Two for Holding release party!

Tomorrow morning, when this post goes live, Two for Holding will be a published book!

In celebration, here come in no particular order, some of the tie-in images I made that tell you more about the universe, sneak peaks to upcoming short stories and books, and links to all the places you can buy the book!

Firstly, please once again appreciate the beautiful cover art by Tuisku Hiltunen, my amazing cover artist. She is wonderful and talented and has already agreed to my stupid idea for the cover of book 2.

Then, there are the stat sheets. These were fun to draw up whilst neck-deep in edits and trying to maintain consistency across four books in terms of character's ages and backgrounds.

Notice for example Tom's very creative choice of a favorite hobby. Also, he's from Sudbury, because Michelle, who listened patiently to the beginnings of this series but does not care about hockey at all, said "Can he be from Sudbury? I feel like that's a really pleasant accent." There you go, Michelle. I'm sorry about the rest.

Some other highlights include Dmitriyev's nickname being "Vladi", something which only makes it into the text twice across about 350k of writing. The hobbies are brought to you by hours of footage of real life hockey players talking about golf and travel and also golf.

The other thing they should tell you about writing a full length series with overlapping timelines is that if your characters have, say, a very rigid and demanding schedule involving a lot of travel, you have to make it consistent. This led to pages of handwritten notes about where everyone has to be on which dates, culminating in this schedule. I had a lot of fun with the fake team names until I ran out of ideas, but there are a few I'm proud of (one team gets to keep the same colors as the city's real life sports teams; another is named for the High School Musical basketball team. Several are puns on the real NHL teams and the best of those are the LA Monarchs, who in the Minor Penalties universe have orange, black, and white cell pattern jerseys like the butterfly).

Then there are the character sheets which I will present with no further comment. I think they speak for themselves.

Ok, wait, one comment: I am very proud of the distinction between wet cat (Luca Mazetti) and wet cat (Kilian Howard).

So what next? Well, over the next unspecified period of time (weeks? months? who knows?) I will be posting four short stories to this blog that follow the end of Two for Holding (or in one case, take place before it begins). One is from Breezy's point of view, and I hope everyone enjoys him because I am obsessed with writing from his perspective. Another one is ~spicy~ (look, I am fast entering Middle Aged Mom status but is there anyway to talk about "spice" and "spicy scenes" without sounding extremely lame? It's sex. There's a sex scene. Woo.) Then, at some point, Two for Boarding will be released. The initial edits are complete, meaning it's on to copy edits and proofreading, so it won't be long hopefully! And in December, Two for Charging enters editing.

Let me know in the comments if there's a character or a naming choice or literally anything you want to know more about! I love not shutting up about this series!