About a year ago, Erin & I got the yes from Torquere on Starling. It was Thanksgiving weekend, she was at a bar in Rochester, and we’d finally decided enough time has passed beyond the deadline Torquere promises a response in that we dropped Kristi, the submissions editor, a note.

Turns out, she had already emailed us about Starling a month earlier.  After some confusion and some frantic texts between Erin & I, we found that original email in our spam folder. This is why I periodically tweet ALWAYS CHECK YOUR SPAM FOLDER; Torquere’s yes on Starling is not the only publishing yes that has filtered into spam for us on accident. Then there was a lot of jumping up and down before we got back to work.

At that point, having told no one other than our partners about Starling, we were closing in on finishing Doves, the second book in the series which we’ll begin blogging about next week.

We’ve had a lot of milestones. We’re milestone oriented people, and they keep us going. But we’ve been perhaps keenly aware of the one year anniversaries of starting Starling and of finishing it, and, now, of getting the yes.  Mostly they come and go without much fanfare other than some amusement from us, an occasional blog post, and a few emails telling each other to get back to work.

Tonight, we’re deep into book 4, and a little preoccupied with book 2.  Having spent a lot of editorial time with it recently, we’ve been reminded that as much as we say Starling is an angry book, what we actually mean is that Doves is a furious book.  It’s dark and it’s difficult and it’s got a massive bouquet of HEAs waiting for you at the end.

And that’s where the holiday season comes in. Because we’re thankful. To our partners who put up with everything from the time-sink to our working on drafts of stories that aren’t even up their alley from our mobile phones in the most inappropriate locations and circumstances you can imagine. To our families, who do things like obsessively check our sales rankings so we don’t have to, even if they can’t really believe — but mostly don’t care — what we write.  And to our friends who listen to us freakout about … well, pretty much everything.

We’re also thankful for the publishers that trust us to write dark, to write real, to write difficult, and to take tropes and squeeze them until they burst into something else. The wonderful publishers who have also forgiven us for the times we didn’t know to regularly check our spam filter are also a huge bonus.

Finally, we’re thankful for readers who have been open to taking a chance on new authors and strange stories and genre choices that may be way out of their comfort zones. We are grateful for your time, energy, enthusiasm, reviews, event attendance, reblogs, tweets, website visits, and willingness to spend time and money on the people who live in our heads.

We can’t do this without you, and we wouldn’t want to.

Thank you.