Nicole Eatough's Blog, page 9

Blessings in Disguise: Ali Getting Impaled

As basically every on Earth is aware, life is hard. There are so many difficult things in it and there can be so many moments where we question: Why is this happening? Why do I have to go through this? But every once in a while, something happens that seems negative at the time then something positive results from it. Otherwise known as blessings in disguise. 

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I love when we can see blessings in disguise in our lives. Like when my cousin was performing service in Canada, and decided to extend her time there by a few weeks. During those few weeks, our grandma passed away. It would be easy for her to ask why this happened while she was doing something good, or why she didn’t have a feeling she shouldn’t extend her time there so she could have seen our grandma one last time. But she met her husband (an absolutely wonderful man) on her flight home, which wouldn’t have happened if she’d come home earlier.

Having those moments can sometimes make difficult things seem a little brighter with hindsight, so I wanted to include moments like that in my books. A have a couple of them in The Genie Whisperer (some still to come). A huge one is Ali getting impaled within the Archives. 

Obviously, in the moment that is an absolutely terrible thing. Ali trusted Garan to protect her, and because he wasn’t paying enough attention, she got stabbed through the stomach. Which is pretty traumatic. But the ultimate result? Garan decided to abandon centuries of hiding within his own mind to live in the present so he could protect and be with Ali. That’s a pretty positive ultimate outcome. (Especially when you have a universal genie around who can heal your injury within less than a day of it happening.)

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The Stolen Truth Release!

Book eight of The Genie Whisperer, The Stolen Truth, released this past Monday! As fun as book seven was to write (I particularly enjoyed Illan and Garan annoying each other, as well as Rajan’s and Ali’s scenes together), I was super excited to focus more on Darios in this book.

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The international travel from the previous book continues in The Stolen Truth. For book eight, I did a little more research into the locations where I planned to send my characters, which made me once again glad I use a private browser. I started using it because I was a little worried some of my searches might look suspicious (such as when I researched museum security when introducing Rajan. Fun fact: the smoke protection thing I have appear in book one is a real thing! But more used in jewelry stores, with the idea being that if a thief can’t see the jewels, they’ll panic and just leave).

I was glad for my private browser in this case because it meant the internet didn’t decide I was going on a vacation and start trying to push that on me. Though I did look up some lovely places when researching . . . Too bad Ali and the genies don’t get to go to those spots 😉

I hope readers are enjoying (or maybe hating is a better word here?) the new villains in this season. I imagine the villains are familiar, yet not. They’re a group that’s already been introduced in that they’re genie wizards, yet not familiar since they’re not affiliated with The Society. It was fun to step away from that organization for a while and show readers that not all wizards bow down to The Society . . . but that doesn’t mean they’re much better. Arguably, just more extreme.

Another fun fact is that The Stole Truth contains one of my favorite lines from the series so far, and Ali gets to say it. Though it’s not so much what she says as the context around her saying it that makes me love it so much 😊

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Writing Mistakes: Writing Down Ideas!

Like my last post about writing mistakes, this mistake isn’t a traditional writing mistake, because it’s not something going wrong with actually writing a story, but it’s still a mistake related to writing. And because I made this mistake once, I write down every idea I have for stories. Every. Last. One. 

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Once upon a time, years ago, I was working at a job generating test results letting patients know their hereditary predisposition for cancer (pretty cool stuff, but since I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was eight years old, stories have always been running around in the back of my mind), and I had an interesting idea for a story. It was a concept I’d never heard of before and thought it would be pretty fun – but I also thought I would still remember it by the time I got home, so didn’t bother writing it down. 

What did I remember about this fun idea by the time I got home and went to my laptop to type it out? Dino-human hybrids. That’s it. That’s all I could remember. I SWEAR it was a great idea! But I can’t remember anything beyond that, and that idea alone is not enough for a story. 

After this, I was a bit traumatized about forgetting story ideas, which is why I now write down everything. If I’ve already gone to bed, I text myself or use a notes app. If I’m out and about, I do the same thing (or have a relative text me the idea if I’m out with them and don’t have my phone). And back when I still worked in an office outside my home, I would email myself any ideas I had. 

And in case you’re wondering, I do have a document in my ‘Story Ideas’ folder with a single line about dino-human hybrids, just in case I remember the rest of the idea I had all those years ago. 

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The Lost Libraries Release!

Book seven of The Genie Whisperer, The Lost Libraries, released this past Monday! I’m so excited for the release of Season Three (books seven and eight). It’s only been three months since the release of book six, but it feels like I’ve been waiting ages for this. 

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The last season of The Genie Whisperer (books four and five) took place nearly entirely in the Archives. In a way, Ali and the genies varied their location since they bounced from pocket dimension to pocket dimension, but all of it still technically took place within one location. That made things extra fun for writing The Lost Libraries where Ali and the genies go international!

This time, rather than surviving whatever the Archives throws at them, the theme is hunting down ancient lost libraries in an attempt to find the missing history of how The Society came to be. This, of course, requires the heroes of The Genie Whisperer to travel to multiple countries in search of these lost libraries and their missing contents.

I feel like like the word missing in regard to anything historical (such as missing libraries) leads to such a sense of mystery. Or maybe that’s just because I’m a bit of a history dork. That also meant I enjoyed doing a bit of research into these lost libraries! I started at this handy Listverse website that lists ten lost libraries. I only ended up using one from the list, partially since not all of them fit within the timeline I needed, but it was a great place to start, and fun to learn about the others. 

Another fun aspect of writing this season was coming up with the villains. I’ve known for a long time that these two books would entail Ali and the others searching for The Society’s lost history, but that alone wasn’t enough to make up a story. I needed bad guys to up the tension and to be part of the climax. I debated between several potential options before settling on who I chose. 

The only thing that makes me sad is that I almost foreshadowed these villains in book one, The Glittering Gems. But I didn’t know at the time if I would ever include them in the actual story, and it felt like dumping too much world building on the reader at once, so I took it out. But at least they were still on my mind for me to whip out here!

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Writing Mistakes: Numbering Books

Okay, so the mistake I’m covering in this post isn’t technically a writing mistake, but it still affected The Genie Whisperer, so I thought it was worth mentioning! And this mistake has to do with the print copies of my book. Can you spot the issue below with the paperback copies of The Doorway of Possibilities and The Doorway to the Future? 

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For the paperback copies of my books, the book number is listed on the spine so it’s easy to line them up in order. When I created the paperback for the Season Two books, The Doorway of Possibilities and The Doorway to the Future, I accidentally listed them as books three and four rather than four and five, like they actually are. I think it’s because I only had books one and two on my shelf since I was waiting to order book three until I could order four and five with it to reduce how much I spent on shipping. 

The result was that I looked at books one and two on my shelf, and my silly (or maybe tired) brain decided that meant I was obviously creating the paperback covers for the next two books in the series, while completely forgetting that book three already existed. (To be clear about the creation of my book covers, I don’t create the main cover. A cover artist takes care of the ebook cover, then provides me with the image for me to create the paperback cover with it.) 

Thankfully, Amazon lets authors order proof copies of books so we can make sure everything looks as it should with the cover. And as I was staring at my books on my shelf one day (which contained the final copies of books one and two and the proof copies of books three and four), I thought, ‘Wait, haven’t I written five books?’ 

It was a major face palm moment, but at least I realized the mistake before books four and five were released and got it updated in time! And now that I’ve made this mistake once, I take extra care when typing the book number on my paperback designs to make sure I don’t do it again. 

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Writing Mistakes: Genies Being Invisible

In the world that I’ve created for The Genie Whisperer series, genies are, by default, invisible to all humans except for their master. If they want to be seen by other humans, they have to actively choose to be visible, though their masters can force them to remain invisible or to be visible. And it took me until all of book four before I already forgot that. 

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I decided early on in the world building phase of my writing that genies would be invisible by default. After all, genie masters love to cart their genies around with them every where they go, and it wouldn’t make sense for regular people to see them, since their existence is supposed to be a secret. Genies wouldn’t be able to hide from their current master or from wizards in this world, but all other humans would only see the genie if either the genie or master wanted them to and made it so. 

But when I was writing book four, The Doorway of Possibilities, my head was a little scrambled, and I think I decided that all Society members could see genies . . . which makes no sense at all. But that’s what I wrote (and what needed to happen) when the Overseer Society members from the Wilde and Sutton families see Ali’s genies in the Archives, and then decide to go after them. 

Thankfully, around this same time I decided to reread the first three books in the series to remind myself of everything that had already happened and to make sure I wasn’t missing anything important. In doing this, I realized the mistake I’d made with the Overseers seeing Ali’s genies, but had the problem that they needed to see them, since the climax of book five, The Doorway to the Future, revolves around The Society trying to take Ali’s genies back. 

Continuity mistakes aren’t always easy to work out, but this time I had a simple solution! I made it so that the Archives don’t let genies hide, and I’d given the Archives mysterious enough powers that I was able to do that without it seeming silly. 

I don’t know if I’ll catch all the mistakes like that, since there’s bound to be something that slips my notice in a series of fourteen books, but I’m grateful I caught this one!

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Writing Mistakes: Genie Names

I love that genie names are something special in my world, that a genie revealing their name to a human is something significant. But there is a difficulty with having genies’ real names be super special and secret, and that is me remembering not to reveal them before they’ve actually been revealed.

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Thank goodness for beta readers and editors in the world of writing, because I have definitely listed the genies’ real names more than once before I should have. I struggled with Rajan and Ocean in particular with accidentally putting their real names in the text when they’re first introduced. Rajan’s name is revealed fairly quickly after his introduction, but readers still don’t know Ocean’s real name (and won’t for a while). 

I’m pleased to say I haven’t struggled with revealing Light’s real name near as much! But for a reason that’s kind of cheating. It’s because it took the longest for me to settle on what I wanted his name to be. There were a couple different ideas I wavered between, but it’s easy not to call him anything other than Light when even I’m not sure what else he might be called. 

And even when a genie’s name is revealed, that doesn’t mean I don’t have to still worry about making mistakes. Like with Shadow/Darios. Whenever I’m writing about him, I have to keep in mind whose perspective I’m writing from and who’s talking. Some of the genies openly use Darios’s name, since Ali already knows it, but some are more respectful and still call him Shadow, since he hasn’t given Ali permission to use his name. And Ali still thinks of him as Shadow and calls him that. 

Ali herself is also a bit of a struggle. Garan always calls her Lady Flora, while Illan refers to her as Miss Ali, and Ocean calls her Master. Then there’s Darios and Light who call her human. I have to make sure no one uses her name who shouldn’t. Rajan is easier, with switching between Girlie and Ali, depending on how he feels, and Tavor switching between Ali and Kitten.

I don’t think a mistake with names has been published yet, thanks to my wonderful helpers. Here’s to hoping that holds until the end of the series!

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Writing Mistakes: People Don’t Title Their Heads!

Fun fact! People don’t title their heads. They tilt them. But do I write that people title their heads? Yes, yes I do. 

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Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but people tilt their heads in my books a lot. When they’re confused. When they’re trying to understand something. When they’re threatening someone. It’s a very versatile gesture, in my opinion. But the words tilted and titled are very, very similar (there’s only one letter difference, after all), so it’s easy for me to mis-type it. Since I know this about myself, I try to make sure that every time I write tilted I double-check that I actually wrote the word I meant to. 

When I’m really smart, after a whole book is written and edited, I use control + F to see if any of those pesky head titles snuck in there. Though I was rereading a series I enjoy recently and caught a character who titled rather than tilted their head, so I know I’m not the only one who struggles with it! 

I also often type the word from as form by mistake, but visually they look quite different, so that’s easy to catch, whereas tilted and titled have a bunch of straight lines all in a row, making that mistake more difficult to notice. 

 Lightning versus lightening is yet another one I struggle with, though I suspect that one is because once upon a time I might have that the bright light streaking down from the sky was spelled the second way – but it’s not. That refers to making something lighter, like mixing a deep blue paint with white to lighten it into a pale blue.

Now you might be wondering: why is my lightning mistake relevant to this post? That’s because lightning will be coming up in The Genie Whisperer! Though not until book ten, so it’s still a ways away. But I promise, it’ll be a whole lot of fun when it arrives. 

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Foreshadowing: The Archives

I adore foreshadowing in books. I feel a series is so much richer if you can reread the series and catch things you didn’t notice before, because you didn’t know what was coming when you read it the first time. With that love of mine, I knew I had to include foreshadowing in The Genie Whisperer. 

One of the first instances of foreshadowing occurs in book three, The Three C’s of Genie Whispering. There’s actually multiple foreshadows in that book, but it’s the reference to the Archives that becomes directly relevant in the next book, since the Archives is the setting where the majority of books four and five occurs. 

Inspiration

With the Archives being such a huge part of two books, as well as, arguably, being an antagonist, I thought it would be fun to bring it up before it appears, so it has two separate references in book three.

The first comes from Maurice, the aide to the heir of the Voltaire family, who is an upper echelon family within The Society similar to the McMichaels. He went there searching in the Archives for whether there is a record of wizards stealing genies, and instead found an outlawed spell that takes away genies’ inhibitions and makes things go wonky with their magic.

The second reference comes from Illan, when he suggests the Archives would be the best place to search for whether freedom is possible for genies. Tavor shoots this down, because they can’t get into the Archives without Darios’s help, which he isn’t willing to risk until he’s exhausted his other resources. And that happens at the beginning of book four, The Doorway of Possibilities, when Tavor is forced to admit that if they want to move forward in his goals, they have to go to the Archives. 

The other two foreshadows in book three both revolve around Maurice. One is discovering that the genie wizard Ren wants to work for the Voltaire family to save himself from the same fate as the rest of the McMichael employees. This has now played out in book six, The Three B’s of Genie Whispering, where Ren finds himself an employee of the Voltaire heir, though not quite under the circumstances he’d hoped for. The other foreshadow is the Voltaire family. Because what would be the point of introducing another upper echelon Society family if they weren’t going to become important?

In the coming books, there will be many more foreshadows. I hope readers enjoy picking them out!

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Reverse Harem Research: Haruka: Beyond the Stream of Time

Haruka: Beyond the Stream of Time is another reverse harem manga series I studied to pick out repeated themes and tropes of the reverse harem genre. In this series, a young woman from our time is thrown into the past, where she discovers she is the priestess of a dragon god, and is tasked with saving the capital of Japan by gathering the eight guardians (who are, of course, all handsome young men). 

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As is often the case, my collection of books within the series is a bit of a hodgepodge. Some copies I found brand new, whereas others were discarded library copies. Which, if you don’t know, can be a great way to pick up cheap paperback and hardback books! When libraries get rid of old books, they frequently sell them for less than a dollar a piece. 

Some of the plot elements I used from my Haruka: Beyond the Stream of Time research is pretty basic to reverse harem manga, but they’re still important aspects of The Genie Whisperer. 

Plot Element: Haruka: Beyond the Stream of TimeGenie WhispererIn a crazy situation, the main character will pick herself up to do the next thing she can do!The main character is thrown into a truly crazy situation when she finds herself in the past, but rather than stewing over it, she decides to do what she can.Ali finds herself in many crazy situations, thanks to the genies, but she’s not one to sit back and let someone else dictate her life. If there’s something she can do, she’s going to do it. 

A love interest tells the main character he’d like to be the person she confides in, because she needs someone. He also admits he also wants the main character to be that person for him.

I honestly have no recollection of how this happened in the manga . . . other than that it was one of the guardians who said this, lol. Illan essentially says this to Ali in book six, The Three B’s of Genie Whispering, when she’s so upset after encountering the puppet genie. How each guy addresses the main character matters. In Japan, there is social etiquette around how you refer to others, with some methods being more formal and other more familiar, that are used depending on your relationship with the person. This is often relevant in manga, with reverse harems having the guys refer to the main character in a variety of ways. I thought it would be a lot of fun to have the genies call Ali a variety of things. As of book six, only Rajan and Tavor call Ali by her name alone, and that’s only sometimes. The rest use nicknames or titles, either to insult Ali or put distance between them and her. And then there’s Illan, who always refers to her as Miss Ali. 

I think the plot line of a young woman with special abilities/a special destiny being surrounded by devoted and capable guards is a lot of fun, and is one I might want to explore someday. I have a few story ideas related to that, but since I have dozens of tentative ideas, I can’t say that those stories will ever be written. 

As for the Haruka: Beyond the Stream of Time manga series, my overall feeling toward it is ‘meh.’ I included it in my research, but I feel that the overall story lacks depth and the main character’s obsession with the villain simply because he was beautiful drives me crazy. The manga was based off a video game, and it’s a pity that mangas weren’t created of later versions of the game, since I found later heroines far more compelling. 

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