The Mourning Season

Gothic Romance · Moderate heat · 26 chapters + epilogue · 85K novel · Dual 1st person

Complete planning package, 180 pages: the premise, a full codex, every chapter outlined, an AI prompt for every chapter, and the whole launch kit — listing, blurb, keywords, posts, newsletter, reader magnet — already written. One buyer only. When it’s claimed, it’s gone.

Cecily Vane is the person you call when a life needs closing down. Estate lawyer, executor of other people's endings. When her estranged husband Edmund dies and the solicitor needs someone to administer his remote Scottish island estate, she is the obvious person — and she accepts with characteristic efficiency and does not examine why.

Then she arrives at Ashmore House on a remote Scottish island and finds a life she doesn't recognise.

The rooms are too specifically Edmund's — books worn from use, a reading chair with the concavity of someone who sat there often and expected to come back. A locked room on the second floor falls, the solicitor insists, outside the scope of the will. The property manager, Fraser Doig — nine years on the island, clearly knew Edmund in some dimension she didn't — is measuring exactly how much she already knows before he decides what to say.

Before she can close the estate and leave: a walled garden where Edmund planted climbing roses and never told her; island residents who describe a man she finds plausible and wholly unfamiliar; a retired minister who says, precisely, I hope you find what you're looking for in the house; a key envelope in Edmund's handwriting at the back of a filing drawer; and an afternoon on the estate boundary with Fraser in a silence neither of them moves to fill, where he offers her his hand at a wall gap and does not make a thing of it.

She's spent six years composing herself at the expense of wanting things, grieving a version of Edmund the island is quietly disassembling. He's spent nine years being the person who keeps everything running without being the person anyone asks about — until someone arrived who hasn't yet decided to look away.

Gothic romance with a locked room, a slow burn across four weeks of late-autumn island proximity, and a heroine who is fifty-two and utterly, unapologetically herself. The kind of book you finish slightly wrecked because you didn't expect to feel quite that much.

WHAT’S INSIDE THIS PACKAGE

⭐️ Story Premise — high-concept pitch, elevator pitch, and Market-Matched™ validation with dual-category Gothic × Later in Life positioning, competitive analysis, and series potential for 3 future Calder Isle books

⭐️ Complete Codex — full story bible with main characters (Cecily and Fraser at full psychological depth), supporting cast of 5, Calder Isle island setting and Ashmore House estate with full sensory profiles for 6 distinct locations, chapter-by-chapter timeline across four weeks in late October–November, dual first-person voice system with four distinct example passages each for Cecily (precise, dry, legally-inflected) and Fraser (observational, practical, sensory), Low-Medium intimacy guidance with Dial the Heat™ scene flags, and series seeds for 3 future Calder Isle books

⭐️ Chapter-by-Chapter Outline — 26 chapters + epilogue with emotional beats, word count targets, 3–4 scenes per chapter, key dialogue, chapter-specific sensory details, and ending hooks; last-third as detailed as chapter one

⭐️ AI-Ready Chapter Prompts — one complete, self-contained writing prompt per chapter and epilogue (27 total) with POV, scene, emotional beat, character voice guidance, key dialogue, sensory anchors, and ending hook; each prompt works in a fresh chat with zero prior context — Amazon listing with KDP categories and 7 keywords, back cover copy, 50-word short description, Instagram post and story slides, Facebook post, newsletter announcement with 3 subject lines, reader magnet concepts, comp author targeting, and Ideogram cover prompt calibrated to Gothic Romance category conventions