Something has changed (and it’s not just a new book).

The world gotten so noisy, hasn’t it? The kind of noisy that when you’re standing in the middle of it you can’t find your car keys because you can’t even begin to think where you saw them last.

Everyone has a microphone. People that should have one, people that shouldn’t, and everything in between. Free-ish speech abounds, the hope to be heard thrumming like a freight train through it all.

Good for you, I think.

Good for everyone.

Hope is a thing with a microphone, as it were.

My dad would laugh at me right about now.

“You’re one to talk,” he’d say, the double meaning intact. I’ve lived my life using my voice: comforting, teaching, dare I say inspiring, annoying, connecting. I’ve chatted and chatted even when I had very little of substance to impart other than,

“You know what I love? I love those super cheap, waxy chocolate covered cherries. I could eat a box in one evening and then be sick for three days. Man, I love them.”

But something’s changed.

Now, the louder the world gets the less I want to talk about anything: chocolate covered cherries, hybrid cars, or the state of the union. I haven’t lost the joy of the chat, etc., etc., but whenever I think about adding my voice to the cacophony I find my energy for the broadcast is no longer present.

Look, I’m not saying I don’t want to take a stand, volunteer, vote, save the world. I do. What I am saying is that while so many others have taken to the internet like Paul Revere did to his horse, with Hear ye! Hear ye! I do not want to mount anything. Side note: This is not about my libido. I’m happy to mount a little bit.

What’s going on? If I were to try and explain it, I would posit that it is due to a life-long dislike of competition, probably rooted in a certainty that I will come in last if it just so happens that I’m standing on a starting line when a gun goes off.

Envisioning this now brings to mind my high school track coach basically begging me to quick track because I was so slow and what was I thinking anyway?

My pick me energy is really f’n low right now. My get up and pick me has got up and went.

All of this is to say that I think this is why I haven’t written in quite a while.

I have been writing though.

I finished my book. It will launch Aug. 11, 2026.

It’s called Tell Two Friends and it’s about a woman who wrote to an incarcerated man when she was in college, just because she thought it was a nice thing to do and twenty-five years later, unbeknownst to her, he moves in next door and is watching her every move.

I like to say: A physics professor, a feminist teen and a serial killer walk into an Ann Garvin book. If you don’t know who Ann Garvin is, this isn’t a great descriptor.

It’s about a woman with no Ninja skills (like me and maybe you) who is just trying to keep fruit in the house, must save the day and live to tell the tale. Will she? Won’t she?

It’s a funny and sad psychological thriller about a woman learning to trust herself in a world designed to make her doubt everything. The book explores how society punishes women for speaking uncomfortable truths, how ordinary people can miss evil in plain sight, and how the qualities that make someone “regular”: empathy, second chances, seeing the best in people, can be both vulnerability and strength.

Hmmmm….maybe this is why I haven’t written for a while. I’ve been busy trying to figure out how and what to say. That could be it. I guess there’s hope for me after all.

I don’t have a link or cover to share but keep an eye here or here or here if you’re interested. I’ll have new gossip soon.

XO Ann