Nicole Eatough's Blog, page 2

Paperback Woes

Do you see the book spines pictured below? Do you see the immediate problem with them? They’re empty. No author name, no book title, no series name, nothing. Which was NOT what I submitted to Amazon. 

Inspiration

Before the release of The Missing Heir, I ended up taking off a month from writing in a (failed) attempt to do a deep dive into Instragram and understand it better for marketing purposes. This led to me butting up against the deadline much closer than I prefer for getting the paperback books ready for The Missing Heir. And, of course, that was when I ran into a problem I’d never had before. 

The PDF that I submitted to Amazon for the paperback copies had all the spine text that it was supposed to. But the proof copies that I received, as you can see, had nothing. I reached out to the Amazon help desk and was told that it was just a timing issue between when I uploaded my cover and when I ordered the proof copy . . . but then I received another proof copy and there was still nothing on the spine. (Which was slightly panic-inducing by that point.) 

Thankfully, the second time I reached out the held desk was able to diagnose the problem and I got it fixed in time for uploading the paperback to Amazon. This is why I always have to buy proofs of new books, to make sure nothing wonky happens with the cover. 

In far less stress-inducing news, all of the bonus stories for The Missing Heir are now up on my website! 

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Not Inspiration for Trenton . . .

The Missing Heir trilogy has one feature that’s often uncommon for young fantasy leads: Arabella’s parents are in her life. And while I wouldn’t say that Arabella’s parents match mine, it’s potentially possible that her dad may have some things in common with my own. 

Inspiration

I certainly wouldn’t say that my dad was inspiration for Trenton, but he is protective of his daughters. I have an older sister and an older brother, and we grew up being told, “No closed doors if you have a boyfriend or girlfriend over.” This rule was strictly observed for my older sister whenever her boyfriend visited. Then, when my brother got a girlfriend, they were shut up in his room ALL the time. So I told my dad that he couldn’t tell me I couldn’t shut my door if I had a boy over, because, clearly, enforcing that rule had dropped by the wayside. 

His response? “Oh, yes I can. You can tell me that I have a double standard, but yes I can.” To be clear, my dad is an incredible father. I grew up in a home where he almost NEVER yelled at us. It’s only as I’ve grown older and interacted with my nieces and nephews and raised my voice more I wish I had that I’ve realized how amazing that was.

Turning our attention to Trenton and his overprotective ways in The Missing Heir, he spent all of Arabella’s childhood wracked with nightmares about his mother discovering her and stealing her away, which is exactly what she would have done, and which would have left Trenton no options to save his daughter from the supernatural life he wanted to protect her from. Even if he escalated to assassinating his mother to get Arabella way from her (because a frontal assault against your own matriarch would never work), the rest of the Heavens Clan wouldn’t have allowed Ara to leave once they realized how powerful she was. And, as we know from Luca’s visions, she would have ended up dead from them pushing her too fast.

Once Arabella became a teenager, Trenton’s nightmares finally faded . . . but not the lingering fear of something terrible happening to his daughter while he wasn’t around to protect her, hence his intense dislike and protectiveness over her being alone around someone of the opposite sex, because he had no guarantee they wouldn’t try to hurt or take advantage of her.

He was always going to be a protective father, but his fears around his mother and clan kidnapping his daughter took that into extreme realms, especially after he was unable to protect her from joining the supernatural world in the end. 

Eventually he’ll calm down and appreciate Luca as Arabella’s husband. 

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Character Cameos

The funnest part about writing trilogies that take place within the same world? Revisiting previously introduced characters through cameos! And I got to include plenty within The Missing Heir trilogy. 

Inspiration

Given that the first book of The Missing Heir takes place within The Red Alder hotel, which was basically the entire setting for The Hidden Hotel trilogy, there were many opportunities for cameos from our lovely hotel employees. We, of course, had our customer service darlings Oliver (who is newer to the position, but passionate about doing a good job!) and Dahlia helping to make sure the celestial guardian guests enjoyed their stay at the hotel. And the hotel owner and manager, Zavion and Dante, would be remiss if they didn’t pay special attention to the most powerful celestial guardian clan, Heavens. And we even got an appearance from the friendly hotel nymph, Alderon.

Who is only friendly under certain circumstances and rather dangerous under others, as the Andromeda Clan found out the hard way. Honestly, both the Andromeda and Inferno clans are lucky that Alderon held back for the sake of the hotel’s reputation. If he hadn’t factored that into things . . . that night could have ended very differently for them after they threatened the life of his daughter. Dante probably sent them a polite letter recommending they not visit the hotel for a while without an apology (of action not words!) suitable enough for Alderon to deign to allow them near his precious daughter again. 

Book two of The Missing Heir takes place nearly entirely within Heavens Citadel, so it wasn’t possible to fit any cameos in there, but book three had a few more! I loved having Arabella and her guards visit Guinevere (Veer) at her spirit beast sanctuary, and briefly spotlighting Veer’s three beloved spirits beasts, Carl the snake, Savannah the leopard, and Tobias the hawk. (I am SO looking forward to writing antics from those three when I write Veer’s trilogy.) And I got to pull in Cynthia the sorceress and one of her marriage candidates (NOT her love interest) to help a bit with the climax of the book as well.

Cynthia’s book releases this fall and will, of course, have its own cameos from the first two trilogies. I hope you’re looking forward to revisiting the world of the enchanted races again later this year!

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Heaven’s Burden Release

Heaven’s Burden, the second book in The Missing Heir trilogy, is now released! 

Inspiration

I’m sure you’ve realized the immensely common trope within fantasy for stories starring young heroines like Arabella, which I’m going to call the ‘parents aren’t around trope’. For a whole myriad of reasons, the main character’s parents can’t be around to help with anything going on. Their parents are dead or missing, they’re terrible parents to begin with who don’t care, etc.

With the enchanted races trilogies, I really wanted a variety of situations with my main characters, so it was quite fun to write Arabella as a heroine who not only has two great parents who are still alive, but who refuses to run off on this fantasy journey she’s been called to without her parents. She’s only eighteen and wants them by her side helping her, darn it!

It allowed me to have family be a heavy theme in this trilogy in a way that I really enjoyed. And I suppose it was a theme in The Hidden Hotel as well . . . and might end up being a theme in ALL the trilogies 😅 What can I say besides I love the theme of family? I hope readers enjoy that aspect of the stories! 

Before we get on to the summary of the latest book, I wanted to let readers know that because Heaven’s Captive reached (and surpassed!) 25 ratings, the first bonus story for that book has been posted on my website! I’ll post the second as soon as the book reaches 50 ratings. (And I also, of course, have bonus stories planned for books two and three when they reach the 25 and 50 rating milestones!) This first bonus story covers Zoey’s perspective when she was helping Wiley and Luca go dress shopping for Arabella.

As for the summary for Heaven’s Burden:  

Arabella didn’t expect her new life as the Heavens Clan’s leader to be easy—and that was before realizing not all of the clan is willing to accept her mixed blood. She quickly discovers that before she can learn how to wield the power of a matriarch, she’ll have to earn the clan’s loyalty if she wants any hope of successfully leading Heavens against the Abyss. Except when she turns to Luca, the handsome seer who promised to stand by her side, for help, he’s suddenly never around. Has he abandoned her after witnessing the clan’s opposition to her?

Luca, after his failure to protect Arabella from Andromeda and Inferno, is determined not to fail her again. Which means staying away from her to ensure she doesn’t stop his visions with her touch. He can’t afford to gain control of his visions if it means going without them, not when it puts the woman he loves in danger. So he’ll stay away from her and relay his visions through his cousins. No matter how much it hurts him to avoid her.

In the midst of these challenges, the Abyss seems intent on taking Arabella’s life before she gains control of her powers—except mindless entities aren’t supposed to have intents of their own. Before Luca can delve into his visions to determine the cause of this, his visions suddenly vanish. The clan, certain Arabella isn’t up to the task of leading them, blames her for Luca’s apparent lack of visions.

With the clan thrown into panic, can a rejected, human-raised leader and a visionless seer bring them together to fight the Abyss?

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Heaven’s Captive Release

Heaven’s Captive, the first book in The Missing Heir trilogy, is now out in the world! And books two and three will follow shortly on March 17th and March 31st. 

Inspiration

I am an absolute sucker for the he falls first trope. It’s one of the things that gets my attention the most in a book description and will probably feature in at least 95% of my books. Heaven’s Captive is an extreme case of he falls first, since our hero, Luca, has been seeing the heroine, Arabella, in visions since he was about five years old. He fell in love with her (knowing she would one day be his wife) long before ever meeting her in person, and is very protective of the woman he loves. Though he has to remember to keep all that in check since he’s brand new to Arabella. 

As a lovely bonus for all those who enjoyed The Hidden Hotel trilogy, book one of The Missing Heir largely takes place at The Red Alder hotel, so you get several character cameos from that series! 

Now, without further ado, here is the summary for my latest book, Heaven’s Captive:  

Arabella has her life following high school all planned out. Supernatural beings kidnapping her to be their leader wasn’t supposed to be part of that plan.

Luca, seer of the Heavens Clan, has known Arabella would be the future leader of his clan—and his wife—since he was five years old. He’s spent nearly fifteen years catching glimpses of her living her life as a human, ignorant of the enchanted races. And now that it’s finally time for her to take her rightful place, his visions have revealed something new. In order to keep her safe, Heavens must allow another clan to steal her away first.

Arabella is on her way to work as a counselor at the camp she loved growing up, eager to help young kids find themselves. Instead she finds herself kidnapped by people claiming they’re supernatural beings and she’s meant to be their leader. The worst part? Her parents aren’t expecting her home all summer and have no idea she’s missing.

Dragged to some annual clan meeting between celestial guardians, the race her kidnappers claim they’re from, her every move is watched to prevent her from escaping. But there’s also the Heavens Clan, who she’s warned is unhinged from being leaderless for so long, who she swears is watching her too. Especially their supposed seer. Could they be her saviors? Or would trusting them put her in even greater danger?

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Finding Stories a Home

I’ve mentioned this before, but when I decided I wanted to create a world that I could write multiple stories in, it was a wonderful opportunity to look through my urban fantasy story ideas folder and pick out all the stories that I felt would fit into this new world. One of those stories ideas was what morphed into The Missing Heir trilogy.    

Inspiration

My basic ideas for the story remained unchanged. My early notes included a supernatural race split into groups led by powerful women, a somewhat unhinged group who’d been missing a leader for several years because no one around had the power to take over, a seer who predicted who the next leader would be, and this leader being taken by a different group before ending up with the one she really belonged with. And even that this group ended up allied with a powerful group with ice themed powers.

But plenty of things had to be fleshed out, like what race these people were, why they were led by women, and the history for how the main clan ended up as it did. I ended up creating a brand new race for this trilogy, which was a lot of fun, and I love the plot that developed because of my creation of the celestial guardians.  

The biggest change from my original notes is that I had the heroine coming from foster care due to her parents being killed in a car accident when she was younger. But that would have been repetitive right after Dahlia’s story, with her also coming from foster care, which I’m quite grateful for! Arabella’s dynamic with her family adds so much to The Missing Heir trilogy, and it’s a much richer story for their presence. Also, I maybe enjoyed the whole ‘they don’t know their true history because they come from foster care’ trope too much when I was younger 😅

We have plenty more characters with missing parents coming up in the world of the enchanted races, but I promise that none of them are in foster care! And most of them are already aware of the supernatural world after The Missing Heir. 

I know that I will never be able to write books for all the story ideas I have tucked away in folders, but I’m grateful that my decision to create the world of the enchanted races made it so this story got to be told! 

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Fantasy Office: Dragon Plaques

Given that I write fantasy, it seems only fitting that I have fantasy-esque decorations in my office, and what’s more fantasy than dragons? 

Inspiration

Dragons are my absolute favorite mythical animal, so when I found this gorgeous plaque back as a teenager, I had to buy it. And I found it in a Montana souvenir shop of all places, where most of the items were rustic-focused, as one would expect from such a souvenir store. And then I made it a tradition to get a new dragon plaque every year I returned, until I had six. 

Not that I would have stopped at six, but then they stopped selling them, focusing on plaques with more appropriate images for the kind of shop it was, like eagles and bears. Which are lovely, but not what I was going for, so that was the end of my plaque-collecting.

Despite my love of dragons, they have yet to appear in any of my stories. I do have a dragon shifter high fantasy story that I hope to write to someday – but I have literally dozens of story ideas sitting around in folders, so who knows what will actually get written from there? Which is partly why I’m pleased that a dragon, in a round about way, will be found within the enchanted races world! 

In fact, he’ll be a very important character. He’ll first appear in the vampire trilogy, though it’s difficult for me to say how large of a role he’ll play since I haven’t done any formal plotting for that story yet. Right now it’s just a Word document with a random collection of ideas I’ll have to sort through when the times comes to write that trilogy. Then he’ll appear again in the next trilogy – Veer’s story, focusing on the beast mongers.  

Then maybe he’ll get his very own story . . . 

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Character Inspiration: Luca

It’s not often that I can point to something specific and say, “This thing inspired this character.” But Luca, the love interest in my upcoming Missing Heir trilogy, is one of the few times where something I encountered sparked the idea for a very particular kind of character I wanted to write.  

Inspiration

Years ago, I read the adorable middle grade trilogy The Blackwell Pages. It’s a story about the descendants of the Norse gods and the roles they must play in the upcoming Ragnarok, the prophesied end of the world. It’s got kind of a Percy Jackson vibe, except with more of a family element to it (found family, adopted family, extended family, etc.) and is so fun. 

One of the characters I adored in this trilogy was Odin’s stand in for Ragnarok, who had Odin’s ability to see the future. He’s only a teen (as all the main characters are), and he struggles to make sense of what’s already happened from his visions and what has yet to happen. And he is a sweetheart.   

Since the story is middle grade, romance isn’t emphasized in the trilogy, but after reading about this character, I loved the idea of a love interest who struggled to keep track of where he was at in his relationship with the woman he’s in love with because of having visions of the future and knowing how close he and the woman he loved would be – eventually. So, the idea of Luca the seer was born and put inside a Word document for a story idea it’s taken me many years to finally get to. (So thank goodness for the world of the enchanted races, where I was finally able to give this story a home!) 

Luca, with his struggles to keep track of where reality is at in relation to all his visions, was a lot of fun to write. And at times writing him gave me call backs to writing Garan from my Genie Whisperer series, who also struggled to keep track of the world around him for several books. Though Garan’s problem was more that he lived inside his own mind most of the time rather than his mind being stuck half in the future, like with Luca. 

I hope that readers will enjoy Luca and his struggles with picking out just where the heck he’s at in his relationship with Arabella at any given point! 

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The Heavens Clan

We are now less than TWO months out until the release of the first book in The Missing Heir trilogy! So I decided to talk about a central feature of this trilogy: the Heavens Clan. 

Inspiration

The Heavens Clan was introduced in the first book of The Hidden Hotel trilogy as the celestial guardian clan who’s been without a matriarch for going on about a decade. And that they’re a little unhinged because of it. Whether or not they are is up to readers to decide, but you’ve seen that Luca, the seer love interest, can be a little out of things, which is thanks to his visions. 

The Heavens Clan is the most powerful of all the celestial guardian clans (for reasons that will be revealed in the upcoming trilogy), though they’ve obviously fallen on hard times not having a matriarch, since matriarchs are the conduit between the power of the stars and the rest of the clan. And a lack of a matriarch is enough to make any clan desperate . . . Including desperate enough to kidnap the poor soul who’s capable of becoming leader of their clan. And no isn’t really an acceptable answer.   

But, hey, who wouldn’t want to become leader of a group of super powered beings who help save the world and live in an isolated stone citadel that looks like a castle? Not to mention the fancy dresses. Do you remember that from the celestial guardian conference in The Hidden Hotel? SO many fancy dresses. There is the small fact that the celestial guardians don’t really look any more favorably upon humans than any of the other enchanted races, and our heroine most certainly has human blood, but no situation is perfect. 

And at least the clan seer is on her side, since he’s already in love with her before ever meeting her in person. Which might be a little awkward on our heroine’s end, but support is support! 

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What’s Coming?

Happy New Year!!! Given that it’s the very beginning of 2025, it seemed appropriate to talk about my writing plans for the year. 

Inspiration

Up first, of course, will be The Missing Heir, the trilogy focusing on the celestial guardian clan Heavens, who has been without a matriarch for about a decade. Which is rather a problem when matriarchs are primarily how clans get their power and the celestial guardians serve an essential purpose with fighting off a force that would decimate all life on Earth if it could. This first trilogy will release in March (which feels like it’s almost here already!).

The next trilogy releasing near the end of 2025 has already been named: The Burden of Royals. It’s Cynthia the sorceress’s story, focusing on her needing to choose who to marry among her marriage candidates (and, of course, the one she actually wants to marry isn’t interested in her), as well as political drama over some sorcerers very much NOT appreciating the direction Cynthia wants to take things with working more equally with the other races.    

I’ve already started plotting out the trilogy and am really excited for some of the ways this series will differ from the other two (Hidden Hotel and Missing Heir). One big way it will be different is Cynthia’s relationship with her dad. It’s a common trope in fantasy for the main character to either have missing parents, terrible parents, or something else along those lines. Dahlia, of course, fell into the first category. I won’t say anything about Arabella’s situation, the heroine of The Missing Heir, of course, but you already know from the description of the first book that her parents are in her life and that she’s (kind of) a human who is completely ignorant of the enchanted races. 

But Cynthia was not only raised within the enchanted races, but was raised to one day lead the sorcerers, and has been helping her dad do just that since her mom passed away. It’s led to them very much having a relationship that’s a partnership where they completely trust each other, which is quite fun to play with. 

I’ll also be working on some projects for 2026 this year, but what, exactly, I’ll be writing is a little more complicated. I’ll be working on the fourth trilogy set in the enchanted races for sure (focusing on the vampire conflict over their prophesied leader!) but I also want to start a series that takes place in a brand new world . . . However, I’ll be polling my newsletter after the release of The Missing Heir to get their thoughts on whether they’re intrigued enough by the synopsis I wrote to have me write this new story for 2026 or if they’d prefer I just focus on the enchanted races to get those trilogies out faster. 

I hope 2025 is off to a great start for you!

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