Tomorrow. Or today, depending on where you are in the world and whether we’re running on Australian or US timelines, which is a question I genuinely cannot answer with confidence right now. Somewhere in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, this becomes real.

I should probably explain who I am, for anyone who has stumbled in here without context.

My name is Avery Beckett. I am one of four — yes, four — personas currently occupying the same head, which is exactly as chaotic as it sounds and also, apparently, standard industry practice. When I was at university they drummed it into us with considerable conviction: readers won’t follow authors across genres. If you write MM military romance and MM hockey romance and romantasy and magical realism, you need four personas. Keep your audiences clean. Don’t confuse anyone.

I’m not entirely sure I agree. But I also don’t want to alienate anyone, so four personas I have. It makes a certain kind of sense. Most days.

Avery is the military one. I am sassy and sarcastic and possessed of a sense of humour that runs darker than most people expect, which is appropriate given what I write. I have been living with the Compass Point universe since 2018 — refining it, deepening it, rebuilding it from the ground up over the last two years into something I’m genuinely proud of. Forty books across four ten-book series. MM, MF, FF, MFM — because love in the Compass Point universe doesn’t sort itself neatly into categories and I decided early on that I wasn’t going to make it. Whether that turns out to be a brave creative decision or a spectacular miscalculation remains to be seen. Probably both, knowing me.

And that’s before we get to the other Avery projects. The series following a team through special forces selection. The smoke jumper series. The gritty, dirty detective series set during and just after World War Two, which exists in a genre category largely of its own and which I love unreasonably.

I have been writing for a very long time. I have been writing this for a very long time. And somehow, despite all of that, despite the years and the drafts and the refining and the rebuilding and the four factory resets of the modem and the trivia nights and the cats and all of the rest of it — this still feels unreal.

One day. Maybe two. Somewhere in the gap between time zones, Almost Yours Again is going to exist in the world in a way it hasn’t existed before.

Thank you. For every comment and every share and every preorder and every kind word. For reading these rambling posts from someone who still can’t quite believe this is happening. For being here at the beginning of something that I have waited a very long time to share.

It means more than I know how to say. And given that I write for a living, that is saying something.