And why in the world did Miranda and TB decide to write it?
If you haven't heard of it before, Paranormal Women's Fiction is a term that was coined in 2020 when 13 authors of mainstream cozy mystery, urban fantasy, and paranormal romance decided to team up and create a unique genre for readers who craved kick-ass heroines who were in the middle of their lives.
Around 2018, I was experiencing burnout writing sapphic romance and needed something different to spark my creativity again. I had an idea for a mystery series with a young witch turned amateur sleuth. I knew it wouldn't fit my usual audience of readers, so I decided to launch a new pen name, Nicole St Claire, and give paranormal cozy mysteries a try.
Unfortunately, shortly after the first two books were released, I had a series of personal life issues that nearly derailed the series completely, and could have sunk my writing career. Instead of fixing the burnout, it got to the point where the trauma I associated with these books made it impossible to write them. Ironically, this turned out to be a good thing on the sapphic fiction side of things. Around this time, TB and I teamed up on our first co-write, Holly and Ivy, and the rest is history.
However, just because I was struggling writing them didn't mean I didn't want to complete the cozy story in a satisfying way for my new readers. I've told my sapphic readers about this series before, but what I didn't mention then (because she said not to) was that by the time I got to book 4 in the series, the only way I could finish them was to have TB cowrite them with me.
Fast forward to this past fall. With the launch of the new I Heart SapphFic website and several writing projects with grueling deadlines, we were both mentally fried. We needed something totally new to bring the fun back into writing. That's when I remembered the cozy series.
Being in midlife ourselves (TB and I both will turn 49 this year), and having seen some shit over the past few years, we've both become fans of Paranormal Women's Fiction. What's not to love about scrappy divorced women the world wants to dismiss as irrelevant totally kicking butt and beating the bad guys, am I right? We started talking, and we wondered if it would be possible to completely rewrite the old cozy series as PWF, and this time, let's make it sapphic!
So that is what we are doing. If you've read the cozies, many elements will feel familiar. There's a lot of new stuff, too. In fact, Midlife is the Cat's Meow, which is our first book that will be released in the My So-called Hexed Midlife series, isn't simply a rewriting of Spirits, Pies and Alibis. It's actually a mashup of the first two books of the old series. There are several new characters, big changes in the mystery itself, and of course, a sapphic love interest for our recently divorced heroine, Tallulah Shipton.
What you will get in this series is awesome sapphic representation in a genre that currently has little to none. We would be delighted if readers of K.F. Breene, Deanna Chase, Robyn Peterman, and the rest of the Fab 13 authors who started the PWF phenomenon would read and fall in love with our books, too. We're doing our best to deliver characters and stories that are authentic to the PWF experience, just with 100% more sapphic content.
And of course, you will get our usual buffet of quirky characters, snarky humor, and witty banter. There is a main sapphic romance, (and a few for side characters, too), but it will take multiple books to unfold. We hope the excitement of solving murders and battling evil will help you be patient on that front.
TB and I will continue to publish traditional sapphic romance. That's our bread and butter, and we're both full time authors who support ourselves with our writing. How frequently we are able to publish new books in this series will depend a lot on how successful they are, but we do promise you will get a complete and satisfying story over time. We will keep writing them until the series is complete. If you're not sure what you think of this whole PWF thing, we hope you'll give them a try!
We can hardly wait to go on this new adventure with you! More details and a release date for Midlife is the Cat's Meow will be coming soon.