Get Ready for Some Laughs!

'Won't You Be Mine? It's a Beautiful Day in the Nightmarehood' is releasing this Friday!
This book is tons of fun, and sure to provide relief from whatever darkens your day. It will be available in ebook and paperback, and at affordable prices because who has money to throw around these days?
I'm only sharing the first chapter with you here, but keep in mind that it starts with 'cute funny' and builds to 'laugh out loud' funny. Early readers were literally calling and messaging me about how much fun they were having with the book.
Read the sample below, or go straight to Amazon to order your copy by clicking here. Also, if you check my facebook, you can listen to me read the first 4 chapters.

Chapter 1
I've heard that a book should start with an action scene, or catchy dialogue or something. But unless I want to start with the part where my eight-year-old son and I stalked an undead man armed with nothing but kitchen skewers and chopped garlic, or when I took dance lessons from an irate bat, and then flash back to the beginning, I can't.
So I'll start here, before dawn on a Tuesday morning more or less like any other morning in our neighborhood just west of Orlando. I strolled along Hamilton—the four-lane highway near our house—on the narrow sidewalk going south. My dog's leash was in my left hand, my son Taye's oversize hand in the other. The whoosh of traffic passing at fifty miles an hour almost constantly blew air against our backs and muted out my son's constant chatter, making his already impeded speech impossible to comprehend. Headlights reflected off the chain link fence to our right, repeatedly casting our shadows in dizzying arcs, which made Taye cheer and made me queasy.
I squeezed Taye's hand in a reassuring 'I love you' gesture, sensing that the flashing lights and roar of engines in the dark were exciting, but might also be making him anxious. The dog, named Drax after the Marvel superhero, didn't seem to notice the noise and lights. He's seventy-five pounds of mushy Pit Bull and Rottweiler, with a bark like mastiff on steroids.
Taye squeezed my hand back, but he didn't pause his monologue or his shuffling gate. I mostly tune him out when he's like this, but I caught something about a flatbed truck and KW. When Taye talked, all of his 'w', 'l', and 'r' sounds were the same, so it sounded more like 'fwatbed twuck and K-doubowoo'. I don't know how he could tell what kinds of trucks were passing when there was nothing but light rushing through pitch black, but he has a gift. He also has a gift for causing trouble and spotting vampires, but back then, I didn't know about the vampire part.
Walking before sunrise isn't something we normally do, but as always we were up early, and I had been wanting to see the sun come up over the lowland now that morning was coming later. It was early October, and cool enough that I had temporarily forsaken my tank top and sandals in favor of a T-shirt and sneakers.
Here in Central Florida, it's not unusual to see people wearing next to nothing even in October or November, but that's usually tourists from up north who aren't acclimated to the weather. Now that I've been here a couple of years, I have to wear a sweatshirt if it gets below sixty-eight degrees.
Taye, Drax, and I waited for the walk signal at a three-way intersection while drivers hurried to get their kids to school and themselves to work. Intersections make me nervous in the dark, but despite the screech of tires as a Jeep took the turn onto Hamilton almost fast enough to leave a flame trail, we survived the crossing.
"Burn rubber!" Taye shouted. (It sounded like 'bun wubba', but since I generally don't notice his diction myself, and trying to imitate it constantly would be disruptive, I'll only spell out his pronunciation when it seems pertinent.) The sharp odor of melted tire did in fact linger in the air, mixing with exhaust fumes and the fresher air that sought to flush the pollutants away.
There was no fence along the sidewalk south of the cross street, just a grassy hill that sloped down to meet the bike trail that would soon rise to intersect our path. The oncoming dawn was nothing more than a vague, gray lightening of the sky over Orlando to our left, so it was still plenty dark enough for things that go bump in the night. We can't quite see Orlando from here in the hills, but it's close enough to make this a fantastic home base for commuters. Commuters and centuries old men who want to hide from their pasts without giving up civilization and easy meals.
Of course, when we paused to exchange pleasantries with Vlad for the first time, we didn't know that he was hiding from his past or that he was looking for an easy breakfast. We were trudging up the long, subtle hill toward the next light when a pause in traffic allowed the step of his hard shoes to reach my ears over the sound of Taye's rhythmic scuffing. In the dark ahead, the man was nothing more than a shortish form, the headlights of a passing car briefly blasting him with light and flinging his shadow toward us. I was surprised that I hadn't already seen him. I can be a little paranoid, and tend to notice potential threats.
Threat or no threat, I nudged Taye ahead of me and moved to the right of the sidewalk so the dark figure could pass safely. I'm paranoid, but I'm not the type to run screaming at the sight of a stranger, even if it is dark, and even if something about the way he walked brought to mind a creature from a black and white horror movie. Which I would never watch.
Traffic, as could be expected on a weekday morning, was heavy, and I didn't want the man to feel forced to step onto the shoulder to avoid our dog. Drax is about as dangerous as a bacteria-free dish sponge, but he looks like a monster, and I always give people plenty of space. Drax obliged by following behind to create a single file line. Usually, I have to hold the dog back from stealing kisses when we encounter people, but I admit that at the moment I didn't see anything ominous in his cooperation.
"Good moaning," Taye said politely from his place at the front of the line.
"Good morning," I echoed.
In the light of passing traffic I saw a fiftyish tan-skinned man with large eyes shadowed by bushy eyebrows, a long nose, and clothes that looked too dressy for exercise. When he'd gotten within a few feet of us, he stopped as if to speak. Oh, crud, I thought. Here we were walking in the dark, and a strange man was going to give us trouble.
"Keep walking," I urged. We shuffled past him, repeating our good mornings, while he watched us. I got the feeling like he wanted to say something, but for some reason he stayed silent until we were several strides beyond him.
Then, a deep, strangely accented voice behind me said, "Wait! Excuse me, do you live around here?"
I didn't stop. Drax either startled or got a sudden case of the boogitty-boogitties, and flung himself past me, yanking on the end of the leash and propelling me forward. The question struck me as odd—why would we be walking down the road before 7:00am if we didn't live nearby?—and set off my danger alarm. But fighting an upbringing of politeness over self-interest can be surprisingly difficult, so I called, "Yep!" over my shoulder and kept walking. I took Taye's hand again and hurried my steps, giving a nervous chuckle as I urged him to move faster.
"Was that guy weird?" Taye asked the question in a way that indicated he thought so, and wondered if I agreed.
"Seems like it," I said.
"He talked like a vampire. Oh, look at that flatbed truck!"
"Please don't stereotype people by accents." I hate that he likes to categorize everyone, but at least he hadn't said anything in front of the man. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure we were truly out of earshot.
There wasn't anyone on the sidewalk behind us.
"Now that's weird," I said, stopping. We were about halfway between traffic lights that were maybe a quarter of a mile apart, with nothing but grass to one side and traffic to the other.
"What?"
"That man is gone, but how could he get across the highway with all that traffic?"
"Maybe he went through the grass."
"To where?"
"He probably jumped on the flatbed truck 'cause he's going to the construction site! That truck was probably going to the same construction site as…"
I stopped hearing his chatter, distracted by the disappearing man. When a man asks me where I live, it's normal for me to spend the day looking for a tail, but this wasn't me being paranoid. It was weird.
I shook it off, letting the rush of vehicles and Taye's monologue wash over me. "He must have made it across Hamilton," I finally said. It was dark, but I could see well enough in the intermittent light to know he wasn't lying flat in the grass, and anyway, why would he?
"I think he flew across!" Taye shouted, waving his free hand in the air to simulate flight. "Vampires can turn into bats!"
"Stop!" I scolded. "It's not nice, and anyway, there's no such thing as vampires."
"Mum," he said in his eye-rolling tone. "He can't hear me anyway."
"Because he flew away," I said sarcastically.
"Yep." Sometimes Taye recognized sarcasm, but more often than not, he took things literally.
"Let's go," I sighed. I led the boys toward the next light, Taye scuffing and hanging on my arm slightly as he talked about the differences between straight trucks with flatbeds and semi-trucks with flatbed trailers. I glanced over my shoulder again and promised myself it would be the last time I turned around. If the man had walked out into traffic, I might have expected to hear horns honking at the very least, but there hadn't been even a squeal of brakes when he vanished.
As we ascended the slope, the eastern sky to our left began to fade from charcoal to the gray of wet sidewalks. The darkness was no longer complete enough to be sliced by low-beams, and I started to shake the ominous feeling of a man sneaking up behind me. A cricket took up his violin somewhere in the grass nearby, so enthusiastic in his search for a mate that he could be heard over everything but the largest passing trucks. "Isn't this nice?" I said with a genuine smile. "You get traffic, I get a sunrise, and we all get live music."
"Music?" Taye asked, breaking off from whatever he had been saying.
"The cricket. He's playing that music to get himself a wife."
"Oh." His dark face became serious. "He should play the Beach Boys."
I choked on a surprised laugh. "That might work better."  
By the time we reached the light, where the sidewalk finally merges with the paved bike trail that comes over from the west, a few wispy clouds had begun to turn pink above the eastern horizon. "Let's hurry to the top of the hill!" I urged. "It's going to be beautiful from up there."
Hurrying for Taye was kind of like being normal for other people. He walked a lot like a toddler, and Drax wasn't much better. The dog had been nursed back to health by a loving foster family before coming to live with us (shout out to Lee Ann and Tim!), but he still tired easily, and often suffered from sore tendons and joints. It wasn't a good idea to push him.
A handful of bats were now visible swooping overhead, but I didn't mention them to Taye or he would probably get back to talking about vampires. He might have trouble sleeping if he became convinced of a blood-sucking monster lurking around Clermont, and that would not be cool. We were practically vampires ourselves, with his insomnia waking us up at all hours of night and morning. I hadn't had a good night's sleep in eight years, and I wasn't about to do anything to jeopardize what little I could count on.
We reached the top of the rise just as a stripe of neon orange split the pink clouds in an irregular pattern, limning everything in salmon pink. Taye's glasses reflected the spectacle, and suddenly I wished I had thought to bring my sunglasses since I wasn't cool enough to wear transitions like him.
Taye is a cute kid, and even more so with his brown skin glowing in the early light. At the moment, he fidgeted almost non-stop, reacting to every passing vehicle and whatever dialogue he had running through his head. His dreadlocks were starting to get longish, hanging over the tips of his ears, and bounced animatedly with his movements. His glasses and awesome hair give people something other than his trach tube to talk about.
It used to be that people would talk about how we don't match each other, but as he got older, that dropped off. I don't know why. I suspect that when he was little, people didn't feel awkward about mentioning it in front of him. I can only assume it wasn't because they were afraid of letting him in on the adoption secret; his eyes are pretty bad, but he'd have to be completely blind not to notice that his dad is a white guy with blue eyes and his mom is Latina.
My husband, Blyth, says the only feature of Taye's he can take credit for is his smile. I disagree. Half of that smile is mine, and Blyth is definitely at least partly responsible for Taye's impish streak.
"That's pretty, Mum," Taye said, drawing my mind back to the sunrise.
It was. It might have been prettier on a hill where traffic didn't interrupt the view and the cricket's song, but it was beautiful all the same. Puffs of cotton candy filled the eastern sky, highlighted with veins of orange and hot yellow, broken up in patches by the intense cerulean blue behind the clouds.
"It must be pretty amazing if it can distract you from the trucks, huh?" I asked, amused.
He gave me an indignant glance. "It's not like I only think about trucks."
"Really?" I asked, hiding a smile. "What else to do you think about?"
He turned back to traffic. "I think about cars, dump trucks, and front end loaders…And those trucks that have big tubs and tankers on them—I think they're for the gutters…"
I laughed. "Yep, you think about lots of different things. Remember when you look at the sky that the world is a lot bigger than vehicles." After I said it, I wondered if maybe I shouldn't have. There was a fair chance that his obsession with trucks and cars was a way of blocking out the size of everything else, a way to cope with the anxiety that might otherwise overtake him. But he nodded sagely and waved at the cars as they passed.
Taye has a rare genetic syndrome that makes him, among other things, ventilator dependent when he's tired or sleeping. That's why he has a trach, and why our life together is a little unusual. I'll refer to various consequences of this syndrome throughout, but I won't bore you by explaining it all right now.
When the colors had dulled and the morning rush had slowed, we turned around and headed home. It didn't take long for the morning to reach full-on daylight, and I relaxed in the mild sunshine on the side of my face, smiling at my child's chatter and my happy, panting dog. When we got home, it would be time to eat second breakfast, clean, and try to get some education in before Taye's occupational therapy appointment, but for the moment, I soaked up happiness. Twice, I caught Taye holding up his thumb like a hitchhiker, trying to catch us a ride, but other than that, it was a nice walk.