LOVE LETTER NO. 001 · AUGUST 2026​
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A September Love Letter for the Haunted

September always feels a little like a threshold.

Summer has not quite let go, but the air starts changing anyway. The light gets softer. The evenings arrive earlier. Everything feels a little more suited to secrets.

Which feels appropriate, considering what I have been working on lately.

The Patron Saint of Drowning is officially available for ebook preorder on Amazon.

Seeing it sitting there, outside of my computer and outside of the little world I have been living in while writing it, is still incredibly surreal.

If you are a Kindle reader, you can preorder the ebook now:

​https://www.amazon.com/Patron-Saint-Drowning-Burning-Avalon-ebook/dp/B0HHM5248M/ref=sr_1_1?sr=8-1​

For my physical-book people, paperback editions are also available through my website:

​https://www.prettylittledarling.com/​

There is something particularly lovely about knowing that soon River, Kieran, the Firefly, Blackwell House, and all of their terrible decisions are going to belong to other people too.

And while Book One is preparing to leave my hands, I have already been spending a lot of time with what comes next.

Desecration

Book Two of the Burning Avalon series is currently spread across my desk in approximately seventeen different forms.

I have been compiling notes, pulling together continuity, organizing everything Book One leaves behind, and preparing to properly disappear into Desecration.

There are consequences waiting.

There are family secrets that did not stay buried.

There are relationships that survived the first book without necessarily surviving intact.

And Anthony Blackwell is still very much Anthony Blackwell.

I will leave it there for now.

Mostly.

And Then There Is Pretty Things Bleed

Because apparently one book at a time would be too reasonable, I have also been quietly writing Pretty Things Bleed on the side.

It is still living in that delicious early stage where I am discovering exactly what kind of monster it wants to become.

It is separate from Burning Avalon, with its own characters, its own atmosphere, and its own particular collection of beautiful problems.

I am trying not to say too much about it yet.

Trying being the important word.

For now, just know that it exists.

And it is getting teeth.

From My Desk to Yours

This part of publishing is strange because so much is happening at once.

I am preparing to release one book while assembling the bones of another and falling a little bit in love with something entirely new beside it.

There are files everywhere. Notes everywhere. Half-finished scenes. Cover thoughts. Marketing plans. Tiny details I suddenly become convinced matter at two in the morning.

And somehow, in the middle of all of it, there are people waiting to read these stories.

That part still gets me.

Whether you have been here since the beginning, recently stumbled into my little haunted corner of the internet, joined the Black Halo Society, signed up for an ARC, shared a post, preordered a book, or simply told me you wanted to read it someday, thank you.

Truly.

I have spent a long time writing stories in private.

Getting to finally hand them to you feels terrifying.

It also feels a little like coming home.

Until the next letter,

Halsey Josephine

For the haunted, the hungry, and everyone who has ever loved something they probably should have run from.