Audiobooks brought me back. When the Twilight wave hit I was too busy to sit down with a book, so I listened instead, and it changed everything. I started with Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series and fell straight down the urban fantasy rabbit hole. That led me back to paranormal romance, then to contemporary (Megan Hart’s Broken was the one that made me feel something again, instead of swapping character names between interchangeable books), and finally to historical, where Lisa Kleypas’s Secrets of a Summer Night sealed it for good.

Falling for books was easy after that, because I already knew how to fall hard for something and I dove deep in Night Huntress, Immortals After Dark, Black Dagger Brotherhood, Kate Daniels, Mercy Thompson, The Hollows. These weren’t just series I read; they were series I lived in, the same way I had with everything else.

I’d been logging all of it on Goodreads back when it was still about community, and that’s where I found my people. A group of women who loved the same books and kept handing each other new ones. In 2011, a few of us started a blog, names and faces secret for years. In 2011, a few of us started a blog, names and faces secret for years. The team has changed since then, but I’m still doing what I did on Goodreads in the late 2000s: talking about books I love until people finally read them. That blog was Under the Covers, and it’s still where you’ll find me.