new book release!!! :D

Dragon's Captive is out now!

Cassie again!

I know y’all follow L’Erin and I for the exciting hospital action, but the entire reason L’Erin and I even know each other at all is because we’re both writers off shift, outside the hospital.

What do we write in our free time, when we’re not at the hospital, you ask?

Well…what I write…is REALLY GOOD (and also v. steamy) paranormal romance — and Dragon’s Captive just came out today!

The story of how it came to be written — last year of all years!!! — is below this awesome cover photo so please keep reading, even if this cover’s not your cup of tea. (But if it is, enjoy, ;))

(Cassie Lockharte is a combo moniker, for my co-author Kara Lockharte and I — we decided to take pity on our cover designers since both our names are so long.)

Like all women of a certain age, I imprinted heavily on Beauty and the Beast -- brunette girls who liked books, taming kinda-jerky-monstrous-men, and becoming princesses? Sign me up! But after growing up (and going through one older ex-husband) I knew personally that it shouldn't be #lifegoals. 

Kara and I were starting to kick around ideas for a new book in our series, in a tentative way, and I was on a road trip, coming back from one of those all out-doors-please-don’t-move-in-a-pandemic visits at my folks.

I didn’t want to let 2.5 hrs of prime-thinking car time go to waste just because I was pissed at them…so I started trying to think of book ideas that would make me happy to write.

And not just a little happy — like, something to look forward to writing every day, happy — which, if you’re a writer, or writer-adjacent, you’d know is nigh miraculous.

I started making a mental list of things I hadn't gotten to write about yet, things that I (possibly shamefully!) still loved...and Beauty and the Beast was right there at the top. 

I knew I couldn't pull off the same ol' same innocence the original had about its situation -- I've lived way too much life for that. 

But I realized I could write a version of it as my own, and suddenly these characters just started unspooling in my mind: Sammy, with her love of cars and obsession with serial killers (so much so that she's pretty sure Rax is one, when he abducts her.) She's stronger than Belle, tougher, and she's been through a whole lot more -- her parents were murdered when she was a child, an incident she still has PTSD from (and some of her PTSD may, uh, be personally relevant from my life.) And Rax, the dragon-shifter, who isn't as beastly as he used to be, because his dragon was magically torn from him as a punishment, to guard a Gate holding back monsters below the sea.  

When Sammy accidentally finds a necklace that belongs to Rax, that's a long-lost piece of the key to the Gate his dragon guards, Rax knows he needs it back -- even if it comes with the girl. A girl who unabashedly hates him, and tries to kill him more than once...which is something he grudgingly has to respect. 

And as for Sammy -- she's so pissed at Rax for kidnapping her she can't see straight -- until she realizes that the monsters behind the Gate his dragon guards might have been the same ones that killed her family.  

Neither of them could claim to want a relationship, especially not with each other, and definitely not like this, but there's something about the other's proximity.... 

They're both beautifully broken -- and they just might be the right people to put each other back together.  

I mean, who doesn't want adventure in the great wide somewhere? 

(PS: There’s quite a bit of sex in this book! If you are a relative of mine, please only buy it in solidarity, but don’t read it. Or if you do, never, ever, ever tell me, lol!)

This book was just so fun for me to write, and the whole experience so joyful, that I finished the 1st draft in under a hundred days. It needed a lot of polishing, but the second I knew I was working with my own version of the Beauty and the Beast trope, earning it out with relatable characters and real emotions — I was off to the races.

And Sammy was just a really satisfying character to write. She was Andi’s roommate (Andi’s the protagonist of Kara and I’s other set of novels, Dragon Called) so getting to write her felt like coming home. I love the way she’s messed up and knows it, but also makes the best of it, and how the HEA (the happily ever after, if you’re not a romance-nerd) in this book affords her the opportunity to be healed in the end. (No, characters in books aren’t always their authors. But sometimes parts of them are, if you do it right.)

And Rax was fun because he’s complicated in his own way, and also magical, a dragon-shifter, so of course he’s friends with a psychic octopus and his house has a massive shark tank. My email to Kara explaining this novel the second my road trip ended was essentially, “Please, mom, please, let me keep the sharks!” — and goddamn if I didn’t earn them out, too!

I remember looking down at romance when I was starting off my ‘career’ as a Serious Writer—and mind you, being a genre writer of any sort in the literary world is not only like being picked last for dodgeball, it’s like being the ball itself. (Especially twenty years ago, when I started, hooboy.)

And I used to think that my science fiction and fantasy was somehow ‘more real’ than romance, because it was angrier and had darker endings….

Then I grew up and realized the world is plenty dark already and what it really needs is more light.

Light, with good, chewy plots about fascinating characters put through extraordinarily difficult times who still find room in their hearts to fall in love along the way.

And if that sounds good to you, too, you should check Dragon’s Captive out :D

— Cassie

There’s not a lot of overlap between medical practitioners and writers I’ve noticed, and I don’t know why that is, Michael Cricton aside ;)