Fragments of the Heart came out on November 1st.

I always put a some of myself into a book. You can’t help doing so, really. Books are a little piece of your soul, of the way you’ve chosen to look at the world in that moment, for that story. In Fragments, there’s a character on the spectrum, and it didn’t take a whole lot of imagination to write her. Many of her questions and confusions are ones I experience daily, as are her feelings of inadequacy in the face of other seemingly more competent people. Navigating people and their expectations can be difficult for me, and in Shawn, you’ll see how that shows on a daily basis.

It has taken a long time for me to be able to understand my differences and my wife and I laugh about them often when something really clearly comes up that shows how we approach things. For instance:

I went to bed wearing pj pants. She asked if I wanted to change into the shorts she’d folded and set on the dresser, as she knew I’d get too hot. I said no.

A few hours later I got up because I was too hot. She said, “Are you okay?”

I said, “I’m getting shorts.”

When I crawled back into bed, she said, “Did you make a mess of the folded clothes?”

I said no and went to sleep. The next day she saw that the shorts she thought I’d gotten were still in the neatly folded pile. I’d gone into the closet in the other room to get the shorts I needed because I didn’t want to mess with the pile of clothes in the dark. She simply shook her head. It was true that I didn’t mess up the pile of clothes, because I hadn’t been in the pile of clothes. That was fact. It just wasn’t the information she’d expected, because I didn’t say that I’d gotten the shorts from another room.

And these are the relationships I’m interested in when I write romance. These oddities, flaws, difficulties, and laughable moments that we all understand to some degree. It can feel a little like being seen, and in the end, we all want to be seen for who we are.