Hi, I’m Mara and I write stories about...
Chasing Lightning ⚡️ Festival Nights 🌌 Crocodile Tattoos 🐊 Paperback Auguries 📖 Reconciliation ❤️🔥 Art & Ambition 🖼️ Deserts & Bayous 🏜️ Wild Roadtrips 🛣️ Airstream Courtships 🛻 Prophetic Playlists 🎶 Backstage Chaos 🎤
Chasing Lightning ⚡️ Festival Nights 🌌 Crocodile Tattoos 🐊 Paperback Auguries 📖 Reconciliation ❤️🔥 Art & Ambition 🖼️ Deserts & Bayous 🏜️ Wild Roadtrips 🛣️ Airstream Courtships 🛻 Prophetic Playlists 🎶 Backstage Chaos 🎤
In my 20’s I was a musician and songwriter in New York City, living for musical collaborations, grimy green rooms, and fleeting creative moments. After I lost a close friend from that era, I found myself tumbling back into those luminous years. I wrote The Makers Series using lots of true stories (names were changed of course) to honor the people, the music, and a very particular New York City ethos.
I’m a writer, therapist, doula, researcher, and educator. I live just outside New Haven with my three children, two cats, two guinea pigs, one loyal dog, and one brilliant and hilarious husband. Our house is full of dance parties and distinctly lacking in organized sports, which feels like the right kind of balance. Even after 30 years, people still tell me I look like “the bad witch from The Craft,” which I choose to receive as the highest of compliments.
My debut novel, Strike A Chord, is the first in The Makers Series, a collection of interconnected novels that explore how women make meaning through art, love, and the people they collide with. This story has been inside me for years, stitched together from memory, imagination, and a heavy helping of nostalgia.
Thanks for being here.
Nice to Meet You…
Strike A Chord : Tessa and Spencer
Tessa Vaughn is a burned-out songwriter and former wild child on the edge of freedom from a contract that has delivered nothing but chaos. She’s played the part for long enough and is ready to step out of the spotlight when a chance encounter with Spencer Trask, the magnetic lead singer of Wolves By Week, threatens to expose her carefully curated persona. What begins as a chance meeting ignites a slow-burn, road-trip romance that unfolds across festival stages, long drives, and the quiet spaces between songs. Creative chemistry turns personal, and emotional risk becomes more appealing than either of them has ever expected. Tessa must decide whether Spencer’s just another detour…or the unexpected reason she finds her way back to herself.
💘 Instalove 🎸 Rockstar Romance 🚐 Road Trip Romance 🤍 Found Family 🧠🔥 Boy Genius × Wild Child 🛏️ Only One Bed (the Airstream) 🗣️ Misunderstanding 💪 Rolling Up Sleeves = Forearm Porn 🎓 Slutty Little Glasses 🐊 Secret Tattoos 🌶️🌶️🌶️ : Slow-burn sensuality, emotionally charged intimacy
💘 Instalove 🎸 Rockstar Romance 🚐 Road Trip Romance 🤍 Found Family 🧠🔥 Boy Genius × Wild Child 🛏️ Only One Bed (the Airstream) 🗣️ Misunderstanding 💪 Rolling Up Sleeves = Forearm Porn 🎓 Slutty Little Glasses 🐊 Secret Tattoos 🌶️🌶️🌶️ : Slow-burn sensuality, emotionally charged intimacy
Just Vibes
Explore a curated collection of audio moments—from interviews to soundscapes—designed to inform, inspire, and engage. Whether you're here to learn, reflect, or just enjoy, our audio selections offer something for every listener.
Other Projects: Makers Universe
More Than a Concept
Bee & Calvin:Book Three
Beena Varma-D’Alba has built her life on intellect, ambition, and always being the smartest person in the room. Enter Calvin Shaw, a sharp-tongued distiller with an infuriatingly steady presence, refuses to fit into any framework she understands. Over years of sharp banter and quiet longing, their clashing worldviews turn into something neither can ignore. Some ideas are beautiful in theory but love asks for the real thing.
Mila Sepúlveda lives among immaculate spaces and inherited legacy, while Kit Reeves believes art should be wild, loud, and impossible to contain. When their collision sparks something electric, ambition and distance test whether desire can survive between restraint and chaos. To build something real, they may have to stop curating their lives—and choose to be seen in full color.
Everything in Color
Mila & Kit: Book Two
Cecily Grovestein knows how to nourish everyone but herself, and Elliott Song knows how to manage everything except his own heart. Forced into close quarters during lockdown, irritation softens into longing, and longing into something tender and unexpected. When the world opens again, they must decide if the comfort they found was only temporary or the beginning of forever.
Elsie Winslow feels safest behind the structure of her art, directing from the shadows where nothing asks too much of her…until a new play and its magnetic playwright, Simone Grant, draw her into something far more personal. As their creative partnership deepens, quiet moments turn into undeniable intimacy. Sometimes love doesn’t arrive loudly and you have to step forward and claim it.