Sarah Scheele's Blog, page 4

The Personal Opinion Roundup

I’ve talked a lot about how other people have responded to my books. I’ve also sometimes, but not always, shared how these responses affected me, everything from pleasant surprise to anger to a back-to-the-drawing-board analysis of the books. But I’ve never actually shared how I personally felt about my books. Especially since I’ve been gradually moved towards my work being mainstream, quality fiction that meets genre expectations, I haven’t said much about my attitudes to this more polished work. I’ve redone my mission statement as an author—you can see in the header that I now define my work into 4 ideas “Inspire. Encourage. Amuse. Challenge.” And I’ve written a lot about it on the Home page of the website, as I’ve grouped my books into 4 genres instead of just a rambling list of publications. But what do I personally feel now? I thought it would be fun to let you know. Five books this week and five books in a later newsletter.:)

The Birthday Present—This book has changed profoundly over the past 6 months, in a movement that has been both quiet and explosive. Neither one of the stories was rewritten much (and Millhaven Castle not at all) to synchronize them into the same world. The differences are subtler than a mere rewrite. This is a totally different book now and a MUCH better one.A Year with the Harrisons—This book is kind of weak. It isn’t my best work and never quite shook off the casual, unprofessional tone of its original release as a serial of PDF downloads on FB. But there have always been some readers who didn’t like it for no good reason, and that’s a primary argument for keeping it around. Must be more to it than most people have thought.Facets of Fantasy—This book has aged quite a bit. There are still some good moments that get you involved in its melodramatic situations, but a lot of the character interactions look unintentionally funny at times. “Jurant” especially is just hard to take seriously right now and Don Tachimant’s permanent scowl and chip on his shoulder bring angst to the edge of absurdity.This Merry Summertime—This book is on the backburner. People were very interested at one time in my satire and my takes on writing craft and classic tropes, but no longer. However, the book still has much to offer. It shows my influences, my insights on life, and my background (more realistically than in Harrisons), and will be valuable to readers down the road.​ ​City of the Invaders—This book was always my least favorite. Others loved the story and it got consistent praise, but the more it moved into real dystopian instead of a fuzzily shown future era, the more I felt it had a distinctive and questionable quality about it. There's a latent edginess that underlies the book like a sharp razor. But I’ve come to realize everyone was quite right. It’s a REALLY good story. :)
And there will be more updates.

Literature and Renovation

Celestine Princess is gradually coming along towards a potential publication date. I’m thinking sometime later this year, but haven’t pinned down an exact month or day on my calendar. Right now it’s all about the cover and while a creative delight (as it has always been to work on this new story) the cover brings out some of the central challenges of this book—blending it seamlessly into the Palladia world when the first two books were written years ago. It’s almost impossible to capture the tone of work that was gestated in the past. Its qualities are fluid echoes of the reality of those years and when time goes by, stories change, emerging like the hunks of ruined stone in murky foggy water around which Bard steers Thorin’s company in The Desolation of Smaug. They look formless, but start to appear, deeply rooted in invisible bedrock below the rippling surface of life.

Different eras produce different stories and while I don’t expect this one to be 100% similar, I do try very hard to meld it with the older Palladia material. I don’t feel I’m quite putting this new story INTO the old ones, like new wine in old wineskins creating rips, tears, stress, and incongruities. The upcoming book is standing apart from them more like an addition onto an older home. It appears new at first—jarring. You can definitely tell this renovation is more recent. But gradually it starts to blend with the older part of the house until it’s all one house and you can barely tell the difference aside from the different wiring tracks for the electricity in different parts of the house. (Speaking from experience of watching our 25-year-old addition to our house age.) A good coat of paint that spreads over the whole house is crucial for sealing it all together visually and that’s what the cover should be. But it’s been awhile since I’ve had this exact pattern of cover done, so it’s like getting back in the groove.

I now have a signup for my street team. Just click to go to the form. There is a lot of information you can read on the form and that information will be reiterated in the welcome email you’ll receive as you sign up. I’m so excited to start launching a formal street team! While I appreciate each of my wonderful readers who left positive reviews before, I stumbled on them randomly through personal networking or specific review requests. I didn’t have an organized team and I felt the lack of it over the years. Although Celestine’s publication is months away, I will also use the street team to get reviews for some of my currently published books. I want the street team to be a well-oiled, functional machine by the time I do get Celestine out there and will be presenting some review requests for the first books in the series before I launch the new book. And don’t worry—I’ll mention this street team again fairly often. Everyone will have a chance to know about it and sign up. :) The team is still embryonic and I'll add new features along the way.

And there will be more updates.

It's a Lovely Spring Day

That’s what I found when I headed onto my porch this morning. It’s been rainy off and on for weeks and the lawn and corn fields that surround my house are so green you wouldn’t believe what this place will look like in a few months. (Aka. Dry and Brown.) The air is cool and refreshing and when the sun shines it’s just right—enough to be warm but not enough to make you feel like you’re the burrito in a dish of baked enchiladas. As I sit here typing this blog post, I have opened my window blinds and the sun pours in, often covered again by clouds as more showers lurk in the air. Sometimes I’m reminded of Lamentations 3: 22--23, which states “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning.” It hasn’t always been a peaceful or encouraging road over the last few years, but we who are Christians are never told that life will be either of those things. Sometimes it will be challenging and those challenges are tests of our faith. This phrase just means they are tests of whether we really believe in what we’re doing and in what we say we stand for.

I have always enjoyed watching a short 1-hr long TV movie made decades ago for children. It belonged to a series that was partly educational and each episode in the series was about a fictional child who had a short adventure getting to know a famous composer. The one that stuck around for me was about the Italian opera composer Rossini. A little girl in the episode traveled through a magic mirror to learn her grandmother had worked as a dancer in Rossini’s company. Rossini, unlike everyone else, was able to see the little girl and thought she was probably the daughter of a cast member. When The Barber of Seville got off to a terrible start—it was, to use just the right word, a fiasco—Rossini quit. Not because he was scared of the mobs coming to torch his home, but because he felt writing music wasn’t rewarding. The little girl tried to encourage him to continue because she had picked up a playbill from her grandmother’s box of old things in the real world before she went through the mirror. It was for William Tell, an opera Rossini hadn’t even written yet, and which is one of his most famous. (Lone Ranger music, anyone? That theme comes from Rossini’s opera.) Rossini said that he always swore he’d just write music as long as it was fun. If it stopped being fun—he’d quit. But he realized he had much more to do in the future and did indeed have a long career ahead of him.

Similarly, I’ve often felt recently that writing isn’t “fun” anymore and like Rossini, I always did it because I loved it. A few books got off to a rough start, just like The Barber of Seville (which became very popular after its debut, by the way!), but that wasn’t why I felt discouraged. It was that all the life seemed to be getting drained out of me as I went on and on writing blog posts and churning out new books. I have seen many career authors who just seem to go on writing because they can’t stop—the inspiration, the joy of writing, has been replaced by honed marketing, perfect genre mastery, really good rapport with fans, and experience as an expert. But I never get the feeling these authors are having FUN. I think it's really just a kind of daily work for them and it’s hard to write good books the way you might turn out good packages in an Amazon shipping department. I felt some of that syndrome creeping over me and I dreaded it.

But, after a period of feeling blue and having a lot of things going on in my life that weren’t writing related, I felt the beautiful spring air on my face and I realized God really does renew things. He renews the world every morning. He renews people’s lives every time they ask Him. And he renews joy in doing what we do with our lives. A joyless life is not His—and if you respond to challenges and tests correctly, you will come through to the kind of joy that He wants. A deep-seated sort of Having Fun with Being Alive. It’s a lovely spring day outside and I find it’s a lovely spring day in my heart as well. And I hope that is the same for you and if it isn’t, if you’re still confused and still feeling gray and blue and all sorts of depressing shades of this and that—I know it can be better soon.
​
And there will be more updates.

Quiet Sense of Completion

In the last few years, I've played a lot of handheld video games on my phone. They’re easy, free, and some are quite addictive. I’ve tried collecting baby dragons, meandering through a Chinese imperial court, and crushing 157 levels of heart-shaped candies. Right now I am designing outfits in an Asian fashion game called Love Nikki: Dress-Up Queen and playing a Star Wars game with some competitive gameplay and acquisition of an assortment of characters from this sci-fi franchise. Galaxy of Heroes, began as a way to introduce characters from every era of the Star Wars franchise, including the non-canonical (but extremely popular) Old Republic, as well as the controversial Prequel Era, the acclaimed Original (Imperial) Era, the new Sequel Era, and several successful TV series set in various periods. I learned about some of the characters in the SW Universe from playing this game, long before I actually saw the source material.

One of these characters was a villain named Cad Bane. He appeared in a handful of episodes in the Clone Wars TV series, which I didn’t see when it first came out. I discovered this character had been an original concept from the first Star Wars movie in 1977, but never actually made it into the film. So he was recycled and popped up decades later on TV. He’s based on western outlaw types and is a killer-for-hire with a huge cowboy hat. Really belongs with the “space western” angle of this franchise. But when the game developers started to use a new upgrade chip—called a “zeta” chip—they didn’t apply one to Cad Bane. Zeta chips come with new abilities for the character and since zetas came years after the game started, a lot of the characters were reworked to include zetas. But not this guy, although he was very popular. When asked why this was, the developers just shrugged. They seemed lost for words. Why didn’t Cad Bane get a “zeta” ability? Well—he just didn’t. They simply couldn’t think of any new abilities to give him.

As I’ve worked through my books, Devotion, Harrisons, and Victoria needed total rewrites. There was always more to Palladia and now it seems there’s more to The Birthday Present as well. The long-forgotten MerrySummer stories suddenly popped back up and Bellevere needed a few tweaks to be clearer and more accurate about the situations in that book. After linking Birthday Present into the Palladia timeline, the first place I looked, naturally, was Facets of Fantasy. Would it develop gaps in and connections in this way? And what about Ryan and Essie? But neither of them did.

A long-running theme with both Facets and Ry/Es was that I always thought there was more to the story. For years I fiddled with little sequels to the Facets stories. Ry/Es ends on a note of possibility the children might return to Caricanus. But the only sequel that really went anywhere was the one for “The Trouble with Taranui,” which eventually became City of the Invaders. The only link I was able to make between Facets and my other books was to tie it into Ry/Es—a tenuous thread that never quite fleshed-out fully, but that also did feel real and sincere. There IS something in common between these two books. They are both fantasy set in outer space. The world of "Halogen Crossing" is so high-tech it could easily be set on a distant planet and not a fantasy world. "Jurant" is already set in outer space. I tied Renari in by having Ryan’s long-lost twin—also an astronomy buff—tells the mythology of the planets she looks at, one of which is Renari. So Renari is a planet on which fantasy things happen, not a fantasy world. But after creating those linkages, the stories in Facets just closed over into their own dimension and Ryan and Essie drifted around them like a satellite. I couldn’t connect or expand them any further and I couldn’t write more stories to continue them.

I’ve felt this was problematic because I want to do an epic fantasy novel, preferably Christian speculative, and I would like it to sync into my already existing books rather than create an extraneous new world. But the worlds in Facets only seem to exist in these 3 stories. I can’t seem to write more about them, though the promise is always looming like a fruit just out of reach. Ryan and Essie was written with a blatant idea of sequels in mind and its ancient mythology would be suited to the story I want to write next. But again, Ry/Es is complete. It ends where it does. Just like Palladia and Birthday Present started to expand, Facets and Ry/Es have contracted and become stable. They belong together.

So when I do write that epic fantasy book, I’ll have to find a way to develop the world that lines up with my other work, but doesn’t include these two books. I’m sure I will, though, when the time comes. Coming up with ways to get stories written is what authors DO.

And there will be more updates.

Those Reviews, Those Reviews, No Trouble . . .

Victoria: A Tale of Spain is part of a review group on StoryOrigin this month. This group has 11 books of historical fiction that need reviews and you can find the link here where you can read samples and then take the books if you feel interested. Of course, what fiction books don’t need reviews these days? Probably only about 1% of them. It’s really not that difficult for readers to put up reviews. In fact, I remember how easily people used to review my books. I never had to ask at that time—they just found books and immediately put up reviews, often also giving private feedback to me in messages, which I didn’t even ask for! But these days people are a lot stingier about reviews. (Most likely feedback too, I'm not sure because I haven’t asked for it in a while.)

There was a pop song that drifted around a few years ago “It’s all about that bass, ‘bout that bass, no trouble.” Similarly, for authors it’s suddenly all about reviews, ‘bout reviews, no trouble. Well, it should be no trouble. A person who doesn’t want to review a book because they have to take time to read it shouldn’t be following an author at all. Authors write books and books are for people who like to read. People who don’t like to read go to YouTube videos-- for the song All About That Bass or for anything else--and write inane comments. This actually doesn’t take more time and effort than reading, but they prefer to do it because that’s what they like. It might be unkind to call them names, but I’ve never forgotten it when someone I knew said, “Don’t read the comments on YouTube. Your brain will disappear.”

There are many businesses now that offer (in some cases guaranteed) Amazon reviews for your books if you pay, as well as free review programs like the one on StoryOrigin. Why is this? Because people review a lot less than they used to and so every author has to ask around. My theory is that after a number of years of reading reviews for products, people noticed a lot of them weren’t very good. Now it’s true they usually weren’t nearly as bad as comments on social media sites—there might be a few trolls in there, but most product reviews were much better thought out. But still, a lot of book reviews didn’t really say anything clear about the book that would justify reading the review. They were vague and used strong, but unclear language—either praise or rejection--and you got more idea of the reviewer's attitudes than of the product itself. In short, they weren’t helpful to people in making purchases. So people became a little shy about expressing themselves through reviews.

There are plenty of professional reviewers out there. Many of them are even paid to deliver high-quality editorial reviews. But nobody is expecting a “real person" putting up a book review to be a professional. (Although actually, pro reviewers are real people in the sense they aren’t bots.) In fact, authors request non-pro reviews because they want readers to hear from a non-expert, just a typical person reading the book, which gives insight beyond the publishing industry and how they talk about books. Potential purchasers can find this very helpful. Reviews also don’t have to be long, polished, or filled with plot analysis. Not only do these take more of the reviewer’s time, they're more suited to beta reading. Whisking off a few lines that clearly describe the book’s content and what was your fav/least fav thing about it doesn’t mean you have to write an essay and it isn’t hard. It’s a great help to readers and authors alike and I hope more people start to realize that reviewing can even be fun.

Well . . . depends on the book, of course. But let’s assume you’ll like most of the books you read.

And there will be more updates.

Well, The Old Adage Says . . .

It’s common knowledge that authors are told to “write what you know.” For instance, in the beloved Anne of Green Gables series of books, a constant thread involves her literary efforts while a teenager. They are melodramatic, romance soap operas that read like silly fanfiction about Camelot. Her characters, as she frequently resents being told, are essentially unreal, stylized fiction personalities that are too high-strung to make any sense to people. In fact, one of her stories was so—well, not exactly literary in quality—that it was chosen as winner for a contest advertising baking powder. (Probably because after Anne’s friend Diana made little awkward additions to an originally full-of-itself fiction effort, those contest judges thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever read.)

Readers want to hear about situations they’ve seen in real life. Anne is told this many times. But if we’re going to talk about “write what you know,” people who write fiction do not write biography or memoir, so they can’t just record what they’ve seen in their lives by putting friends and neighbors into books. Such actions can easily come across as simply uncreative or even spiteful and tasteless if anything critical is said about the characters based on real people. And does this maxim even apply to speculative fiction, like sci-fi and fantasy, at all? How on Earth can you “write what you know” about a far future or a world with dragons when you’ve never seen those things? People must think authors really have the power to go to the places they talk about. 😊 I feel that this phrase does indeed apply to speculative fiction, because you can know about things in life besides physical locales and personal acquaintances. Science fiction often requires a lot of understanding of scientific possibility and fantasy explores philosophy and morality—all things that people can be expected to know about. But in two of my more realistic stories--Movies at the Beach and A Year with the Harrisons--that pretty obviously draw from some real life experiences, I tried to navigate between the scenes that I knew from life and characters that were fictionalized so that the story could be told a lot better.

For instance, the characters in Movies at the Beach attend a dance school because I did that at their age. I wrote about what I knew. But some of the actual people at the school are altered for the story. The dance teacher’s sons in real life were both very lovely young men and I remember them fondly. But they weren’t funny. Not only would it be rude to put them in fiction without their permission, they wouldn’t make good comedic antagonists at the school—unlike the fictional Dylan Dupree in the story. Similarly, Letty Harrisons' extended family is much more dramatically different from hers than occurred in my real life, but I kept a lot of the details of the world of Texas that I knew about fifteen years ago. Substituting other relatives that went better with the story—a story about growing up and culture shock—turned it into what it really is, a work of fiction. Fiction blends reality that you know with characters native to the genre you’re writing, often replacing real people who came and went and didn’t really create a story you could tell.

So the advice, I found (and I think every author has found), should be amended to, “Write what you know—but not all of it. It's OK to fictionalize at times, because some things don’t add anything to the story even if they really happened to you.”

And there will be more updates.

There Are Gaps. Gaps That Need to Be Filled

If you want to catch my literary fiction book Bellevere House at a discount price, it’s on sale for $0.99 right now as part of a big chick-lit reading bundle. Find a variety of books from light reading like mystery and romance to literary, fantasy epics, and historical fiction. As the giveaway's title suggests, it's a big bash of books at sale prices. Prices vary based on author’s choice, but you’re sure to find some good steals here. Click here to visit!

Halfway through the 4th Palladia book, I took a break to go back into Celestine Princess and start some minimal editing--finding some overly long paragraphs to be trimmed and some dialogue to be clarified. All basic stuff for a second look at a book before getting it on to the next phase. And the more I write Palladia books, the more of them keep coming. It seems there’s always more to the story when it comes to this projection of the future 300 years from now. And over time, the “always more we need to explore” aspect has spread beyond Palladia into my other sci-fi and fantasy work.

Aside from Ryan and Essie, my other SFF books are unrelated novella and novelette collections, since I got a lot of short fiction ideas early in my writing journey. That was all well and good until a small glitch between The Birthday Present and Palladia set up a domino effect. TBP had always been this individual futuristic story spinning on its own orbit. It had more links to the seemingly unrelated Millhaven Castle than to anything else and since it was out of print for years, there was even less reason to worry about it. But as Palladia grew and grew, I realized it was important that the timelines between these two visions of the future not clash.

It’s fine for different authors to describe wildly different concepts of a future that’s been invented for their fiction—one, for instance, shows the world as collapsing into dust-piles and nonstop thievery as a result of an ecological disaster, while another author instead shows the exact distance in the future (say, 100 years) as so high-tech that robots have replaced people and everyone is extraordinarily wealthy except for some unfortunate rebels that the robots don’t like. But works by the SAME author should not contradict each other. Whatever history of a fantasy world or of the future you are constructing, it still has to be logical even if it’s imaginary.

I’d already set The Birthday Present 1000 years in the future, long after Palladia. But if it was set 1000 years after our time, Aure would be ruling at the time of the Palladia stories and I’ve yet to write one where he’s anywhere in sight. So instead, a marginal tweak of just a few numbers set The Birthday Present 1000 years after the time of Palladia—1300 after our time. Why does this matter? Well, once I made the change for the sake of consistency, I realized I needed to write more about this dimly seen farther future. Palladia has four books now to detail its era, but the TBP era has scant coverage. And, of course, I noticed another thing right away.

What happened in those 1000 years between Palladia and The Birthday Present/MC? So not only do we really need another book about the characters who appear in The Birthday Present so we can see more of the “Aure’s Dominion” era, there are all sorts of gaps between the two eras. And yes, there now are two “eras” for a lengthy future scenario instead of a couple of unrelated sci-fi books because lining up them up also linked them by default. I will say I am very much looking forward to finding out if all of my sci-fi and fantasy books are going to reveal hidden cracks and gullies like this. 😊

And there will be more updates.

The World Beyond

Springtime has come to Texas and it feels even more pleasant because it follows closely on the heels of a devastating winter storm that hit here a short time ago. Our hardy little rosemary plant died during the storm—which was a pity because rosemary is one of the plants I’ve always had success growing. In fact, because of my good memories spent gardening over the years, I named Arielle’s sister Rosemary in Celestine Princess. This character doesn’t appear much as Arielle is separated from her family throughout the book, but choosing this name for someone that the MC cares about is a little personal touch for me.

So we replaced the old rosemary plant with a new one and our plum trees are blossoming beautifully. One of them had a large limb, almost a third of the tree, cut off last year due to a disease, but it seems to be in a great mood in spite of that. The branches are white with flowers. We are also experimenting with growing carrots, which aren’t easy to nurture and we haven’t grown them in my memory. (My mother says she tried to grow them once, but that was before I could remember.) Tending things that take effort to care for and looking at the enduring strength of our tree that has been through so much—imagine if your legs were cut off and then you were subjected to abnormal temperatures!—reminds me of the vicissitudes of characters in fiction and why we respond to those so much. The struggle of life and also its healing are echoed in the stories we read and seen even in the natural world around us.

My current writing effort looks like it is shaping up to be Palladia 4. It’s a little early to tell, but it seems to be getting longer than just a short story. When I first wrote Palladia 3, it felt like an effort to finish out a trilogy that was started years ago and never completed. But by the time the book grew during the writing, the world of Palladia had really gone on a journey and Celestine Princess didn’t feel like the end of a trilogy, but a middle book in a series. Characters from the earlier books, like Katia, had also really grown up. As a guide for Arielle, she represents faith to believe in what is right, and from a teenage outsider who moved into a corrupt city and blew up a building (among other things she and her brother did), she showed a much more mature persona by Palladia 3. Perhaps that’s a natural effect of so many years passing since I wrote books using this world.

This new story will use the culture of Alphea (Mars) as a setting. The Palladia world is largely dystopian in terms of “the Earth won’t look ideal in the future” framework, but it also mentions a colonized solar system and we’ve never visited any of these places that are mentioned. We mostly visit Palladian countries caught in a friction between two cultural groups—a friction that reached a boiling point around Arielle’s adventures in Celestine Princess. But writing a brief area on Luna (the Moon) in that book really sent me into a whole story set off-Earth. I had considered characters taking a trip to Alphea last year, but now I am revisiting the concept after doing Palladia 3 it’s a quite different take from before. The Palladia books each have a different protagonist, but characters and locations from earlier books pop up in later ones and Katia will reappear in this one. Her personality has grown so strong that by now I have this sensation of “these new characters are going to meet her. I wonder what that will be like for them? I think they will be very impressed by how she rises to challenges.” And as for Miss Plummer from Consuela, who has it in for Arielle’s former mentor Mrs. Hoberman . . . well, that argument seems to have flown all the way to Mars and writing it is one of the really fun things about this new book.

And there will be more updates.

Palladia 3 Title Reveal and More Stories to Come

First off, I’d like to let you know about another great StoryOrigin giveaway. It’s in one of my favorite categories—All-Genre, with a bent towards Young Adult and family-friendly. Although genre-specific events are great for getting people who are interested in that genre, all-genre events are perfect for any books that don’t fit neatly into just one genre label. For instance, This Merry Summertime, the book in this giveaway, contains a mix of historical, fantasy, and contemporary under its celebration of “Family, Fantasy, and Young Women” subtitle. So any of those genres might cancel the others out for a genre-specific event, but all-genre is right up its alley and the fact the giveaway is clean and family-friendly is an added perk. It’s a big giveaway—74 books & 54 authors—so you’re sure to find something you like in this diverse newsletter builder event. Click here to see all the books!

Finished the first draft of Palladia 3 this week! I’ve got to say, I haven’t written a story like this before. But what I’ve liked about working on each one of my books is they don’t duplicate each other, so readers get to explore a different scenario every time. That keeps things fresh because if authors have created for a long time, as I have, they run the risk of lapsing into staleness, repetitions of previous books, and a dearth of new ideas. But that hasn’t happened, at least so far, to me as this book was an emotionally intensive story to write with one of the weirdest plot premises I’ve ever used. I've put the manuscript aside for a few weeks so I can go back into it with fresh eyes later on and get it ready for beta readers, and I’ll write a full description when I dive back into the story a short time from now.

But just to let you know what it’s about, the story built to a climactic encounter with the villain in which Arielle, inspired by Katia and challenged by Consuela, faced her inner weaknesses and learned to rise past a situation that ate away at her self-esteem and made her bitter. The action takes place in Dorilantz, a country that neighbors Palladia and Belaria but was not visited in the first two books, which has an oppressive regime that still persecutes the EC. When Arielle is chosen for a symbolic ritual called The Princess is Not Pretty, in which she is put on a stage and mocked every day as a way for the two people groups in her country to come to terms, she pretty much gets really frustrated about it. But in choosing the right—yet not natural-feeling decision—to think outside her immediate emotions, she ends up making the world a better place and coming to terms with what she was afraid of.

And the title will be: Celestine Princess. The logic for this naming is simple. The first two Palladia books have titles that begin with the letter C and cover art that shows one girl as the central concept of each book. It keeps the series branding consistent to use these for the third book—title starts with “C” and the emphasis is on the female MC of that book. The title for Consuela also names the MC outright, but City of the Invaders does not mention Katia’s name in the title. So I include Arielle’s identity as the MC in the title (like Consuela) but not her actual name (like Invaders.) I wasn’t sure until the end chapter if this would be the book’s title, but I found it went very well with the book’s ending after all.

Fitting the two girls from the first books into this one in a way that felt believable was one of the big challenges of writing this, but as I worked along towards the conclusion, I did discover that both Katia and Consuela were necessary to represent and portray Arielle’s journey. So I was very pleased about that! When I return to working on the book in a few weeks, I’ll start putting together a street team and that means beta readers. I’m so eager to get some of you reading this book and to hear your thoughts. 😊 Really excited. So stay tuned for that a little while down the road. Meanwhile, I’ve already jumped into a new Palladia story that came into my mind the minute I’d finished typing on Celestine Princess. I’m not yet sure of the length of this story—whether it will be a fourth Palladia book or a short novella/skit to offer as a perma-free download. But I’m working briskly away at it right now.

And there will be more updates.

Writing Palladia 3: I've Got a Protagonist

When I sat down to write the third Palladia book, I looked at a blank screen and a well-worn keyboard. The Word document had nothing on it. It was a white, fat letter-size rectangle that was bigger than the print-formatted files of already published books that I’d been looking at recently. A thought crossed through my head:

“I guess I'm getting back in the game."

Bellevere House, my last book, was written in early 2016. Since 2016, therefore, I hadn’t actually drafted a new story, although I had published Bellevere and done a lot of platform-building. All of my life, I had written stories. Every day—every other day—every month. I had never gone so long without writing a new story, until the last five years. Last year I wrote 3 brief outlines--just broad concepts really, without details, for books I planned for the future. But thinking about a story and writing it are absolutely dissimilar experiences. As I started letting the new characters of Palladia 3 take shape on that Word document, I felt so stiff. I had almost forgotten how to let words just flow out of me in a first draft for fiction. I wanted to edit every few paragraphs. Looking at that screen, I realized that though I had written and written for so much of my existence, I was actually RUSTY! Previously, I’d never been out of commission long enough to be rusty.

But once the story started, from the first page it developed a strong voice that quickly took charge of the narrative. For some of my other books, I drifted through the first drafts as I tried to find how they should be plotted. Palladia #3, burst out with a hefty dose of young adult angst and a protagonist with a pretty specific personality. Many details demanded a style of writing I wasn’t even used to doing—quite physical, visceral angst and fear, a lot of small details like shoes, raindrops on eyelashes, and italicized personal thoughts. The heroine starts out with her home being attacked and it grows into a personal journey for her. She's often panicking or angry or makes poor decisions. Ordinarily, I want to emphasize dialogue and have the characters talk to each other as I hear their voices in my head. I’m an auditory learner. But this MC, Arielle, doesn’t listen to other’s voices very well. She notices physical details and physical things that happen to her. Which is probably fine, since Palladia is a YA series. This third one just took it in the angsty young adult voice direction right from the get-go.

I'd forgotten also how good characters and stories are when they act more like people with minds of their own than like cardboard dolls for an author to prop up, costume, and move around. In the transfer from my head to my keyboard, this book just got a lot more fun.

And there will be more updates.