I’ve been trying to write this post for three weeks.
Every time I sit down to do it, I stare at the screen for a while, type something, delete it, and go make another cup of tea. My friend Karen, who has heard more about this book and these characters than any person should reasonably have to endure, has been very patient. She has also been very gently suggesting, in the way she does, that perhaps I should just write the thing, Avery.
So. I’m writing the thing.
Almost Yours Again is at the editor. The cover has been made. The cover reveal is locked in for May 20th. And the book goes live on June 1st.
June 1st. Thirty-four days from today.
I need you to understand something about what it means to type that sentence.
I have been living inside the Compass Point Security universe for fifteen years. Alone, mostly, in the way that writing is always fundamentally alone — just me and the characters and the particular madness of a world that refused to stop expanding every time I turned my back on it. Forty books across four series. The novellas that exist because certain characters were absolutely not going to accept a supporting role and I don’t know why I ever thought they would. Fifteen years of notes and scenes and timelines and character voices that have become so familiar I sometimes forget they don’t actually exist.
Karen has been alongside me for a lot of that. Not writing Avery — that’s mine, entirely mine, my voice and my world and my particular obsession — but there. The person on the other end of the phone when I couldn’t work something out. The one who has heard about Marc and Finn probably more than she ever asked to, and who kept listening anyway. We work together on other projects, Karen and I, and that partnership has taught me what it means to have someone who truly understands what you’re trying to do — which makes her support of this work, the work that’s entirely my own, mean more than I can easily say.
But Almost Yours Again is mine. That matters to me and I want to say it clearly, because this is the work I built alone across fifteen years and a great deal of very strong tea.
Marc and Finn are the heart of everything in this universe. That’s not hyperbole — it’s architecture. Every series, every character, every thread that runs through Compass Point traces back to them. They are the reason the world exists in the form it does. And Almost Yours Again is their story: the one I’ve been holding the longest, the one I’ve circled back to again and again over fifteen years of building everything else around it. The one that had to come first, even though — especially because — it’s the most important one.
For those of you who are new here: Marc Dalton and Finn Cooper are the soul of Compass Point Security. Everything else in this universe grows from what they are to each other, what they’ve been through, and what it costs two people to find their way back when the distance between them has been measured in years and silence and choices that couldn’t be unmade. That’s all I’m going to say right now. The book will say the rest.
For those of you who have been waiting — who have been here through the years of it’s coming, I promise it’s coming — I don’t have adequate words for what it means to finally be writing it’s here. Or almost here. Close enough that I can see it from where I’m standing and it doesn’t disappear when I blink.
The manuscript is with the editor, which means it’s temporarily out of my hands and in capable ones. The cover exists and is beautiful and I am being heroically restrained about not sharing it before the 20th. Fifteen years of waiting has given me a certain capacity for delayed gratification. I am drawing on every last bit of it.
Here is what I know about June 1st: it’s the day forty books get their foundation. Everything I have built in this universe — every team, every mission, every love story, every scar and every choice and every moment of two people deciding each other is worth the risk — gets its why on that day. Marc and Finn are the answer to questions the rest of the series is still asking. That’s what it means to have lived in a world this long. You know, eventually, where everything comes from.
This is where it comes from.
Fifteen years. One universe. The cover reveal is May 20th. The book is June 1st.
Almost there. Almost yours.
— Avery
Almost Yours Again is Book 1 of the Compass Point Security universe — the beginning of forty books across four series. Cover reveal: May 20th. Publication: June 1st. Sign up to the newsletter to be the first to see it.
Avery Beckett Books 