The Feed

You ask Heartsong something you're carrying — a worry, a grief, a thing you can't quite name — and a response comes back. It's like sending an emotional support card to yourself. You can also send one to someone else: a friend in a hard week, a sibling going through something, anyone you'd want to sit beside if you could.

One free question and one free send each month. The whole thing came out of Glimpse and was meant to be a small feature inside something larger, but it kept asking for its own room. So it has one.

The Glimpse Tool is a place to ask one spiritual question a month and receive a reflection back. Not advice. Not a verdict. A reflection — the kind a careful friend might offer if you handed them the question and gave them time to think.

It draws on the world of the novel GLIMPSE, which we'll publish later this year. The tool came first because the question form felt ready before the book did. That's been a pattern lately — the side projects asking to come out before their source material.

A note for anyone tracking the catalog: we've also been having a bit of fun with something different. The Completed is a psychological thriller with a Glimpse twist, and it's drafted. More on that when it's closer.

Second Half Compass opens in June. The Sounding assessment is in place. The Companion is trained. The six modules are written. The technology that holds it all together has been quietly working in the background for weeks.

What it offers, in plain terms: a 24/7 companion for the kind of transition that doesn't have a clear roadmap. Retirement. A move. The end of a chapter that took up several decades. The Companion has been shaped by a year and a half of Glimpse work — the same restraint, the same refusal to push the reader anywhere they aren't ready to go.

Founding members and full pricing details will be on the Compass page when the doors open.

All three movements are now available as audiobooks. The print editions are next, landing across the back half of the year.

Dirge has been in motion for more than two years. It was the project already underway before everything else changed in late 2024, and it kept going — became, somewhere along the way, the thing it was supposed to become rather than the thing it started as. That happens with some books. You stay with them long enough and they tell you what they actually are.

The writing changes depending on where I do it. Coffee shops give back a kind of background hum that fills in the silences. Disney has its own pace, which is strange to write inside but turns out to be useful for certain kinds of scenes. Charlotte Beach is for the chapters that need a horizon. Eastview is good for the work that needs people moving past.

If you happen to see me out somewhere with a notebook or a laptop, don't hesitate to say hello. The writing keeps better company than people might think.

Laurie has become a serious pin trader. The collection is real — sorted, catalogued, the kind of thing that earns nods at the trading boards. It started as something we did together on Disney trips. It has, somewhere along the way, become hers.

If you're a trader, or curious about the world, she'd be glad to hear from you. The pin community is one of the warmer corners of fandom, and Laurie's been welcomed into it generously. Happy to pass that forward.

From the beginning, the trilogy was meant to move from silence into song. Book one set the silence. Book two introduced the music. Book three is what happens when you've listened long enough to hear what's been there all along.

The new covers are live across the site. The third book lands later this year.

The Chair Trilogy was always going to be three books, and it was always going to end here. Quiet Miracles brought strangers to the chair. The Chair Remembers stayed long enough to learn what the chair had been holding. The Last Quiet Miracle is what happens when you stop waiting for something larger and notice that the small thing was the whole thing.

Closing a trilogy is its own kind of quiet. We're glad to have arrived.

It would have been easier to write one book that covered all three. We didn't, on purpose. Faith, hope, and love don't actually live together in one room — they take turns. Some seasons are mostly faith. Some are almost entirely hope. Some are love, quiet and unmistakable.

Three short volumes felt closer to the way these things actually arrive.

The thing people keep telling us is that they didn't expect a book to not push them somewhere. The whole industry — self-help, devotional, even a lot of fiction — is built around moving the reader. Toward decision. Toward action. Toward becoming the person they were promised they could become.

Some of what we publish does the opposite. It sits down beside you. That's the whole pitch.

People who pick up our books are not, generally, looking for a four-hundred-page argument. They're often tired. Sometimes grieving. Sometimes catching ten minutes between things they couldn't put down. A book that demands a week of attention isn't going to meet them where they are.

Short doesn't mean slight. It means we did the work of cutting so the reader doesn't have to.

Parables don't tell you what to think. They put a small story in front of you and let it do its work. You walk away with something — sometimes the thing the writer intended, sometimes a thing the writer didn't see and couldn't have. Either way, it's yours.

We keep coming back to the form because nothing else delivers a difficult idea quite so gently. A direct argument can be argued with. A parable just sits there, waiting to be ready for.

Most of what makes a small operation possible is the boring infrastructure that nobody sees. We've spent the last several weeks on exactly that: the database that holds Sounding results, the worker that quietly proxies API calls, the bridge that lets a WooCommerce purchase unlock the right Companion access.

None of it is the product. All of it is the reason the product can exist.

From the start, the model has been: every book we put out, copies go where they're most likely to meet someone in a hard hour. Hospice waiting rooms. Hospital chapels. Rural libraries that don't get many new titles. Funeral homes, when they'll have us.

We don't talk about it as charity. It's more accurate to say it's the actual point — and the storefront exists to make the placements possible.

Second Half Compass was built around a simple question: what would a digital companion for the second half of life actually need to be useful? Not a chatbot. Not a coach pretending to know you. Something that holds your story carefully and meets you where you are.

The Companion runs on a private architecture we built end-to-end — a Sounding assessment that surfaces where someone actually is across the SPICES dimensions (Social, Physical, Intellectual, Contributional, Emotional, Spiritual), a database that holds those results securely, and a guide that draws on them to make conversations feel grounded rather than generic.

The research underneath it draws on decades of work in adult development, retirement transition psychology, and the literature on meaning-making in later life. None of that is visible to the user — which is the point. The technology stays out of the way so the conversation can stay close.

It wasn't supposed to be a Glimpse title. It was supposed to be one copy, hand-bound, sitting next to Laurie's coffee on a Sunday morning. That was the whole plan.

Then enough people read it over her shoulder and asked where they could get one of their own. So here we are. The Husband-Catching Cake recipe is in there, and it works exactly as advertised. The rest of the book is what we couldn't have predicted — small, quiet, a little funnier than expected.

Kirkus reviews are among the few credentials that travel well outside the small-press world, and we don't submit lightly. The Memory of the Tail earned the attention — it's a book about how loss leaves a shape that doesn't actually fill back in, and what we do with that shape afterward.

Whatever the review says, the book is the same book. But we wanted it considered.

Children's books that try to teach are usually doing too much. The Chronicles of Becoming tries to do less — each volume is one child, one discovery, told by Button the Notebook, who has been around long enough to recognize what's happening before the child does.

Charlie is first. Eleven more are waiting their turn. Riley and Mica are already drafted; the rest will arrive across the next two years.

The premise was simple: a free Glimpse audiobook each month for a year, no strings, no upsell, no expanding email funnel. We wanted to know whether people would value a thing given freely, or whether free quietly meant disposable.

The answer, mostly: people listened. Some came back for the next one. A few wrote to say where the book had found them — a long drive, a hospital waiting room, a hard week. That was always the part we cared about. The Circle is staying.