Years ago, before I started writing fiction, I used to marvel at the imagination of novelists. How on earth do they come up with every little thing contained between those two covers? I mean the characters, the events, the plot, the suspense… Hundreds, if not thousands, of crafted details.

I spend more time watching YouTube than television. I do this to learn, to be amused, and sometimes simply to play hooky from writing. For me, YouTube is an antidote to what we call “news.” It’s actually one of my go-to places for good news. A place where the world feels human and positively connected. Here, I can ponder what happened before the Big Bang till my brain hurts.

Today I published the first book of a new legal thriller series. It’s called “I Swear To Tell” and it centers on a young woman who’s out to make her mark as a defense attorney in Washington, D.C. Her name is Cadence Elliott. She is smart and ambitious but she has some serious personal issues to deal with.

It’s a nice feeling hitting the publish button on a new book. It’s also scary. Because from that point onward you have no control over your new baby. You’re kind of feeding it to the lions. But I’m so stoked with Game of Justice, I’m just going to enjoy the moment. Just a few months ago this was a little embryo of an idea.

Okay, so that was a little over the top. Forgive me, please. I’m a little excited, precisely because of the two things mentioned above. Two days out from Christmas and my kids can barely contain themselves. They’ve just had a day spent making and decorating gingerbread men (and other shapes) and then spent ages playing some kind of Santa game. And while they were distracted I was getting very close to finishing Game of Justice, the third novel of the Brad Madison series.

Or, to put it another way: “You’re just going to give your book away?! Have you lost your mind?!” Given I hate the way food bloggers bury their recipes—you have to scroll through a mile of dumb story (like a trip down their chocolate frosting memory lane) to get the ingredients and method—I’ll give you the short answer now: YES, YES and YES … about 34,000 times over.

Hello, whoever you are. I take it you’ve read one of my books or maybe you goofed off at work and got here by some random spin of the search engine. No matter, I welcome you with open arms. And right now I’m pretty sure I could get my arms around every single one of you. One of the beauties of having a website is you get told exactly how many people show up. So I know I can count my current audience on one hand. So what? I still want to put this out, my welcome mat of words.