For good or for ill, we live in a connected, online society. And I’m old enough to remember how nuts it was, clustered around one of the gumdrop-bright iMacs in the physics lab, Sophomore year, watching the Super Bowl commercials someone had put online. They each took about 45 years to download, but we all watched them in awe and amazement. Can you imagine? A place on the computer to watch videos? Crazy! Well, fourteen thousand cat videos later, here we are. Apart from the amusement of vines, memes, and cute kittens, the internet has brought me a very specific experience that I think many of us might share: Being in an online fandom. To me, there’s literally nothing better than finishing a book, walking out of a theater, or waiting on a season finale of a show, then going online and finding Your People. People who love the thing you love, who want to keep talking about it, engaging with it, and theorizing about it. I’ve now been involved in online fandoms and fan communities for a variety of things for over half my life, and although there’s the usual strangeness that happens whenever any group of people comes…

Instead of trying to find your perfect match in a dating app, we bring you the “Author-Reader Match” where we introduce you to authors as a reader you may fall in love with. It’s our great pleasure to present Magan Vernon!  Hi, y’all! I’m Magan. I write contemporary and new adult romance books with love and laughs. Dirty Irish is my latest release that focuses on the last of three Irish, playboy brothers who in order to inherit the family business, have to be married. I’ve been published since 2011, writing young adult science fiction novels. But I’d actually started writing New Adult contemporary romance in 2009, just couldn’t find a place for it. Then when my first New Adult contemporary book was published in 2012, I knew that was the place for my writing. Younger characters. Some giggles. Some heat. All of it. And always with a happily ever after. So hopefully I’d be the ideal match for a reader looking for these things. What I’m looking for in my ideal reader match: Someone not afraid to laugh in public places Vast knowledge of the Google search bar when they want to look up Irish phrases and then start using…

Have you ever opened a book and found yourself walking the streets of your favorite city? I have. I’ve been transported to real-life places like New York, Atlanta, and Miami, and found myself yearning for imaginary worlds like the dangerous island cliffs of Thisby. It’s my favorite part of writing and reading—watching a setting become alive. Books, where setting and atmosphere created a significant dynamic between characters, is what inspired me to become a more atmospheric writer. Thankfully, my co-writer, Jude Sierra, is well known for using personal backdrops to amplify her characters, especially in her critically acclaimed Idlewild and well-loved new release A Tiny Piece of Something Greater. A love for setting and mood was one of the core concepts Jude and I used for building Shadows You Left. Gray, storm soaked skies, Seattle’s height, and sea-side scents, and the forest spanning the outskirts of the city were all used as parallels to mimic emotions and conflict between our two leads, Erik and River. As challenging as it might be, creating a character out of your setting is an intimate and poignant way to inject personality into the fringes of your story. We used this technique as we navigated…