My second novel is slated for fall 2020. It’s not a sequel, but let’s just say it has some themes in common with Temper: like rage, revenge, women making men sorry for their bad behavior (and if they can’t make them sorry, they’ll make them suffer).
Learn Her Wrath stars Dr. Scarlett Clark, a college professor with a secret life as a serial killer. She hunts abusive men on the campus where she works and covers her tracks by making the deaths look like suicides and accidents. Unlike my first book’s hot-tempered heroine Kira, Scarlett is all cold calculation. But when she does get angry, you better run.
Like Temper, Learn Her Wrath is told in two points of view, the second POV being a college student who gets involved with one of the guys on Scarlett’s kill list. It’s been really fun drawing from my own undergraduate experiences to write those chapters. The college in the book is fictitious, but definitely inspired by the rural Pennsylvania university I attended.
The title of the book comes from the Shakespeare play Titus Andronicus (Lavinia’s line “O, do not learn her wrath; she taught it thee”), and I love the Biblical undertones it has as well. Scarlett isn’t religious, but what could be more Old Testament than taking justice into your own hands and striking down men who have sinned against womankind?
I sold the book on proposal back in January, and I’m still in the midst of the drafting process. I won’t lie, it’s been really difficult staying focused and producing new words while in the whirlwind of my debut year. I’m definitely jealous of Kai already having her second book written before the first one came out! But writing Learn Her Wrath is helping me get to know who I really am as an author, what I have to say in my body of work as opposed to just in one book. So far the overarching takeaway seems to be: ambitious bitches get shit done, and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll get the hell out of their way.
