A cover, a blurb and an apology…

Oh, my poor neglected website. I promise to do better. Not this week, but hopefully before the year is out. I’m just waiting for the planets to align and for flares to come back in.

Inbetween Days is my new YA novel. It’s coming out in September with Text Publishing, and here’s the sublime cover from W H Chong:

And the blurb:

At seventeen, Jacklin Bates is all grown up. She’s dropped out of school. She’s living with her runaway sister, Trudy, and she’s in secret, obsessive love with Luke, who doesn’t love her back. She’s stuck in Mobius—a dying town with the macabre suicide forest its only attraction—stuck working in the roadhouse and babysitting her boss’s demented father.

A stranger sets up camp in the forest and the boy next door returns; Jack’s father moves into the shed and her mother steps up her campaign to punish Jack for leaving, too. Trudy’s brilliant façade is cracking and Jack’s only friend, Astrid, has done something unforgivable.

Jack is losing everything, including her mind. As she struggles to hold onto the life she thought she wanted, Jack learns that growing up is complicated—and love might be the biggest mystery of all.

For a long time I thought this book was going to get the better of me. It’s had many incarnations and I’ve deleted more pages than there are in the final novel – but here we are, near the finish line, staring at each other with some animosity and grudging respect. Stamp your feet and toss your mane all you like, book (random Black Stallion reference), but in the end I didn’t conquer you. I just gave in and hung on for dear life.