allow it to be rented instead. In that scene, and for this prior version of Jeremy, Jeremy would have been inspired by a lecture given that suggested enclosing common areas etc etc etc: it would have been a book about convincing Jeremy that actually Wedgeford was great and worth saving.

 

Some of you know that I give my books code names. This is actually a series that I gave a codename. In my initial formulation of Wedgeford, and what it represented, I have always thought of this series as the Triumph of the Commons.

 

I ended up planning that scene with Jeremy but not writing it, mostly because I wasn't interested in a book where Wedgeford had to prove it was worth saving: I wanted that to be a given.

 

In many ways, I feel like The Earl who Isn't is the culmination of my vision for Wedgeford. What does the trumph of the commons look like?

 

Well, I guess it looks like long beans.

If you need to catch up on the series:

I've had a lot of people ask questions about audio, and I don't have firm answers, but I wrote a little note about what's going on with audio on my website for those who want to get a high-level overview.

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