I can’t wait for you to read Apprehension, if you haven’t started yet. I’ve been calling it my Alfred Hitchcock in Space novel. It follows Bonnyjean, a retired grandmother, and what happens when her six-year-old grandson is kidnapped.
It pairs perfectly with Red Star Hustle by Sam J. Miller, about a framed high-class escort.
Apprehension and Red Star Hustle occupy the same physical booth, and they’re in sympathetic universes, though not exactly the same ones. For fun, Sam and I decided we wanted to add Easter eggs of each other’s books to create loose points of connection.
So, for example, Math Turtles is a band in the world of Apprehension. In the universe of Red Star Hustle, you’ll see stickers of the band. Meanwhile, I took his Mecha warriors, Mai and Imadi, out of the Red Star Hustle universe and bring them into Apprehension as a comic book.
By doing this, we’ve created universes that brush up against one another in fun and sometimes unexpected ways. Sam doesn’t get my aliens, and I don’t get his wormholes, but we still get to have fun flirting with one another’s worlds.
Don’t miss us on our book tour in October-November, 2025. Click here to read more.
If you get the book and would like to take a picture of yourself holding it, please tag Sam and/or me, and we’ll share it on our social media profiles. Thank you so much for all of your support.
On the Personal Front…
Here’s a quick snapshot of what I’m…
- Crafting: Sweater for Elsie, no pattern. Plum merino yarn that she picked out by stealing it from my stash.
- Reading: Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim. DEAR GOD!!! Preorder this NOW.
- Writing: When you were so far away from home that distance was measured in light years instead of kilometers, the word homesickness lost all meaning.
- Watching: K-Pop Demon Hunters
- Enjoying: Gardening
In early 2026, Elsie will have the chance to meet up with another button-using cat, Flounder. We know what happens when button users who are dogs meet up — they use each other buttons — but we don’t know what happens with cats.
Cats are much harder to do meetups with, which I think has a lot to do with how we socialize them, but that’s a different topic. Typically you have to do a slow introduction where they can smell each other and see each other before they interact.
We are trying to do some of that using videos and smells before they are in the same house. We have no idea if this is going to speed things up, but we think it is.
Elsie has not yet said anything about Flounder but she was more enamored of that mouse toy than the exact version of it that I bought from the store.
If you’d like to start your own communication journey with your animal, use the code “elsiewant” for 12% off FluentPet buttons when you click here.