Do you like Escape Games? You know – the kind that either really excite you or REALLY frustrate you? I made one for the WHISPERROOT book! You can play here and I’d love to know what you think! BIGGEST CLUE I CAN GIVE: There’s a Caesar Cipher puzzle — so, good luck!

On July 1, 2025, Remember the Nightingale was released.

That was only two months ago.

Almost immediately characters began shadowing me. This is unusual. Typically, I take a few months break between releasing a book and starting a new one. For one, I have to wait on the characters and they almost never just pop up right away. For two, the research into any given topic typically takes me months. For three, even if those two things happen, the design for the cover and formatting the interior and buying the ISBNs (you need, like, four of the whoppers for every book)—there’s not usually enough time. And, so, I’m usually much less of a Danielle-Release-10-books-a-year-Steel kind of writer and more of a release consistently one book a year. In fact, I haven’t released more than one book in a year … ever? At least a dozen or so years.

But, wow, Ainela and her sister Zosia came on STRONG and I found myself dreaming of this story and writing full-on scenes in my head throughout most of the day and writing … a lot. I wrote the first words on July 10 (9 days after Remember the Nightingale was published: Ainela was impatient. Or maybe it was the hushwood that was impatient…) and I wrote the last word yesterday. That means I wrote 119,922 words in 65 days (averaging about 2,000 words per day. (See? I can be you, Stephen King. No problem).

As I wrote, I went ahead and preemptively started doing cover work and I would edit a chapter as I finished it, and then I’d edit it AGAIN when I finished each “part.”

My point is that this was an accelerated pace for me that I probably won’t ever be able to replicate.

But a lot of really amazing things have happened — even within just the last week!

FINALLY, here is the nitty gritty:

There are multiple versions to this thing because I was pretty proud of all the work that went into this book — from strategizing to using CANVA to create dozens of images to formatting the interior to thinking of creative add-ons that I’ve never done before… so:

  • You can pre-order the KINDLE version here. The KINDLE version is $9.99 USD.

The book is

  • 596 pages and 119,922 words. It includes:
    • Image and Epigraph for every chapter (there are 37 chapters, meaning you have 72 chapter images + 30 additional images for the Appendixes — that’s like 102 images!)
    • Appendix A & B which make up the Rhymebook that the girls wrote while in captivity
    • Appendix C which are sketches Zosia draws and uses to confront the town.
  • Includes Interview with Author (that’s me!), comprehensive Book Club Discussion with 89 questions grouped by theme, and full page About the Author with some fun things
  • There are tons of images and so we have three print versions:
  1. Paperback, black and white.
    • Retail price $29.99 from Amazon.com on October 1, 2025.
    • $14.99 if you Pre-order from Hartprints Bookshop — and no shipping.
  2. Paperback, full color.
    • Retail price is $42.99
    • HOWEVER, if you order from Hartprints Bookshop, then you can purchase the full color version for $24.99 (that’s half the price of anywhere else AND you don’t get charged for shipping.
  3. Special Edition: Hard cover with dust jacket
    • Retail USD $59.99
    • You can message me and tell me you want it, and I’ll send it to you for $29.99 with free shipping!

Also, Chapter Chats will be reading WHISPERROOT starting on October 10, 2025. You can sign up to join us! It’s online, free, and only happens once (sometimes twice) a week — plus you get free books, like, regularly.

I share all of this as a reminder:

dreams do really come true.