I doom scrolled in horror on January 7 and January 24, 2026. Those were the two days when ICE agents and other federal officers shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Given the rhetoric from the President and his underlings, this was a predictable outcome. Eventually someone was going to be killed by officers who were told they could act with impunity. But it didn’t just happen once. It happened multiple times. And the number of people who have died in ICE custody because they were denied required medical care is a tragedy that all Americans must eventually come to terms with.
The rage I felt at these murders occurring in the name of the American people cannot be fully described. I’m not someone who actively participates in social media debates. There’s protesting, but I needed to do something more.
And that’s where the Embers of Winter Series comes in. It started as a one-off idea. Frost and Fury. It wasn’t even going to be a novel at first. It was just supposed to be a novella, something for me to vent my frustrations through. But with each passing day, with each new news report about the attempts to cover up the murders and deaths, the project grew.
It began with expanding Frost and Fury into a trilogy. There was just too much potential story to tell. That was when the Embers of Winter Series was born. But it kept growing beyond that. The series of novellas soon became novels. Even as I started writing Frost and Fury, the story grew. New chapters had to be added and those chapters that I had written got longer. Before I knew it, I was dealing with an entirely different beast.
But it a beast that I am proud of. The novel may be short by most romantasy standards, rest assured that the world of Tesni and Ronan will grow, as will their relationship. And while their relationship will remain the focus of the series, you can expect political undertones to sometimes become overtones. There’s no escaping it. But just like this novel has changed from its humble beginnings, so too will the world in which Tesni and Ronan reside. Neither of them were chosen, but they will be the catalyst that lights their world on fire.