Nicole Eatough's Blog, page 5

Get to Know: The Hidden Hotel’s Bellhop

The hotel for supernaturals that The Hidden Hotel trilogy takes place in, of course, has several bellhops, but only one of them is important enough to be named in the story: Oliver Emberheart. 

Inspiration

Oliver could be a red-headed cutie . . . instead he’s mostly a punk with a giant chip on his shoulder. Except when he’s talking to hotel guests, of course. He is also, unfortunately for the heroine of this story, Dahlia’s trainer once she arrives at the hotel. 

Not all (or maybe I should say most) of those belonging to the enchanted races are terribly fond of humans, leading to Oliver sharing the popular opinion among his coworkers that their hotel is no place for one. Talk about a rough training experience for Dahlia. 

To his credit, he is dedicated to his job as bellhop, just as most employees of the hotel are. (The ever so charming manager of the hotel, Dante Shadowcaster, would never accept any other kind of employee. But at least he’s equally loyal to anyone who serves the hotel well as opposed to many real world workers who give their best to their company only to be passed over and taken advantage of for it.) 

Oliver can also be pretty adorable once he gets over himself – you just have to hang in there for a while to reach that point. And then he’s totally up for a little workplace gossip ;) 

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Get to Know: The Hidden Hotel’s Brilliant Inventor

We’ve covered some of the managers working within the hidden hotel, so let’s move on to rank and file employees, the backbone of what makes a company (or hotel) function! Today we’re covering the hotel’s adorable and brilliant inventor, Lola Sparkleton. 

Inspiration

You never knew that inventor was an essential job at a hotel did you? All right, I suppose essential is an exaggeration, and her technical job title is engineer rather than inventor, but she HAS invented more than one amenity provided by – and only by – the hotel, and it sure helps with job security. Which is probably a good thing for someone who likes her inventions more than people. 

Sadly, this picture does not fit with my image of the character nearly as well as the ones I found for the hotel manager and front desk manager, but such is life sometimes (and I probably just got lucky before). The actual Lola is super short, with blond hair usually thrown in a messy bun, and an adorable button nose. With glasses. So basically this picture has the ‘cute with glasses’ part right.  

Though Lola would much rather be hidden away in her lab experimenting than talking with people, she is also the most genuinely nice character introduced in these posts so far. She is an exceptionally curious person by nature and is fascinated by human creations, so at least with her, our human heroine of the story might have at least one ally within the hotel ;) 

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Get to Know: The Hidden Hotel’s Front Desk Manager

Last week we covered The Hidden Hotel’s hotel manager, but running a hotel takes more than one manager! So this week we’ll cover the front desk manager: Clara Helena. 

Inspiration

Ever notice how some companies often have beautiful people front and center? It’s not the best statement on our society that this is the case, but often good looking people get a better reaction. (I’ve heard the claim that this is in part an evolutionary bias, because people with nothing overtly wrong with them look healthy and are therefore potentially good pro-creation partners.) There’s also the fact that good looking people attract more people. Hence why models for clothing or makeup look so amazing, to give the message to consumers that you too can look this great, or restaurants and clubs putting the best looking people front and center for the messaging of good looking people frequent our place. Don’t you want to frequent it too? 

That’s kind of a long-winded explanation of saying the front desk manager within The Hidden Hotel, one of the most front and center employees, is one gorgeous lady, but she’s certainly not just a pretty face is also very competent at her job. She truly loves her work and is fully dedicated to it and the hotel. That said, if you’re not a hotel guest, she’s rather likely to be arrogant, prideful, and obnoxious in her interactions with you. Which, of course, applies to the poor heroine of our upcoming story, Dahlia the human. 

She and Clara will not get along, but I do make one promise to you. I hate the trope of the “evil woman” (no idea what it’s officially called if it has a proper title) who wants the main guy, so does underhanded things to try to sabotage the heroine and get the guy for herself. Clara has zero romantic interest in the story’s hero. She’s much more interested in being considered employee of the year, even though that’s not official award within the hotel. 

While perhaps not the most likable of characters, I do hope readers will be at least a little fond of Clara by the end of the trilogy!

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Get to Know: The Hidden Hotel’s Manager

We’re on the countdown for less than two months until the first book of The Hidden Hotel releases! So I figured I would take the next couple weeks to do some character intros. We’ll start off with Dante Shadowcaster, the manager of the hotel. 

Inspiration

The Hidden Hotel, unsurprisingly, mostly takes place within a hotel. And like any other hotel, a hotel for supernaturals requires plenty of employees to keep it running smoothly. One of the most important roles for that is the hotel’s manager. In addition to needing all the same skills and competencies as a human running a hotel, one catering to the supernatural requires that the manager have a certain level of power just in case fights break out between guests of different races who aren’t so fond of each other. 

Luckily for Dante, he’s got power in spades! As well as customer service skills that would put a puppy begging for love to shame. With such a customer service genius around, it begs an important question: Will he find Dahlia’s, our human heroine, customer service skills up to par?

The hotel’s manager is not an easy one to impress. He expects top notch work from all his employees, but if he gets that from you, he’ll be loyal nearly to a fault. (Don’t you just love a boss who will go to bat for their employees?) On the other hand, if you severely let him down . . . you’re a bit screwed. 

I’ll be honest, I ended up loving Dante so much that I’m tempted to give him his own trilogy where he’s the love interest/hero of the story. I can’t wait to find out if you think he deserves his own story! 

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Meet the Enchanted Races . . .

My new urban fantasy world that my latest trilogy, The Hidden Hotel, takes place in contains thirteen different supernatural races, who together call themselves the enchanted races. What all are these different races? Let’s talk about it!   

Inspiration

First off, it took me a while to settle on what the races called themselves. I wanted them to have a vague type of community, with them all being united in keeping themselves hidden from humans (which is just about the only thing they’re united on). I had a couple ideas of what I wanted them to call themselves . . . though I can’t remember any of my other ideas. Sometimes I keep old notes or notes I use while brainstorming for fun or for reference, and sometimes I decided they’re just clutter and chuck them, like I apparently did this time. Regardless, I’m pretty happy with what I settled on with the enchanted races, a world I hope to write several trilogies in. 

As for the races themselves, I spent about a month doing world building for this new urban fantasy world, picking out what races I wanted, what abilities they had, a few facts about their culture, and how the races interact with each other. The thirteen races are a mix of familiar supernatural creatures and ones I made up. Because I like making things up (hence why I am writer, and especially why I write fantasy). So without further ado, let’s go through the thirteen different races!

*Beast Monger*Celestial Guardian*Light Phantom*Shadow PhantomAlchemistWerewolfSirenVampireSpriteNymphShifterPixieSorcerer

I put stars next to the first four races, since those are the ones I made up, and I put my own twist on a lot of the familiar races, though I won’t go into that here, since I think that’s more fun to encounter within the story. Though I am planning to put together little intro videos for each of the races, just for fun, to spotlight each one. 

As for what the hero of The Hidden Hotel is, I’ll keep that to myself for now 😉 

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Writing Mistakes – Wizards vs. Sorcerers

Do you know what’s really important when writing a book? Keeping proper track of the races you’ve included within the world you created. So it is NOT okay for me to write wizard when I should write sorcerer. 

Inspiration

The world I’ve developed for my planned enchanted races trilogies has thirteen different races (I’ll post more on them later), so it’s a pretty rich world. But those thirteen races don’t include wizards. They include sorcerers. Yet while I was editing book two of The Hidden Hotel trilogy, when sorcerers come to visit the hotel for a conference, I realized I’d put wizard in place of sorcerer multiple times. 

This might be a result of the fact that The Genie Whisperer did contain a race of wizards, of a sort, so wizards is what I’m used to typing. Or maybe it’s just that wizards and sorcerers are similar in my mind. And the mind of the software I use to create my graphics, because when I searched for ‘sorcerer’ and then for ‘wizard’ it brought up basically the same images. Though, as I’ve pretty much admitted to, I can’t blame it. 

But I also can’t willy nilly put either wizard or sorcerer within my story, because that’s confusing, and similar does NOT mean interchangeable. I debated just changing the race to be wizards since my mind was apparently struggling so much with sorcerer, but I really liked the tone and feel of sorcerer better for this series. Thankfully, this is an easy mistake to correct because I just need to search for all instances of ‘wizard’ within my story and update it to ‘sorcerer.’ 

I hope you guys are looking forward to seeing what these sorcerers are capable of and what other races populate this new world!

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The Hidden Hotel – Character Names

Since character names are something I often put a fair bit of thought into, I thought it would be fun to post about the names of the main characters in The Hidden Hotel. 

Inspiration

The main character’s name is Dahlia, though she generally goes by the nickname Lia. You floral fans out there will undoubtedly recognize that my latest main character is named after a flower, so you might feel some shades of Garan as you read part of this book, which wasn’t intentional on my part.

My first thought for my heroine’s name was that I wanted it to start with the letter L (which is often how my name searches start out), and then I decided that I wanted her to be named after a flower instead. (I got to do both, thanks to her nickname!) And then her being named Dahlia led to a bit of a flower theme within the trilogy. Garan would be so pleased. 

As mentioned, Dahlia goes by a nickname, which is because I wanted her to be one of those people who insist on being called by their nickname, partly so her love interest could low-key harass her by always insisting that he and everyone else use her full name (which he gets to do since he’s the big boss at the hotel). As I was plotting the story, I realized that her nickname is a reorganization of Ali’s name from The Genie Whisperer. I was both embarrassed and amused by this. I swear there was nothing intentional about it! If her name had just been Lia, I would have changed it after realizing this, but since it’s technically Dahlia, I decided to leave it as it was.  

After deciding to name the main character Dahlia, I wanted to give her foster mom a flower-based name too to give them a connection. While I was filling out the character info in my personal story wiki, I meant to write ‘Peony’ for the foster mom’s name but messed up and put ‘Peona’ instead. Then I decided I liked Peona, and that it was still based off a flower, which was good enough, so I kept it. (As you might have noticed from my Genie Whisperer series, I like using names that are a little unique.) 

Now onto the hero of the story’s name! He is Zavion, though I originally planned to name him Adan (like Adam but with an n instead of an m). I was pretty fond of that, but then ended up naming the hotel The Red Alder after the tree, and Alder and Adan were just too similar. I didn’t want readers to get confused, so I ended up going with Zavion instead, which I ended up being quite pleased with. 

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The Hidden Hotel – Tropes

I think one of readers’ favorite things (myself) included, is encountering beloved tropes in a story, so I figured I’d cover some of the tropes found within The Hidden Hotel trilogy today!

Inspiration

First up is enemies to lovers. The hotel owner allows the main character, Dahlia/Lia, to come to his hotel for supernaturals because of a favor he owes someone, but he is NOT happy about her presence there. Until he starts to fall for her, of course 😉 

And that leads us to our second trope – he falls first. This is one of my favorite tropes, and will likely showcase in the majority of my books . . . which is why I have specifically planned for one of the trilogies in the enchanted races world to be she falls first and another to be they fall together, just to make sure I have a little variety in that area! But the he falls first trope in this trilogy plays out quite fun, because Zavion, the hotel owner, is HORRIBLE at expressing himself, and after he’s been such a jerk to Dahlia, she’s very confused and suspicious when he starts treating her differently. 

Another trope is protective main male lead. This trope is one of my most beloved and might just feature in every story I write. I just feel like it gives such a feeling of the guy cherishing the woman he loves, which I absolutely adore. Though, of course, it’ll be a while before Zavion becomes protective of Dahlia, given his feelings about her being around in the first place. 

The next two tropes are intertwined in this book – amnesia and secrets. Dahlia has no memory of her life before she was ten years old, while Zavion knows some things about her past . . . that he’s not so inclined to share with a human he never wanted to hire in the first place. 

The last trope I’ll cover found in this series is alpha male. Zavion is the big boss of the influential and novel (it’s the only one of its kind) hotel for supernaturals, as well as a powerful figure in his own right. I feel like this trope dovetails nicely with the protective one, because alpha male characters often give off the vibe of being better able and more motivated to protect the people they love, which I’m sure is why I enjoy this trope, though it won’t be as common in my stories as protective main male lead . . . at least, probably not. 

I hope this little sneak peek into The Hidden Hotel has gotten you excited for this trilogy!

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The Hidden Hotel – Origin Story

It’s time to start talking about my next series – The Hidden Hotel. The first book, Whispers of Enchantment, is up for preorder and releases in just three months on September 2! I can’t believe we’re just three months away, but since we’re coming up on the release date, I figured I’d give a little background for how I came up with this series. 

Inspiration

I am a big anime/manga lover, which anyone who’s been following me for a while probably knows, and the initial inspiration for The Hidden Hotel comes from the anime An Ayakashi Bed and Breakfast. The story follows a young woman who can see ayakashi (which often refers to a whole host of non-human races that humans generally can’t see). Thanks to her grandfather wracking up a whole bunch of debt, the main character ends up sold as a bride to an ogre who runs a bed and breakfast for ayakashi. However, rather than submitting to a marriage she didn’t agree to, the main character insists she’ll pay off her grandpa’s debt by revitalizing and running an abandoned restaurant at the back of the bed and breakfast. 

It’s a super cute show, and I loved the idea of creating my own story using a hotel as a sort of gathering space for various supernatural races. I had this idea in the back of my head (and written down in my idea folder so I didn’t forget about it) for a long time with nothing hugely specific about it for a few years. Then came the day when I discovered K. M. Shea’s Magiford Supernatural Cities series, which has multiple trilogies set in the same world that can be read individually and/or in any order.

I thought that idea sounded SO fun. But all of my story ideas were isolated in different worlds. (Fact about me: I’m a very in the box thinker when it comes to problem-solving, unfortunately.) It took me about an entire year before I finally came to the conclusion that, astoundingly, as the author I had the ability to expand the worlds I planned to write in and just include more races inside them. I didn’t HAVE to have a story that just had werewolves or just had vampires or just had some random race with a matriarchal society where I hadn’t figured out any specifics about them other than that yet. I could put them all in the same world. 

After that, I went through my urban fantasy folder and pulled out several story ideas I thought would be fun to have take place in the same world (as well as stealing one idea from my high fantasy folder, because I wanted alchemists and golems). After that was done, I had to figure out where to start things for this project. I had a couple different ideas, but one of my favorites was the hotel, and I decided that if I was going to start there that since this was a new world for readers, I wanted a character who was new to the world to, so made the main character human. And of course, since she’s a human being dropped into the supernatural world, I had to give her an enemies to lovers relationship with the owner of the hotel 😉 

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Genie Whisperer Research

There wasn’t a ton of things I researched for The Genie Whisperer (which is how I like things, because I much prefer making things up to looking them up, hence why I write fantasy), but little things did come up here and there that required research – or that I looked into because I was curious. One of them was when I had Ali use Garan’s magic to grow rainbow flowers in book nine, The Three R’s of Genie Whispering. I wondered if there was such a thing as rainbow flowers, other than the two-toned flowers you sometimes see. The answer was not really . . . unless you artificially create them! 

Inspiration

Once I saw the article for how to artificially dye roses, I had to test it out. It was a lot of fun, and quite pretty, though to get multi-colored roses, you have to split the stem to put each piece of stem into a different tube of dye, which was no easy task. I tried to do two different tri-colored roses, but those only semi-worked out. Still, I liked how they looked overall and dried them after so I could keep them around! 

This next thing I didn’t really research for The Genie Whisperer so much as I learned it once at a museum and it always stuck with me, so I thought it would be fun to include in the series. In book eleven, The Gathering of Enemies, Mynoch recommends that Garan use a poison that prevents people from moving, but not from feeling pain. He then tells a gruesome little story that humans used to use that exact poison for surgery. Which is true. 

I discovered this at a fascinating museum exhibition on poisons of the world and was quite horrified to read that. And baffled. Like, how does something like that happen in the first place? You would think the patients would complain VERY early on about the surgery still hurting. And then I can only imagine that the surgeons refused to believe them, telling them that it was only in their minds or some such thing. Someone should have suggested that the surgeons try it out for themselves to see how much they thought it was in their own minds when they were the ones being operated on. 

Regardless of the horror, if I’d realized I would one day write a book with genies wielding plant abilities, I would have taken more notes at the exhibit, and The Genie Whisperer might have included a bit more poison attacks! Then again, maybe not. 

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