Writers on Writing

DIY High: A young adult novel about resilience, alternative education, and building your own path

Mandy Webster

DIY High is a young adult novel about a high school student forced to take control of her own education when both her school system and her family fail her. Inspired in part by real-life struggles with bureaucracy, poverty, and addiction, the novel explores what happens when traditional institutions stop working—and what young people can build in their place.

Get your copy of DIY High from my independent online bookstore today!

I wrote this book during one of the hardest seasons of my life. My son was recovering from a traumatic brain injury after being hit by a semi truck while riding his bike. When he returned to school, it felt less like support and more like resistance. Instead of helping him get back on track, the system seemed to work against him. Eventually, when he turned seventeen, I made the decision I never imagined I would make: I let him drop out.

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A Killer in the Family by Amin Ahmad: Wealth, secrets, and a dynasty where no one is innocent

Mandy Webster

When Ali agrees to an arranged marriage with the daughter of a powerful New York real estate tycoon in A Killer in the Family by Amin Ahmad, he expects privilege, stability, and a glamorous life among the elite—but not the creeping suspicion that someone in his new family might be a serial killer.

Get your copy of A Killer in the Family from my independent online bookstore today!

This sweeping drama follows Ali, a charming but somewhat naïve Mumbai party boy who decides it’s finally time to grow up. His arranged marriage to Maryam, the poised daughter of real estate mogul Abbas Khan, brings him into a world of unimaginable wealth in New York City: private helicopters, glittering skyscrapers, and lavish weekends in the Hamptons. At first, Ali seems to have landed in a dream version of the American immigrant success story. But as rumors begin to swirl about Abbas Khan—whispers of corruption, secret affairs, and something darker beneath the family’s rise—Ali starts to realize that joining the Khans may have come with a cost he never anticipated.

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Too Close to Home by Seraphina Nova Glass: When suburban perfection starts to crack

Mandy Webster

The illusion of safety is a fragile thing—and in Too Close to Home by Seraphina Nova Glass, it shatters in the most explosive way possible when a Labor Day celebration turns deadly in an upscale lakefront neighborhood that suddenly doesn’t feel so safe after all.

Get your copy of Too Close to Home from my independent online bookstore today!

Set in the pristine community of Cloverhill Lakes, the novel leans hard into the familiar rhythms of the affluent suburban thriller: PTA politics, curated friendships, and the quiet competition simmering beneath polite smiles. Life here is carefully managed, right down to the image each family presents. That illusion implodes when Regan Hoffman’s car explodes at a neighborhood party—killing the wrong person and setting off a chain reaction of paranoia, suspicion, and buried secrets clawing their way to the surface.

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Sorry for Your Loss by Georgia McVeigh: A deliciously twisted game of obsession, grief, and control

Mandy Webster

Grief can make people do strange things—but in Sorry for Your Loss by Georgia McVeigh, releasing March 31, 2026, grief is just the starting point for a psychological duel between two people who may be far more dangerous than they first appear. What begins as a chance meeting in a grief support group quickly turns into a tense, unsettling cat-and-mouse game where the real question isn’t whether someone is lying—it’s who’s manipulating whom.

Get your copy of Sorry for Your Loss from my independent online bookstore today!

At the center of the story is Iris, a woman who is clearly out of touch with reality. She attends a local grief group to keep herself “grounded,” but from the start it’s obvious that Iris is holding onto far more than grief. Her childhood offers clues about how she became the person she is. Iris grew up in the shadow of her twin sister, Marcie—the golden child who their mother adored. Marcie’s birth came easily, while Iris reportedly took days to arrive, a story their mother never let her forget. Even after Marcie’s tragic death at seventeen, their mother openly wished it had been Iris instead. It’s the kind of emotional wound that never quite heals, and as an adult Iris is still searching for the love and validation she never received.

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Ruins by Lily Brooks-Dalton: A haunting literary mystery about civilization, memory, and the stories we choose to tell

Mandy Webster

In Ruins by Lily Brooks-Dalton (releasing March 31, 2026), an ambitious archaeologist chases proof of a lost empire—and in the process, confronts the fragile architecture of her own world. After loving The Light Pirate, I could not wait to read this one. I was not disappointed. Ruins just catapulted itself to the number one spot on my best books of 2026 list.

Get your copy of Ruins from my independent online bookstore today!

I read an advance review copy as an ebook, as I do with most ARCs. I usually prefer print, but you can’t argue with free. This, however, was one of those rare cases where I found myself wishing the book had already been released so I could run out and buy a physical copy. I wanted to hold it in my hands. I wanted the weight of it. The experience of immersion felt so complete that a screen almost seemed insufficient.

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Writers on Writing

How to generate content efficiently when you already have a full-time job

Mandy Webster

If you want to build an audience for your books—or grow a platform that actually sustains interest—you can’t post once in a while and hope for the best; consistency is the engine, and efficiency is the fuel. The problem, of course, is time.

Breaking the work into parts doesn’t cheapen it. It makes it possible.

If you’re like me, you work a full-time job. You have family obligations, errands, laundry, dishes, and a life you’d like to live outside of your laptop. And yet, I typically update my blog five days a week. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because I treat content creation less like a burst of inspiration and more like an assembly line.

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Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher: A gothic horror that burrows under your skin

Mandy Webster

In Wolf Worm, T. Kingfisher delivers a slow-burning gothic nightmare set in the woods of North Carolina, where scientific curiosity collides with something far older and far more feral. Releasing March 24, 2026, the novel follows Sonia Wilson, a scientific illustrator in 1899 who has been surviving on the borrowed credibility of her late father’s reputation. When she accepts a position with the reclusive Dr. Halder to illustrate his insect collection, she believes she’s securing stability. Instead, she steps into a story that opens with a chilling admission: “I saw the devil in these woods.”

Get your copy of Wolf Worm from my independent online bookstore today!

Kingfisher’s prose reflects Sonia’s artistic eye. Descriptions feel layered, as if applied with a brush—yellow ochre laid in for a dog’s fur and then lifted back out again along the face. The natural world is rendered with precision and technique, which makes the corruption creeping through it feel even more invasive. As animals begin behaving strangely and local whispers about “blood thieves” grow louder, the beauty of the environment becomes inseparable from the horror beneath it. This is a novel saturated with insects—some of them of the burrowing-into-flesh variety—and Kingfisher does not shy away from the visceral implications.

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Mother Is Watching by Karma Brown: A dystopian horror that turns pregnancy into a battleground

Mandy Webster

In Mother Is Watching by Karma Brown, releasing March 17, 2026, a routine art restoration spirals into a chilling exploration of surveillance, bodily autonomy, and the quiet horror of a society that thinks it knows what’s best for women. What begins as the story of a haunted painting becomes something far more insidious—a dystopian nightmare hiding beneath a gothic veneer.

Get your copy of Mother is Watching from my independent online bookstore today!

Mathilde “Tilly” Crewson, a thirty-nine-year-old art conservator and mother, is hired to restore The Mother, a fire-scarred painting rumored to be the lost fourth work of a female surgeon-turned-artist. Not long after the canvas arrives in her home, Tilly discovers she is unexpectedly pregnant. Then the insects come. The whispers. The visions of her long-dead mother. The line between psychological unraveling and supernatural intrusion blurs as the painting’s influence tightens around her.

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The Plans I Have for You by Lai Sanders: A dark, seductive debut about revenge, race, and dangerous devotion

Mandy Webster

A viral video destroys one young woman’s future in The Plans I Have for You by Lai Sanders, and what follows is a gothic-tinged descent into revenge, obsession, and the perilous gap between justice and annihilation.

Get your copy of The Plans I Have For You from my independent online bookstore today!

Releasing March 17, 2026, Sanders’s debut has already been named one of Publishers Weekly’s Most Anticipated Thrillers of 2026, but this novel resists easy categorization. It blends psychological suspense with sharp social critique and an undercurrent of supernatural ambiguity that keeps the reader unsettled from the first page.

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Essays

State governments as change-makers: Raising standards when Washington won’t

Mandy Webster

Many Americans talk about states’ rights as if it’s a shield for inaction, but the truth is that with states’ rights come states’ responsibilities. The federal government sets minimum standards for the country, but it’s up to each state to decide when those standards don’t go far enough. States have the authority—and the obligation—to raise the bar if they believe it’s the right thing for their residents. A higher minimum wage, stronger environmental protections, or expanded healthcare access can all start at the state level before ever being considered federally.

When states take the lead, change becomes possible. Highlighting the power of local action to set higher standards and drive national progress.

It’s easy to forget the sheer size and diversity of the United States. With so many people spread across vast distances and different cultures, making nationwide change is incredibly difficult, sometimes impossible, without groundwork laid by states first. Many social issues, including marriage equality, have followed this path. By June 2015, 36 states plus Washington, D.C., had already legalized same-sex marriage—proving that federal progress often relies on state-level experimentation and leadership. States shouldn’t see this as a hindrance—they should see it as an opportunity to lead national change from their own communities.

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