Sarah Scheele's Blog, page 25

Palladia Moving Forward

With 2 Palladia books completed and 2 more coming quickly (I hope) there might be a question why I’m doing this series at all. City of the Invaders was a beginner effort and there didn't seem much more to say after it. The world didn’t have a lot of unanswered questions at the end. But once I put Invaders into a print form I knew I wanted to include Consuela, crossing it over from the now-defunct Valley Stories series that was a problem for me a few years ago. 

After deliberation, I decided more needed to be done to dissociate “Alyce” from The Prince’s Ball. The fake-history setting of the Valley Stories was too similar and people might remember it. I’d already turned the final Valley story, Victoria, into a historical short story that spun off on its own thing. But Alyce was just lurking around and I wanted to make it absolutely separate.

So currently I plan for Alyce to follow Consuela into the Palladia world. One girl in a review (now deleted along with the ebook) said Alyce was confusing because it felt medieval, but some areas were like dystopian. I thought this was silliest thing I’d ever heard. That would be like saying Romola Garai’s Emma was dystopian. But if people could interpret Alyce as dystopian, that should make a transition to Palladia natural. There will also be a third book in between Consuela and the rewritten Alyce. It has not been published before.

Putting Alyce—a bit longer, of course, and set in outer space—in the Palladia series will move it far enough on its own that it stops being a wart. I won’t even use the same names for the heroines and if “Alyce” is now trademarked to this story, I’ll change her name in The Prince’s Ball.
 
And there will be more updates. 

Out in the Sunshine

After working on the VJA project, I was glad to be out in the fresh air again. It truly was a personal endeavor for those who started it, especially the leader who was feeling irked that one of her stories had been rejected in a contest. Negativity is not a good reason for creating a project because it creates a self-focused passion that's not healthy when working with other people. There might also have been a touch of sarcasm in Bellevere that I wasn’t aware of when I wrote it. Because honestly the whole thing grew to be a leetle bit silly as the years piled up. Just a little bit. I didn’t mean to satirize their writing—or that of countless other young ladies I’d read over the preceding 4 years—but it might have been there unintentionally because I always write what I feel is there.

By the time of publication, tensions were high and communication had been poor for over a year. The beta feedback on Bellevere showed strong feelings, but didn't take that lack of communication into account, and my sister was almost yelling at me through a chatbox when I changed my book cover model. I felt it was essential because Faye’s hair color had switched from black to blonde. I did the changes myself to save her the work, because it was my call to change the hair color so late. (I didn’t even have to tell her about it, but I wanted to be upfront.) But she cared passionately about the covers. Passionately, passionately, passionately. This should have been a light hobby project among some friends. Some homemade fanfiction about Jane Austen. That’s all it was. Just because your reactions are genuine does not always make it okay to voice them.

Because it’s difficult for me to sort this book when it’s so drowned in associations from the project, I’m going to send Bellevere out solo. I no longer view it as part of the series, nor should readers. That’s a formality only, at least for the time being. I’d always wanted to market this book separately after the collection was done and that will give me a chance to decide whether I want to keep it among my works.

And there will be more updates.

The World of Jurant

Jurant was first published as a stand-alone short story—inasmuch as it wasn’t linked to any other world or set of characters. About 5 years after I joined it up to the intergalactic world of Ryan and Essie. Partly because isolated short stories tend to drift around and disappear unless they’re pinioned to a larger storyline. And partly because Jurant’s setting is identical to Ryan and Essie’s—a distant part of our galaxy humans visited or colonized in the past which is now a complex civilization with many planets.

Jurant is set on Chaldon, a planet closer to the center of this galactic society. Ryan and Essie is set on the now almost abandoned planet of Caricanus, on the edge of this civilization. Caricanus is by now a mythological place. It was the first to be inhabited by humans and the society created there eventually spread to a larger number of planets while Caricanus became a forgotten place. (Which is not the same thing as an uninhabited place.) Chaldon, on the other hand, is at a hub of things, as one of the Alliance’s premier military training facilities is there.

The Kinari, Sekana’s people (the ones who are making a rebellion) are far on the other side of the galactic civilization from Caricanus, and also far from the center near Chaldon. Viltan, a teenage scavenger in Ryan and Essie, is partly Kinari. This is why he has purple eyes. (Sekana turns into a girl with purple hair when she assumes her true form.) People rarely mix with the Kinari, so he is highly unusual, which is why he ended up running into Ryan and all the other doings on remote Caricanus.

I was pleased I could loop the story into a pre-existing structure like Ryan and Essie, because although Jurant is a stand-alone and probably not for quite the same audience, I wanted it to be grounded outside of the Facets collection.
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And there will be more updates. 

The Accountability Factor

It might be shocking to for book readers—and actually for people in general—to realize that THEY can be held to a standard. Readers can be rated and judged by authors, as good readers or as useless, offensive, and boring. Viewers of TV shows and movies, members of fandoms, writers of reviews for any products, and just plain ordinary people interacting during daily life are not above rules. There are expectations for them and a book reader or online network contact can most certainly get a 1-star rating as much as other people can.

There’s an idea out there that people are allowed to have no regard for other people if they’re discussing entertainment. That what they say exists in a consequenceless vaccum where ordinary rules don’t apply. This is stupid. “Reader” is not some sort of exalted, deified position that means you don’t have to be legit. It’s a human relationship—a relationship between the author, the reader, and others out there who have read the same book. Books, like pretty much anything in life, are a network of real connections between real people with real feelings. And with real, very active standards for how you treat them.

It’s hard work to do work—to put any product out there. Even a weak book or movie takes hours and hours, possibly even years of work. Even more effort to make a good one. Relationships are also work. Going the extra mile, caring about people’s feelings, and building bridges that last takes effort. On the other hand, it’s easy to mouth off on the work of other people, as if no one could ever have or express a critical opinion of you. But authors don’t want shoddy, lazy, stupid, rude people reading their books any more than a manager in a grocery store would want to hire such an employee. And, far more importantly, they don’t want that kind of behavior to appear in deeper, real-life relationships outside of writing.

In short, to paraphrase the old joke about mathematicians—“Authors are people too.”
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And there will be more updates.

More and More Changes

Even in the midst of coming down with the flu and going to a wedding in freezing temperatures, it’s been a really productive month for me. It was ironic to be working on the final chapters of The Harrisons, which are about the wedding of one of the sisters, just before going to an actual wedding of one of my sisters. I hadn’t thought when I wrote that conclusion 8 years ago that it would come full circle in that exact way as the book was finally being published. The book wedding was a touch more traditional than the one in real life—actually, stock-photo by comparison to toughing it at a Renaissance Faire during a rare cold snap on the exact day of the wedding. Lol

During all that I somehow finished The Harrisons, a completed, tidied draft that should be published by the end of the month. I’m not sure how I did it, but I’m so glad to look into the list of book files and see it in such good order after weeks of pounding at it.I also brought back the print of Jurant (yes, there was a long-ago Jurant paperback!) with a new cover that goes with the ebook. There’s a new page for it on the website. Jurant has a slight tie-in to Ryan and Essie, which I haven’t discussed much yet.Facets of Fantasy: Collector’s Edition has been retired. It will still be available to look at for a few weeks on the “Specialty” page and you can download “Millhaven Castle” from that page. This was the first of those boring little Alyce-world stories that I’m gradually just getting rid of.Bellevere House page is back up and when I have time I plan to give the book a mild run-through. In addition to doing a contemporary remake, I want to go back into the vintage book and trim some of the Christian-market content. Not the conclusion with Myrtle and Horace, which is crucial to the story, but Faye’s constant thoughts about and references to God when interacting with other people. I want to market this book to a wider audience.Victoria isn’t going to disappear when Facets is retired. I’d like to publish it separately, especially since I still have an old print version lurking in CreateSpace. Not sure how I’m going to put that together yet, since this story is kind of hard to sort.
And there will be more updates.

The Philosophies of Ryan and Essie

When discussing the ideas that make up this book—and that’s probably a good thing to do when a book is about ideas—there is one character who leaps into prominence and that is Tarvelas. Not Ryan or Essie—nor the villains that try to lead them astray. Tarvelas, the last princess of the castle of Enfarm, is a core piece of the story. She dramatizes the concepts these kids are learning about, living them out as part of her life. Sometimes people won’t understand an idea until they see it visualized in a way that feels raw and actual before their eyes.
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All the 7 great castles of Caricanus were made out of giant jewels and each one held a piece of a mirror that connected to God. At times a person would be chosen as a “Voice” and zapped by the mirror, especially at a time of crisis. This hasn’t happened for thousands of years, but shortly before Ryan and Essie came it happened to Tarvelas. She became blind when the mirror’s light burst out on her, and separated from all her relationships. Her family doesn’t understand. Even her brother says she’s crazy. She is very lonely, but her will is strong. She knows this is what she wants to do. And in the end she lets Ryan make an ultimate choice all on his own, even if that will end up killing her.

The idea of sacrifice of someone noble is very close to Christianity—Jesus Himself, for example—but it can often get skewed into something fatalistic. (The noble will always die in the end, which shows how good they are. The bad always win, but that makes them bad.) This is not Tarvelas’s thinking. She is not a martyr and she is not a victim. She chooses to do this because she wants to help others make decisions. Tarvelas lets Ryan also make a choice as she did and she is willing to use her life to the ultimate extent—even lose it—to make these ideas real to people like him.

She represents something almost catastrophic for her country of Farlent. After she is zapped as the “Voice” the country is invaded and the castle destroyed. Everything that once remained from a distant past was wrecked—a way of life gone. Eventually, this harshness envelops Tarvelas too, because harsh things do happen in life and she embodies them. But it can be the start of something better and she knows this. Good things simply don’t happen without hard things happening first.

And there will be more updates.

Heroine Spotlight ~ Katia

Katia first appeared in a small novella called “The Trouble with Taranui.” She was a quiet girl and very much an observer on the sidelines, especially since she was new to the EC community in the city of Wyncon. When the action around their mysterious robotic dog forced her and her brother into an adventure, Katia was still mostly supportive. But there was something I wanted to develop about her in the longer book—the quality of being an outsider.

Katia doesn’t talk very much and is often excluded. The other EC kids are cliquish and she’s only able to connect with another girl who’s on the edge, and with a couple of her brother’s friends. Because she is EC the rest of the Palladian population views her as off-limits and basically don’t like her. Almost no one talks to her. Almost no one seems to SEE her. People who work with her closely, such as her parents, the theater director Mr. Coughing, her non-EC aunt and uncle, and her neighbor Lina don’t see her any more than the many people in the city cut off from her by cultural barriers.

The adventurous setting of the story gave me a chance to emphasize something critical about that invisible person. You don’t really know anything about them. Katia has a lot of secrets. She doesn’t conceal things out of malice, but because she feels insecure. Everything she does seems not to fit in, so she tries to minimize talking about herself. She can use weapons very well, which is rare in an EC girl (in fact, it’s practically forbidden.) She has a family of cousins who live in the city leader’s Gotham-like inner district and none of the EC know that about her. She and her brother blew up an important building and no one ever knew they did it. And of course, they have a robotic dog creating no end of trouble and Katia spends a lot of time concealing the adventures about that.

You can never tell about people by their outsides. And even if situations aren’t as exciting as in futuristic Wyncon, that’s always a good thing to keep in mind.

And there will be more updates.
 

Why The Harrisons Had to Come Back

I forgot about The Harrisons altogether after 2012. I struggled at first to do some rewrites that would include new material, but it never took off and eventually the manuscripts just got buried and floated around on file. For 6 years it just vanished. If I did ever stumble on it, I thought, “That’s old now. I don’t think anyone would find it interesting,” and moved on.

When I began going exhaustively through my work, however, I knew the slightly-dreaded moment of at least pretending to look into The Harrisons must come. I didn’t want to fuss with it again and I felt the overall theme, especially the areas about homeschool graduates, didn’t have a lot of potential. But when I opened the story I was shocked. Even though many areas needed smoothing, only a few were really passé.

This was because the characters jumped off the page. I’d created the story because I wanted to see if that old-fashioned kind of novel, with that scope and those many, interlacing, larger-than-life characters could be set in the present day. In the 18th and 19th centuries, readers were excited about realistic, contemporary fiction in a way they’re more typically inspired by sci-fi/fantasy worlds today. In most realistic books today it’s a personal, literary journey for the reader—a consciousness of “Now I read a good, intelligent book or a book about real issues and politics,”—instead of a sense of adventure.

I was curious if writing about modern life in that way was related to that older culture and couldn’t be possible with our current situations. I found that wasn’t true. And the characters of The Harrisons have a reality that’s still there after all this time. I was very startled. Perhaps the story had never been about social situations as much as I’d believed. It had always been about people-- the kind of people who leave an impression on you after the book is closed. 

And there will be more updates. 

The Popularity Breakdown

One of the things I set out to do when I started this blog was to change how conversations happened on my website. Or on any bog I’ve ever had. I shut down comments so I could post in an uninterrupted way that let my words be heard. But I also wanted to get much more an idea of what people wanted me to talk about. People didn’t speak about what truly interested them (another reason comments were useless) and I posted so sporadically on my other blogs that I couldn’t generate a steady conversation.

I not only talk—I do some listening as well. Not because I’m looking to feel affirmed about the content I put out, but because not all content is good. Website advisers always tell you to put content out there, any content, but I’ve read enough blogs to know endless, endless posting is often just boring. Just plain boring. It’s repetitive, it doesn’t pay attention to what readers might actually be looking for, it can feel like a hammer being thrown at you if the person posts often. In short, it’s not actually content even if it does show your website is active.

That’s spammy and ill-mannered, so I divide my posts into sets of 4 and check them to see which one did best in each set. It can take months for final results, but eventually I find what one was most useful in that set of 4. And it’s often a surprise to me. People might not talk about what they’re interested in, but they do look at what they’re interested in. 

And there will be more updates.
 

The Capsell/Sherban Thing

 
One important thing to understand about The Prince’s Ball—versus other, smaller stories from the Milland world like Millhaven Castle—is that it didn’t originally have the division between the “Capsells,” a worldly majority who oppressed the “Sherbans,” a small, mostly rural demographic who kept to old ways. The Sherbans viewed the current ruling house as usurpers and they also didn’t like the way these Capsells dressed. When the heroine was asked to a dance by a Capsell ruler, Lord Timson, it tied Cinderella into the Capsell/Sherban divide and made the Sherbans even more the oppressed underdogs. (Can almost hear Cate Blanchett’s malicious purr, “A ragged servant girl is what you are and that is what you will always be.”)

But this had nothing to do with the original world of Milland. I left out numerous characters to make these short stories—well, shorter—and I realized these characters had been important. I wrote about Milland bit by bit, off and on, with no real focus, for years. I had thought all these characters were random, but they weren’t. Leaving them out, while adding the Capsell/Sherban thing, gave an entirely different view of Alyce’s situation. I had only added the Capsells and Sherbans to tie into the theme of Facets of Fantasy—each story was about someone from an unusual group or family culture who interacted with a larger world.

 So The Prince’s Ball, once seen in its own right, is much more homogenous, with no divides other than that two royal families of different countries are always arguing. Within Milland, Alyce and the others are separated from Lord Timson only by rank and there is no division among the villagers at all. This opens the story up and gives it a lot more opportunity to be exciting. When not bogged down by a small conversation about a static minority, the world becomes a much more unpredictable place. Milland is not the secure land it seems.

And there will be more updates.