Coming of Age

Inseparable friends Val-and-Tal are used to making their decisions together. But what happens when their choices become their own? CHOOSE THIS NOW, a novel-in-stories, illuminates the small moments that shape their lives across nearly twenty years.

When the work on The Pipeline began, Amy thought that her work was done. Little did she know that it was just the beginning. She knew plastic pollution was an issue, but she had no idea how bad the problem was until she was face to face with it. Now, she has a new foe. With her friend's lives on the line, Amy will have to take on her biggest challenge yet.

When Noah and Maya find themselves on the same rescue team, they’re immediately drawn to each other. Yet, with so many complications in their personal lives, do they have time to open their hearts to someone new? As their friendship grows, Noah and Maya are both about to discover that life is worth nothing unless you share it with the people you love.

It's 2026, and Rally is thirteen years old. The long, hot Louisiana summer looms before him like a face-melting stretch of blacktop, and the country is talking civil war while his adoptive family acts more vicious than ever. Rally spends his days wondering about his dead father's people, the Woolsacks of West Florida, who long ago led a failed rebellion to carve their own state from the swamp and sugar-sand of the coast.

Liv and Finn meet six summers ago working in a bar on the rugged Cornish coastline, their futures full of promise. When a night of passion ends in devastating tragedy they are bound together inextricably. But Finn’s life is in LA with his band, and Liv’s is in Cornwall with her family—so they make a promise. Finn will return every year, and if they are single they will spend the summer together. This summer Liv crosses paths with Tom—a mysterious new arrival in her hometown. As the wildflowers and heather come into bloom, they find themselves falling for one another.

It’s 1992, and ten-year-old Molly is tired of living in the fire-rotted, nun-haunted House of Friends: a Semi-Cooperative Living Community of Peace Faith(s) in Action with her formerly blind dad and their grieving housemate Evelyn. But when twenty-three-year-old Jeanie, a dirt bike-riding ex-con with a shady past, moves in, she quickly becomes the object of Molly’s adoration. She might treat Molly terribly, but they both have dead moms and potty mouths, so naturally Molly is the moth to Jeanie’s scuzzy flame.

In 1837, seven-year-old Thomas Wright followed in his family’s footsteps into one of England’s most dangerous coal mines. He struggled with childhood fears, working twelve-hour days, six days a week in the darkness 500 feet below ground. That was until disaster struck in one of England’s most horrific accidents that changes the direction of his life and the course of history. This is the fast-moving story of a young boy overcoming the iron-fisted rule of the massively wealthy lord of the land.

Told with penetrating insight, humor, and unexpected tenderness, Wait is a story about a family swimming against the social currents that erode bonds: housing precarity, immigration systems, and inherited wealth. But it is also a story about love, wit, and sisterhood, and how two sisters cling to each other in the midst of cataclysmic change, all the while dreaming about a better future.

As far as Jolene is concerned, her interactions with her colleagues should start and end with her official duties as an admin for Supershops, Inc. Unfortunately, her irritating, incompetent coworkers don’t seem to understand the importance of boundaries. Her secret to survival? She vents her grievances in petty email postscripts, then changes the text color to white so no one can see. That is until one of her secret messages is exposed. Her punishment: sensitivity training (led by the suspiciously friendly HR guy, Cliff) and rigorous email restrictions.

When sixteen-year-old Shae meets Cam, who is new to their small town in West Virginia, she thinks she has found someone who is everything she has ever wanted in a companion. The two become fast friends, and then more. And when Shae ends up pregnant, Cam begins a different transition—trying on clothes that Shae can no longer fit into and using female pronouns. Shae tries to be fully supportive as Cam becomes the person she wants and needs to be.

This short story collection offers snapshots of a life. A kid is set up by an old uncle to think he's going to be scalped. Seeing demons in every shadow a few nights later, he's told by an older cousin it was all a joke, that adults always seem to want kids to go through the same bad things they did. Just how they are. Shut up, he's advised. Get used to it. Hunkered in the dark listening. In the next room, bubbling a bottle with a drinking buddy, his Old Man telling tales of roadhouse glory. Bad odds fist fights, rearranged faces that stay that way.

In her 50s, Cassie has already weathered more than most. She was orphaned at the age of two and has never fully understood why her DC-based parents were on a bridge in West Virginia that just so happened to collapse as they drove across it. Her search for answers prompted a failed career in journalism, and now she’s an aspiring novelist teaching at a local community college waiting for her literary dreams to finally come true.

In the summer of 1914, sixteen-year-old Evan Sinclair leaves home to join the Great War for Civilization. Little does he know that, despite the war raging in Europe, the true source of conflict will emerge in Ottoman Palestine, since it's from Jerusalem where the German Kaiser dreams to rule as Holy Roman Emperor.

A crusade is called to aid the Kingdom of Azgald in the distant Nordslands, and the young idealistic knight Godfrey does not hesitate to volunteer. Yet Godfrey soon learns that the greatest threat to the expedition's success is not the savage clans under High Warlord Alvir and the Great Witch of the North, Nera, or the orcs and cyclopes that fight beside the clans, but the rivalries among the crusaders themselves.

England, 1940. Only given two days leave after barely escaping Nazi troops in Paris, Lily Baker visits her fiancé’s family and is dismayed to learn he’s still missing in action. And going from an exciting overseas telephonist post to a routine office assignment leaves her bored… until the Blitz begins. Joining the Air Raid Protection service, Lily’s perilous new role puts her on the chaotic frontlines of deadly shelling and scared crowds turning hostile. But despite her heroism, she is plagued by guilt when she starts feeling attracted to a fellow A.R.P. member.