Welcome to Raymond!

To celebrate the completion of the initial draft of "Further than a Neon Sky," let's visit the small town the novel takes place in.

This weekend, I finally finished writing my novel Further than a Neon Sky. It came in at just under 110,000 words, and I already have several notes for things that need to be edited, but overall, I’m actually really happy with it. Plus, it’s the first novel I’ve completely finished (from outline to full draft, not just picking up an already-in-progress work) in years. To celebrate, I want to first, pitch you all the book, but then also let you get to know Raymond, MS, the fictional town that this novel (as well as a handful of others across the Lazy Tequila Afternoons series) takes place in. It’s as full of charm as it is nosy neighbors.

The pitch: Erica Stanton’s life in small-town Raymond is about to be transformed when unexpected opportunities, raw family conflicts, and a mysterious connection with her co-worker Colin force her to confront her past. Can she rebuild her world—and her heart—before it all crumbles?

(Eh, not my best work — but I’ll keep working on that before I’m pitching it for real. The vagueness in the middle doesn’t really grab me the way I want, personally.)

As you can probably imagine by the fact that I’ve nicknamed this novel Emo Coffee Shop, the local coffee shop where Erica and Colin work — El Café — plays a large part in this novel. Not only is it where they meet each other and spend most of their time, but they also make it their personal goal to help save the shop from financial and structural ruin.

One thing about this novel that’s a little different from the other novels in this series is that it’s not set in an actual city that exists (though there is actually a Raymond, MS, so I might need to change the name in edits, but I digress). Normally, the books in the Lazy Tequila Afternoons series have been set in real locations, using real landmarks and points of interest to establish the settings. With this particular book, however, I made up a coffee shop… And then decided to also just go ahead and make up the entire downtown area, too. Once I made that decision, I also realized I had to plan out a lot of the rest of the cute little downtown area as well. And that got me thinking about different ways to share that work with people. Of course, I’d love to have a stylized map as the front pages of the book, but that won’t happen until publication.

It would look a lot better than my quick and dirty iPad sketch, that’s for sure!

So, I came up with / designed a little trifold brochure for the city, highlighting some of the places to see, things to do, and a glimpse into the future of this mostly fictional city.

Trifold travel brochure for Raymond, MS (click the images to see them full-sized and read the text)..

Other points of interest that you might notice listed on the map, but not in the brochure that play a role in the book are the flower shop that Colin lives above and Pizza Den. The festival grounds are off the screen to the right (that’s where a lot of the governmental / official buildings are, not the cute fun ones, so I didn’t draw those), and Erica lives off to the left, on the same street as her best friend, Lindsay. One of the other books in this series, Static Lightning Skies, that also takes place in Raymond heavily features the fabric / quilting shop, the pawn shop, the tattoo parlor, and another off-screen location: a horse ranch.

I know this is a shorter post for this week, but I hope you enjoyed seeing something a little more visual today to go with all the words. Is there anything about Raymond that you’d like to know more about? I’m happy to ramble on about any of these locations in the comments!

For now, I’m off to rest my brain, and my fingers, before jumping into edits for this book (which will be my first official novel publication, coming to you sometime in 2026)!