Flotsam
Cargo lost when a ship sinks or perishes, still floating after the vessel is gone. No one chose to throw it away. Disaster made the decision.
K.S. VALENTINA
The Sinner’s Syllabus · A Newsletter from the PropertyThe third Salvage Claim · September 15
This was
never lost.
Not everything overboard is lost. Some things are marked before they hit the water.
Lagan, the third book in The Salvage Claims, arrives September 15.
The series began with what the island tried to bury in Selvage. It returned with Savannah in Flotsam. It tightened its hold in Jetsam. Now the water is giving something back—but the sea has never returned anything without changing it first.
Field notes · Four ways to belong to the sea
Maritime law asks what happened—and whether anyone meant to come back.
It does not look at everything floating offshore and call it debris. It asks who made the choice.
Jetsam
Cargo deliberately cast overboard from a ship in danger, usually to lighten the vessel and give the people aboard a chance to survive.
Lagan
Cargo deliberately cast overboard and fastened to a buoy or marker so it can be found and recovered later. Not discarded. Not surrendered. Marked for return.
Derelict
A vessel or cargo abandoned at sea without hope—or intention—of recovery.
Lagan is not the story of something accidentally lost. It is the story of something sent beneath the surface with a marker tied to it. Somebody always meant to come back.
Which is, as you may imagine, a very dangerous word to hand a romance author.
A note from the property
The coast remembers what was thrown in. The mountain remembers what was taken out.
I keep writing landscapes that behave like witnesses. Neither one is neutral, and neither one is especially interested in letting people call damage “the past” just because enough time has gone by.
That is the thread tying the work together right now: Lagan rising out of the water while Overburden opens the mountain.
One is about what comes back. The other is about what never left.
Both are love stories, obviously. I have a type.
— K.S.Writing somewhere between the tide line and the tipple
The mountain is already awake
Read Overburden free on Lantern.
While the sea prepares to return its next claim, a different landscape is moving.
Overburden, Book One of The Reclamation, is unfolding now on Lantern: Appalachian gothic, cryptid romance, slow-burn dread, infrastructure as courtship language, and a land that has been keeping records.
The store doors are open
For readers who want the whole dangerous shelf.
Six signed paperbacks · $89
Vauclain Monsters
Boundwater through Homebound, signed, with an optional personalized inscription.
Four signed paperbacks · $59
Iron Vow Society
Study in Scarlett through What the Nothing Holds, individually signed, with an optional personalized inscription.