Working on New Stuff: The Harlequin – Plus! First Look: Full First Chapter Preview

I recently worked on the formatting of my next novel, a YA/NA dark fantasy horror called The Harlequin. It is expected to come out March 14, 2025.

Snapshot of formatting

The print book and ebook are both about 97% done (sans the cover, that’s being worked on now by Edge). What’s will be left will be audiobook recording.

What is The Harlequin about? Read on:

Rosalyn loves her books, they are her sole refuge in the world of today. All she wants is to be surrounded by the world of fantasy. 

Then she meets The Harlequin, a fanciful, majestic individual who showers her in adoration and brings the world of fantasy to life. He even calls her his “Midnight Maiden”. 

Swept off her feet, Rosalyn doesn’t see the dangers ahead.

Few do.

Here is also a small first look into The Harlequin, the first chapter:

The Harlequin (Super Smol Preview)Download

A longer preview will be available on the front of this site when the cover is done, just like with all my other books.

This one has a bit of Black history folded in but not in a “When They See Us” kind of way. Medicine stories are very important – but they’re not usually for readers of color, they’re usually for White readers about people of color, like little “how not to be terrible people to the people beneath you” guides. They’re usually loaded with race pain/race trauma and other things that just sour the story for readers of color. It’s ok to talk about history without the “won’t someone please slow walk the White people” bullsh#ttery added. They don’t have to be centered in every little thing. They’re not deities. At all.

There will also be a history page added here to coincide with a qr code that will be in the book. The basis of the town in this book, New Tulsa, is Tulsa itself. Namely, the Tulsa Massacre. It’s not a must to know the dirty deets about the massacre for the story to be understandable at all, but if I’m going to bring it up as a reason for a town to exist, it’s only fair, ethical and sensible to bring up the original event itself instead of do the classic “A thing happened – a Very Bad Thing – and we’re not going to talk about it because I have the spine of a willow tree, please just go off the pretend goOd ViBZeeezzzzzzz” that I regularly see. If you’re too weak to talk about it, then don’t write about it.

Fear not for readers of color, The Harlequin won’t be The Watchmen series (Regina King was amazing in that, by the way, as Sister Night) or Cloak & Dagger tv series. (In case someone thinks I watched The Watchmen series and then drafted up The Harlequin, The Harlequin is actually a Legacy Story. Meaning it’s been in my head for about 20 or so years, since I was a teenager – so roughly since 2003 or whenever Flyleaf started putting out music, the sonic backdrop of what inspired the story.) Now, what this all means is that The Harlequin is not going to be a deep sea dive about the wrongs of racism and how messed it is up dealing with White supremacy and anti-Blackness and telling the story in a way that’s primarily a soft social teaching tool for White folks. I’m Black, we already know what happened and the fact it was messed up since day one, the end. New Tulsa is simply a place where things are different, it was merely borne from the massacre so the massacre is as about as much of a backdrop of New Tulsa’s history as the Revolutionary War is for the US. In other words, New Tulsa is simply a city that just has a bit of history. As anyone who lives in a city knows, a city is way more than its history. There’s also the people who live there. And the entities around them.

More details later!