WE DID IT! 100+ Reviews on Amazon

...Plus my first paid subscriber only post--Chapter 1 of a serialized crime novel

Thank you to everyone who wrote book reviews for me, especially on Amazon! I finally have over 100 reviews, which is an important milestone for the Amazon algorithm. My latest review cracked me up. Five Stars (hooray!) and said the following:

5.0 out of 5 stars Imaginative

Reinception was one of my favorite books. Exhausting yet exhilarating

I love this review because it about summarizes my writing journey as well. I might have to put it on a bookmark….

So again, thank you to every single one of you who read my book and especially to those who posted reviews—they are the difference between success and failure in this competitive writing world!

As promised, I’m doing a random giveaway to someone on my mailing list. The winner of my giveaway will get a lovely bookish prize! Photos to follow!

I’ll do my next giveaway when I reach 500 subscribers!

And the Award Goes Too…

ReInception is a semi-finalist for a CIBA Cygnus award! Final announcements are in April. That’s more than 10 awards for categories for everything from Best Science Fiction Novel to best Audiobook Science Fiction. We even won an award for cover art! Thank you again to

Winding Road Stories

and

Michael Dolan

for bringing my book to life and to my narrator, the talented Arielle DeLisle!

A Little Housekeeping

I’m trying my very best to do a new post every Thursday. I am also retiring the blog on my website in favor of Substack and have imported some of my archived posts here. I hope that you find this new format as user friendly as I do!

A Serialized Crime Novel…

I’ve been thinking about how to best thank and reward my paid subscribers—first, thank you! I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you are supporting my passion for writing.

For my paid subscribers only, I will be sharing a serialize crime novel! This is a novel that I wrote several years ago called “The Collector.” The Collector is set in The Bronx, where I used to be a prosecutor, and also in the art world, which I grew up in. It still needs a lot of work to be shelf ready, and I’m sorting through some different approaches to the points of view, but it has stuck with me and I’ve been toying with the idea of resurrecting and editing it.

The second Thursday of each month, I will post another chapter (or partial chapter if very long) for paid subscribers. Then, I will be asking for your comments and feedback!

I hope that being involved in the book revision process and helping shape a novel will be fun for my readers! I don’t know if crime novels need content warnings—they are crime novels—but this novel contains explicit murder and sex scenes.

Once I reach about the halfway point, I’ll be asking you to vote—keep it shelved or resurrect it for publication!

So, without further ado, here is the Prologue of The Collector (a teaser from my free subscribers and the whole shebang for my paid subscribers!)

The Collector by Sarena Straus

Brownsville, Brooklyn. 1992

Underneath the bed, it’s like this: Bare, cold tile flooring-- a dull, lifeless, unimaginative gray. Above are wood slats, bowed in the middle. The air is full of dust motes so thick you can choke on them. It was plenty of room to hide when she was three, but at seven, the slats scrape along her back as she forces her way backward, arm over arm, retreating under the bed like a soldier through a minefield. And she is. She’s in the middle of a war, and her life depends on this hiding place.