Sarah Scheele's Blog, page 24

My Days at SWGOH

About 2 years ago, I suddenly felt an urge to find some sort of little game I could play on my phone. There are countless such games out there. I entered Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes and started very, very, very small indeed. It was a year before I could be even passably competitive in the guild activities and since getting the more rewarding, more popular characters takes a lot of time or expensive crystals, it took about up to now for me to get a set of characters I really liked.

But it was very fun and I learned a lot of skills along the way that I’ve found helpful in real life, such as being patient and not freaking out if other people seem way ahead of you. Someone always will be for a while. In SWGOH these people are called “whales” and even extremely advanced guild leaders often lag behind whales. (They are also much quieter. Whales tear up the forum with endless screaming about boring things. By now they literally speak their own language and new players have a separate area of the forum.) It's after the initial period with the whales—who grab anything new—that the real fun begins. Then all the other players sort out which characters and events are really liked and by whom.

​If you'd like to try this game it's free on Google Play.

And there will be more updates.

Heroine Spotlight ~ Essie

It’s time to have a little discussion of Essie from Ryan and Essie. (Very easy to remember, right?) Essie starts out as a child, although the later areas of the book feel slightly older. So perhaps she aged a touch traveling through that wormhole to Caricanus. She seems 9 at the beginning, a very destined-for-something little girl, and is perhaps 12 at the end when she and Ryan have their big growth experience and learn to see each other’s POV.

I can’t describe how long I’ve worked with the Essie character. She truly feels like someone I have always known. Essie’s personality is blazingly distinctive. She is the sort of person who seems created to mess things up. She often does risky, weird, or questionable things with literally no regard for safety—her own or other people’s. She is astonishingly resilient and is so foolhardy because she seems to know she won’t get much hurt. That’s not the sort of thing that happens to Essie. It happens to other people.

Her bounce-back optimism amounts to aggression a lot of the time. She pushes other people beyond their endurance—in the tragic case of the plant-girl Crissy, for instance—because she can’t sympathize. This experience with Crissy helps her gain wisdom and awareness of other people’s boundaries, but it has to go to the ultimate because only then can they get past Essie’s staring green eyes into her head. Essie knows she is special. But she has to respect the gifts and needs of other people and that’s hard for her.

Essie is that brash because she is like no one else. I can mix and match a bit with my other heroines, but Essie has always had an exact appearance. She is short and strong. She has a snub nose, a proud, slightly dimwitted smile. She has curly, tangled red hair and bright green eyes. And she is almost like a force of physics—the Law of Something or Other, possibly not yet discovered, that bounds into alcoves and changes the world.
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And there will be more updates. 

Anatomy of a Disney Princess Movie

With the 4th of May coming up—in other words, Star Wars Day—I’ll digress into a mini-review of a George Lucas movie. Although not Star Wars, Strange Magic was really fun, in part because it was filled with sly little references to all kinds of Disney-princess-movie clichés. Finding all these little pokes at the stylized, at times inexplicable, elements in the Disney Princess cult was more fun even than the actual plot of the movie. (Although it was pretty good—still humming, “Love. Love is straaange.”)

So here’s a list of things that recur in every Disney princess movie I’ve seen—some in one movie, some in another--and also in Strange Magic, though perhaps not in quite the same way. 
The Prince (Roland) has no friends. The Princess always has “little” friends who are animals—the Prince doesn’t actually have friends even if he spends time with animated thingamabobs. Roland doesn’t have friends either, but instead of glossing over that fact, he is given 3 extremely motivated, obviously laughing-at-him fake friends. Aladdin is no exception, a whackadoodle genie being the definition, in my mind, of a fake friend.There are characters that literally serve no purpose and take up time. Why do we have gossiping mushrooms with swanky vintage theme music? Why do we have an unbelievably irritating comedy duo with a silly twist at the end about how one of them is actually a girl? Why on earth does that little elf guy have a friend who follows him around for about half an hour of action and contributes no character development? These aimless plots make me feel like screaming.The King. The King. The King. If there’s a queen too, it’s parents. They are eternally stiff, off in some weird dimension about your personal life, and completely unreasonable. They always want you to marry “for the good of the kingdom,” but they also hate it if you show any actual interest in anyone. So what DO they want you to do? Someone ought to hit any animated parents on the head with a rolling pin.A weird woman who resembles no one living dominates the screen. This woman is often shown opposed to the Princess, but in reality (at least in Strange Magic) it’s the men who don’t like her. This woman is belligerent, overconfident, extremely unusual, and often screams a catchy piece of music about her very vague goals. Actually, in this movie we actually have two such women—such an embarrassment, but not of riches.There is a little village. This village might be trolls, it might be peasants, it might be forest animals—but there is always a little village that yells at you in chorus about your personal life. They know who you should marry, yes they do. They think you are really are so silly, really such a funny one, you don’t know you’re supposed to marry, but they’ve got it all figured OUUUUT. They are bossy too. Very bossy. And they blatantly barely even know you so why are they so sure?

​I could go on and on, but that’s some of the highlights. May the Fourth be with you.

And there will be more updates. 

The Pirate Play

A large part of the plot of City of the Invaders concerns a group of teenagers who are required to put on a play. A backdrop of politics in a gangster-led city provides some action, but most of the character dynamics comes from the Wyncon EC’s mandatory theatricals. The teenagers in this little group have an acting club and when Katia moves to the city with her brother, they are forced to take part. With comic results, of course. In spite of being amateur, these Wyncon productions are presented to a wide general audience and there’s nothing funnier than having people stuck in assigned roles without their consent.

Frank’s audition gave me some great character interactions, and the theatrical scenes throughout the book were fun to write. When I was younger, I had to take dance. I wasn’t any good and only did it because it was recommended for my feet, so I guess I turned that into a bit of a comedy. Not that any of the book’s situations are even based on anything real. But the backstage, the milling around before performances, the feeling of “I look stupid, but I have to be here,”—maybe a bit of that did seep into the story at times. And of course I had ample exposure to great plays like Shakespeare's. I studied many of them seriously to learn good writing tricks, but if you read something enough to know it in your sleep, you’re likely to find it funny now and then too.

From this came “The Works of Charles Glassware” an appendix I wrote years and years before the story itself. I summarized plots of famous works I thought were silly, however old they were, and invented an author for them—Charles Glassware. Eventually one of these works was reused as “The Pirate,” a bombastic historical play Frank, Katia, and Co. perform. “The Pirate” is a collision of lush ancient world movies like Ben-Hur with Norse-based epic fantasy, and you can easily imagine it wouldn’t be easy for a team of mismatched amateurs to pull it off. As the director, Mr. Coughing, says, “this year’s production will be one of our most challenging, considering our cast and budget.” And many of the lines from the play are sprinkled through the story. Very fun to write. Just because authors are real, serious people doesn't mean they can't have fun sometimes. 

And there will be more updates. 

Lucy and Aure

The dynamic between Lucy, a human girl, and Aure, the ruler of the futuristic society, is the central driving arc in The Birthday Present. Aure was the special pet project of Lucy’s father, his creation. Since Lucy, his daughter, is also her father's creation, Aure is Lucy’s brother in a way. But he is a GMF, the enemy of the humans, and Lucy is the main force for trying to get rid of GMFs, so they are always at odds. Their relationship shows the essential closeness that underlies antagonism. We can only fight that much with someone to whom we are actually very close.

Lucy comes to the GMF world out of touch. She expects the GMFs to revere humans as their creators however much they try to overthrow them, but finds the opposite. GMFs don’t even remember the ancient situations she is talking about and hold humans in low estimation. During Aure’s rule he has actually changed the world and created something new. That old war doesn’t exist anymore. Lucy came from the distant past before finding a small colony of humans who also have outdated thinking, and she truly is living in a time warp.

Lucy finds she’s not viewed as a heroine. She’s a weird interloper who is trying to mess things up. Only Aure even knows who her father was—so he’s the only one who understands what she’s trying to do. She wants to get rid of GMFs, as part of a conversation nobody cares about now, and strangely the leader of the GMFs is the only one who really sees where she’s at. Even the other humans, locked in their hideout of Santau, think she’s a wart. It’s strange that she’s focused on Aure as the enemy when he’s the one person who truly understands her. She finds Aure threatening and nobody else does, actually. Because those who are so close to us also hold great power over us and sometimes we dislike them for that very reason.

And there will be more updates. 

A Year with the Harrisons is Here

A Year with the Harrisons is now officially published (as opposed to unofficially on FB at a time everyone has forgotten.) I’ve been pushing away until it was finished and feel very proud I was able to get a full novel done in such a short time. It felt like ages because the book needed to be out there as soon as possible—making up for lost time, you know—and I continued to be sick throughout the month. So very happy now it’s finished.

Anyway, the editions should be linked soon—my usual disclaimer—and there’s a lovely cover and a nice description—yes, all the usual announcements. I’m discussing some other books at the moment, but I’ll devote full attention to The Harrisons soon, I promise.

I am looking for reviewers. I’m not ardent about getting reviews as I used to be, but this is an older book that has had readers and I think it should have reviews to reflect that. But there are no reviews on Amazon or any other site because the book wasn’t on those platforms. Reviews do not have to be favorable—I’m not a whiner. But it would be helpful to people if you could articulate what exactly didn’t work for you and why.

To get an ebook review copy, go to the interactive page and fill in the contact form. Just say you want to review The Harrisons. Files will be in mobi form unless you can’t use that. Just specify if you can’t. 

The Publishing History of Me

Earlier, I did a brief history of myself—in short, an extended bio—and put off my publishing history for another post. There’s not much that’s very special about much of my publishing, which had the usual ups and downs for a beginner to the world of marketing and media. I had all the writing skills, but didn’t have the knowledge to navigate the industry as well as I needed to. That’s typical. The sheer number of people writing can be a shock to a new publisher, as well as the formatting, online marketing, social decisions, FB groups, this-thing-called-twitter, and scouting outlets for sales. And of course the not so nice people lurking in corners, the ones who always find the new kid.

I also had a low budget, literally shoestring at first—again, like so many authors. This created a bit of a vicious cycle for a while, since you need to put in money to get something started. Sometimes the covers weren’t the fanciest—sometimes I made connections with people I shouldn’t have because I was so eager for networking. Signing anything is a little quicksand of its own, since there are always people interested in it, but you do have to be careful. I’d spend hours a day learning the little logistics of formatting books—now it’s just a snap, since I’ve figured out what works—and over time, I learned. And learned. And learned. And learned.

People can often mistake a beginner publisher for a beginner author. This isn’t true. There are some hobbyists, and some people just trying to get across a message rather badly. But most people who start publishing have already achieved an acceptable level of craft. They’re beginners at zoning their work towards an audience and navigating the little alleys and side streets of getting to that audience. By now I have a lot of years with my stories out in the world instead of in drawers tucked with my dreams.

And there will be more updates. 

Coming Up with Caricanus

As a kid, I spent a lot of time looking up at the stars. One of the great things living in the country is that astronomy is absolutely painless. It’s just as easy as going outside. No city glare—no need to worry about artificial lighting. It’s very dark. (In fact, after I came back from 2 months living in cities, I was scared of the vast countryside at night. I had to tell myself, “you’ve lived here your whole life, stupid. You were never scared of it before.”)

So as a kid, I looked at those stars a lot. As a teenager, I learned their names. When I was in my twenties, SpaceX built facilities nearby and, ever since, distant thunder and smoke from the rocket tests became a part of daily life. So this story goes way back into my blood, into the little things I was always used to doing. Directly opposite my front yard was the constellation Capricorn (in the summer, that is) and it was an amazing thrill when I actually saw it. I could trace the shape and it was so much bigger than in the pictures in books. It was a “real” constellation. It wasn’t just something you read about. It was actually in the sky! It was not made up! (Okay, so maybe it was stupid to think it would be made up, but that’s what a light bulb moment is about--being less stupid now.)

The original story name was “The Heirs of Capricorn” because Ryan and Essie went into a planet in that constellation. Later, of course, I realized it would be silly for them to be the heirs of a made-up grouping of stars seen from Earth. It doesn’t exist out in real deep space. So I changed it to “The Heirs of Caricanus,” the name of the planet they visit. Then it became “Ryan and Essie” and that’s what it’s called now. Caricanus’ jewel castles came from a different story I wrote at about the same time. I often melded stories into each other back then—and sometimes still do—to create layered narratives. At least, that’s what I’d call them now. Back then I just said, “this combined story is more interesting.”

And there will be more updates. 

Let's Talk Consuela

Consuela is the second book in the Palladia series. City of the Invaders is a prequel that introduces us to this futuristic world. The series has entry points at every book and each story is about completely different characters. Consuela has a whole new cast, so it can be read independently of Invaders.

This book began as a retelling of some of The Pickwick Papers. I turned the main leads into girls because it was easier for me to write about them that way. I couldn’t handle a cast full of guys. Pickwick isn’t as popular now, but it was a whopper bestseller in the 19th century and is constantly referenced in works by classic authors. And even if some of the situations, dialogue, and references have fallen out over the centuries, I thought some of the ideas couldn’t help but entertain someone again. I wanted readers to see why people cared about this story back then.

Turning well-meaning, bumbling Mr. Pickwick into a naïve old woman always getting into adventures she shouldn’t be a part of was extremely easy—as was turning the trio of Pickwick’s friends into young ladies. Making the legendary Sam Weller into a girl was more challenging and I often thought I’d stumbled with it, but as I read over Consuela’s snarky, pert conversations I realized it hadn’t turned out too badly.

Maybe ambling, lighthearted Pickwick turned into something a bit more unsafe in a futuristic setting, a world of more tension at times. But there really was a timelessness to this tale of a friendship between two people from such different backgrounds. Situations that divide us are just as much with us as in Dicken’s London, and as they surely will be in the future. And it always warms the heart to see those differences bridged by something so real and so human.
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And there will be more updates.

Odds and Ends

After concluding a month of talking about my first books (The Birthday Present; A Year with the Harrisons; and two versions of Facets of Fantasy) I realized Victoria: A Tale of Spain does deserve its own print even if the story is shorter now. I also moved Jurant into a single, with its own paperback, and moved the Facets collections off the website.

Over the next few weeks I’m moving forward into the next books—Ryan and Essie and the Chronicles of Palladia. City of the Invaders, Consuela, and Alyce were all published at a similar time and are now being linked into a series. Very tidy, right? I’ve already done a few posts on Ryan and Essie and will do more, as it’s an exciting story that’s certainly worth a look even for the reluctant.

A Year with the Harrisons will be published in a couple of weeks, I hope. When a book's been delayed by 8 years, it can’t get out fast enough. There’s a gap in my publications that won’t be filled until it’s available, but the page for it is already up and you can take a look. I’m not sure yet about The Birthday Present. I think of it as my “extra” story and always have—that’s why it was gone for so long. But it gets steady attention, so I’ll throw in a post here and there about it too.

Just because I’m turning the Palladia stories into a series does not mean I am automatically "keeping" them. The series makes me able to sort a lot of jumbled material, but if it doesn't perform well I'll stop marketing it like anything else. I just feel the stories have to be in a series before I can begin to have an idea of their value.

And there will be more updates.