by Avery Arujo | Oct 27, 2025 | Book Updates, Life Updates
I know I’ve been pretty quiet online lately. Truth is, I just haven’t had much to say. Most of my time has gone toward taking care of my mental health. The world feels like a dumpster fire right now, and social media hasn’t exactly been helping. It’s a steady stream of misinformation, outrage, click bait and hot takes, and after a while, it started to wear me down. So I stepped back. I’ve also been busy protesting and calling my congress representatives and senators to ensure they’re doing all that they can to stop this insane administration from hurting everyone. Billionaires really suck!
All of this has negatively impacted my writing progress. When everything feels dark and heavy, it tends to seep into my work, and that’s not really the tone I want for the Moonridge series. Those books have a dark element, but they also have heart and humor. They’re about finding light in the dark. And lately, I needed a little time to find my own light again before I could get back to that space.
The good news? Yesterday, something finally clicked. I sat down to write for the first time in weeks and managed to rewrite two full chapters of book three. It felt good. And the good news is, my characters didn’t hold a grudge for my absence either. They slipped right back into my head, ready to cause chaos and fall in love.
I’m easing back into a rhythm and feeling cautiously optimistic that, if life behaves, I can still have book three out by early spring. That’s the plan, anyway. Fingers crossed the world doesn’t throw another curveball big enough to send me back into hiding.
Before I go, I just want to say thank you to everyone who’s read and reviewed Date Night With Death. The series isn’t exactly storming bestseller lists, but it’s found a little corner of readers who genuinely get it, and that means more to me than I can say. I’m so glad you love Moonridge as much as I do.
Here’s to more words, more weird magic, and better days ahead.
by Avery Arujo | Sep 12, 2025 | Book Updates, Life Updates
Hi, friends!
It’s finally fall, my favorite season of all, and boy, have I been busy! Sweater weather is just around the corner, and I can’t wait. Between getting everything ready for the release of Date Night With Death and trying to stay on top of things at my day job, I feel like I’ve barely had time to breathe. I did take an extended Labor Day weekend, though, and it was great to visit friends I hadn’t seen in years. I even gave myself a full week off from writing and plotting, which was exactly what I needed.
Date Night With Death comes out in just over a week, and I’m so grateful to the early readers who’ve already reached out to tell me how much they’ve enjoyed it. While not always easy to hear, I also appreciate the ones who wrote to say they hated it or DNFed because it wasn’t what they were expecting. If you haven’t read it yet, the vibe is definitely different from Once Upon a Blue Moon. It is a little darker, which honestly feels closer to my natural lane. I love cozy, but sometimes I just need to let the shadows in. Honestly, I like Date Night better than Blue Moon, but what can you do? 🙂
On the writing front, I’m about halfway through revising the first half of book three. While cleaning it up, I realized that what I had mapped out as book five actually needs to come earlier in the series arc, so I’m swapping books four and five. I’ve taken a break from cleaning up book three so I can reorganize notes and plots, so I don’t lose track of why I made the change in the first place. Speaking of tone, book three is shaping up to be a mix of the first two. There are many more lighter moments reminiscent of Blue Moon, but we are still very much in the thick of the Concord’s growing menace. The deeper we dig into them, the more evil comes to the surface.
Thank you for sticking with me. A handful of you have sent in great questions, and I’ll be putting together a Q&A post soon to answer them. I’m also hoping to have a new Moonridge Gazette article up in the near future. They take a little more time to put together, but they’re some of my favorite posts to share.
Until next time.
Avery
