On Amazon, here– paperback and ebook editions are available, audiobook will be available at some point. If you pre-ordered via the kickstarter you’ll get your ebooks via email this week, paper books will arrive by the end of January.

When I first started writing BETS four years ago, all I cared about was the plot. I was new to fiction and having a lot of fun creating a compelling plot! A near-future collapsing city, a young person on a stolen bicycle with a small dog riding across the arid, abandoned western United States, looking for friends. Where will she find water? What happens when she runs out of food or gets injured? What if her love interests prove to be nefarious? Two years and several drafts in the plot was good, but the story felt anemic- it was missing something, and I couldn’t figure out what. Then I read that, when writing fiction, plot is great and all but the most important thing for us to figure out, as writers, is what our characters want. Our characters’ hopes and dreams and fears are what make a story real, and everything else springs from that- that’s what drives the story forward. Not the plot.

I’d never sat down and tried to figure out what my characters actually wanted- why was Bets willing to risk death to ride her bike into the great unknown? Why was her love interest Georgia so avoidant- what parts of herself was she afraid of sharing with the world? What did Jane, Bets’ mother, have to gain from organizing such a massive prison break? I did some visioning (thinking really hard about it on dog walks) until I had my answers and then everything fell into place, like a line of dominoes- I not only knew what parts of the story I needed to change to make it work but I knew what the plot twist would be and I started crying on my dog walk when I put that final piece together because it was the kind of plot twist I would want to read in a book, the kind that punches you right in the heart and I’d never written a plot twist before and it felt so amazing and lowkey magical to just make one from scratch, to be able to contribute to the literary world in that way.

To be honest, I think the first half of the book is kind of cringe but it’s OK, I did my best and as I keep writing fiction I’ll get better. The second half of the book though- the second half is perfect. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever written. I still cry when I re-read it. And if one half of the book is gonna be superior it makes the most sense to have it be the second half, amirite?

What I always aim for, when writing books, is to provide escape for my reader- so I hope that BETS, if nothing else, gives you that. I hope it lifts you out of your world for a little while and drops you into Bets’- you’re looking for water in the sonoran desert, wearing a faded flower-print dress crusted with salt- your hair is tangled and your skin is chafed, you and the dog finished your last bit of millet gruel this morning, and you’re down to half a liter of water- you’re worried but then you feel the air change and you know that water is close, that you’ll find it in this rocky wash after all, that this most basic need will be met and that at least for a little while, everything will be right again. The day will cool into night and the stars will come on and you’ll sleep, the dog like a hot water bottle in your sleeping bag, and you’ll dream of your mother who you know is somewhere out here in this empty desert too, under this very same moon.

BETS is only available on Amazon for now- I know Amazon is evil! They are also currently the only publisher/distributor giving independent authors a fair cut of sales- they actually pay independent authors really well. It’s probably part of their world-domination strategy- undercut other publishers, who have been giving authors a very bad deal for a long time now, as a way to continue to undermine them, until the slow collapse of the biggest dinosaur publishers is complete and Amazon controls the book market completely- at which point they will probably stop offering authors such a fair deal. But for now, if you actually want to get paid fairly for your books, distributing them through Amazon is unfortunately the best way to go. So here we are! (Also, if you do read the book, please leave me a review on amazon- the more reviews a book has, the more visible it is in amazon’s algorithms.)

Two more things! There are just a few spots left in my February beginner backpacking guided trips, and I’ve discounted them heavily- they’re $500 off! Deets are here. And I’ve opened applications for my summer 2025 Brooks Range guided trips in Alaska– these are going to be amazing, and I’ve made a few changes to this years’ trips. Deets and the application are here.

More soon,

Carrot