My Indie Author Life

I want to tell you something real. Not the polished version. Not the highlight reel. The actual thing.

I published my second book yesterday. The King's Wrath — Book Two of Storm of the Silver Wolf — is live on Amazon as a pre-order right now, with a release date of June 24th. Kindle, paperback, and hardcover. My author website is updated. The blurb is tight. The cover is gorgeous. By every measurable standard, I am a functioning indie author with two books in a series, building something real.

I am also currently living in my Chevy Suburban.

The shelter program my youngest daughter (she's 17) and I were in came to an end two days ago. So right now, home is the truck — me, my other half John, and our two dogs: Peanut, my seven-year-old pit mix, and Garrus, my ten-month-old bloodhound mix who somehow got bigger than Peanut and hasn't figured out that's not allowed. It's tight. It's hot. It is what it is, and we're moving through it.

I'm writing this from the library. Or rather, I'm writing this from outside the library, catching the wifi through the wall, because someone decided it was a good idea to strip the copper from the building's AC units. Fifty thousand dollars in damage. Now the library closes the second the indoor temperature hits 82 degrees, which in a California June doesn't take long. So I sit outside. I work with the time I have.

That's kind of been the theme of this whole journey.

I've been writing since I was thirteen years old. Decades of stories living in my head, on paper, in half-finished files — and then life kept happening. It always does. But this year I decided to stop waiting for things to settle down and just build anyway. The Alpha's Compassion came first — Book One, Crystal and Aiden's story, the Frostfang Pack. Then I kept going. I kept writing chapters on my phone, formatting manuscripts in the middle of chaos, designing covers, learning KDP from scratch, figuring out ISBNs and interior margins and what a bleed edge is and why it matters.

I did all of that from my phone. I still do everything from my phone.

Three days ago, Peanut and Garrus got into it. I stepped in to separate them the way you do when your animals are your family and you don't think, you just move. Peanut caught my arm — a couple of puncture wounds, nothing deep, but I was at the ER within ten minutes because I wasn't taking chances. They cleaned it, told me to keep it dry, watch for infection. My arm is fine. We're fine. Peanut is forgiven. Garrus is still figuring out that being larger than the older dog does not make him the older dog.

And yesterday I was back outside the library, working.

I don't tell you all of this for sympathy. I tell you because I think there's a version of this story that gets told a lot — the indie author who grinded in their spare time and made it work — and it usually sounds cleaner than this. Like the hardship was manageable. Like the circumstances were just inconvenient rather than genuinely hard.

Mine are genuinely hard right now. And I'm still here. I'm still writing. I'm still building Frostfang Books one book at a time, because the stories don't stop just because life gets heavy. If anything, they've kept me moving when I didn't have much else to hold onto.

There's something else keeping me going too, and it's heavier than any of the rest of it.

My son has been missing since late December.

His name is Nicholas Draven Watkins. He was born June 24th, 2004 — and yes, that is the same day The King's Wrath releases on Kindle and in Hardback. That date means something to me that I don't quite have words for yet. Draven was last known to be in Charleston, West Virginia. His last known employer was Chili's restaurant there. He's twenty-one years old and I don't know where he is.

I write because I have to. I write because it's the one thing I can control when everything else feels like it's slipping. And somewhere in the back of every chapter, every blurb, every formatted page, I'm still his mom — waiting, and hoping, and not stopping.

If you or anyone you know has information about Nicholas Draven Watkins, please contact the West Virginia State Police at 304-746-2100. Any information helps.

If someone you love ever goes missing, know that you can also contact the National Center for Missing & Exploited Adults or reach out to local law enforcement to file a report immediately — you do not have to wait. Organizations like the Doe Network and NamUs (National Missing and Unidentified Persons System) at namus.nij.gov are also free resources for families searching for missing adults.

Both books in the Storm of the Silver Wolf series are available now on Amazon under M. N. Watkins. The King's Wrath releases June 24th. If you read them, if you share them, if you leave a review — it matters more than you know.

Thank you for being here.

— M. N. Watkins Frostfang Books