Sarah Scheele's Blog, page 6

My Books in Libraries

This Merry Summertime is now available for sale on several retailers besides Amazon. It joins the 9 other books already distributed via Draft2Digital. You can find it listed at B&N, iBooks, Kobo, and more. Click this link to see some of the stores where the book can be found. It will actually be available in more places, but some of them have longer publishing times (meaning the book takes longer to list there) or they don't have easily accessible links because you have to plug into their system to view content.

Library distributors like Overdrive and Bibliotheca are among the outlets that take an additional week or two to publish content, so I'll notify you when MerrySummer hits library ebook shelves. Meanwhile, all of my other books have been library-accessible for over a year. Reading ebooks at the library is really easy. You can check them out just like regular books except you read them on your phone. You return them by clicking a button—or they will return into the system automatically when their time is up. Audiobooks are also available to check out through library systems, if you like audiobooks, along with loads of ebooks. My library uses the Bibliotheca system—many others use Overdrive or a different system. Bibliotheca doesn’t have a browsable website of titles (that I could find anyway), but if your library uses Bibliotheca just log into its app with your library card.

Having my books available in library systems doesn’t mean you can automatically borrow them. The library has to purchase them first. But they are available for the library to buy because I’ve listed them in some of the sites that libraries use to buy books. If you’d like to check out one of my ebooks through the library, you can search for it using your library ebook app and then hit a button that requests for the library to buy it. There’s not a guarantee it will be bought, but libraries often fulfill requests from their patrons, and then you and others can enjoy the book for free through the library.

And there will be more updates.

Central Five: A Year with the Harrisons

A Year with the Harrisons was published on retail sites fairly recently, but had an appearance as a weekly serial years before. It was a rambling story with lots of incidental moments that have gradually fallen by the wayside, but a lot of its situations are still quite relevant and its theme has always been stable--it describes a big extended family who might be a little out of the mainstream but who are really just like everybody's family. They’re not the only relatives to squabble, to feel more different from each other than they are, and to have a busybody aunt. And because of that every reader can see a lot of their own parents, cousins, and siblings in these characters.

The five central characters:

Brenda occupies a central place in the story and activates whole areas of the plots, influencing directly or indirectly almost every other character. A vibrant and talented musician who wears the concept of “star” like others wear perfume, she might be a little controlling, a little self-absorbed—at times, even a little teensy bit full of herself. Maybe?

The Way of Reviewing

During the next five weeks, The Birthday Present will be available as part of a review promotion for fantasy books. Free copies of 30 books are available for you to download and help out the authors (and potential readers) by sharing your opinion. Reviews are most important for authors and one of the hardest things to get, so if you'd like to participate all these authors would be grateful! Here's link to get started browsing.

This is a limited-time promotion. I have also created a permanent "Review Copies"  page on my website where you can find review copies for The Test of Devotion, Facets of Fantasy, and A Year with the Harrisons. I encourage you to check it out--just remember that there is an obligation to put up a review for these books if you take the review files. Nobody likes hit-and-run reviewers who download books and then evaporate.

Reviews are hard for authors to feel comfortable with sometimes, but I've grown to appreciate them. I enjoy reading reviews for a variety of things and it's a great feeling to have real people speaking about the product and expressing how they feel. They are all such individuals it's like having a window into a person's mind and in addition to adding some buzz about the item at hand (such as a book, for example) it just shows the diversity and transparent humanity of who's getting involved. And books are meant to be human, after all. They are about human experiences!

And there will be more updates. ​

In a Nutshell: Viajero and Jenny

Digging deeper into The Test of Devotion always brings rewards, as I found when I returned to the first draft last year. It has such a great plot, in which interlocking characters pursue separate journeys with one goal in mind—what to do about beautiful, possibly out-of-her-depth, rebellious Arabella. It has POV characters for both sides of the plot, and we switch back and forth between them pretty systematically. Outside of Devotion, the only other novel where I've used multiple POV is Harrisons, but its function is merely practical for incidents that the narrators (Betty or Letty) might not be able to show if I used just one of them. In Devotion the two plots frame each other and head towards one conclusion, swirling around Arabella, so we follow two teenagers who are approaching the story from different angles.

Viajero is a boy who is born and raised into the outlaw lifestyle, since his father is an outlaw. He also likes it pretty well and views it as a dashing role in society, which causes him embarrassment gradually as he meets new people while finding Arabella and he learns that becoming a criminal is not really an admired life decision. After he is hired by Arabella’s boyfriend to help him navigate an unfamiliar western landscape in search of her, we follow Viajero’s view on the adventure instead of Trevalyn’s.

Jenny, similarly, is a girl who is viewed as a helpful figure around Arabella and balances the Viajero/Trevalyn chapters with feminine situations in a hotel where she spends time with Arabella as a companion/assistant/friend. Her father, who runs the hotel where Arabella is staying, isn’t very popular and Jenny is self-conscious about her role in society, unlike Viajero. Although not formally hired by Arabella as an attendant, she rapidly becomes one and we follow her efforts to help the attractive protagonist get out of danger.

And there will be more updates.

That Mysterious Future

The Palladia series began with a small novella—which grew into a standalone book—which eventually got joined to another standalone book that had been written separately—which is now developing yet another book after it. This new book, like everything else about Palladia, is taking a direction I hadn’t foreseen and hadn’t particularly wanted it to have at first.

​I posted a while back on possible ideas for this story, which included a fun, rather juvenile-feeling sort of romp in the outer-space colony of Alphea. And, as happened for what feels like the thousandth time, the story moved itself forward in a quite different direction. Towards the hidden past of the EC instead. There’s a character called Meldono who is mentioned briefly in Invaders as the “founder of the EC,” at a time that appears to be about a hundred years from now and two hundred years in the past from the time of Invaders. Nothing else is mentioned about this man except that he had been an Invader who took the side of the EC and Katia looks at a statue of him.

City of the Invaders was never really my personal favorite of the books I’ve written, nor was Consuela. I enjoy working on every story at the time, but like all authors it’s hard not to feel particularly fond of some for whatever reason—personal emotions, association with a family event or a special location, a feeling of achievement in showing a character or social issue, etc. As I mentioned last month about Victoria’s King Felipe, he’s a little bit a favorite character of mine. But I’ve never felt that way about any of the characters in these two books. In fact, I wrote Consuela as a filler and then dismissed it as a dud. It looks a bit different now when compared to its original, silly first draft even though the story components weren’t changed very much. But the series gradually, slowly develops more on its own arc than in line with my feelings about it. It's a little bit humbling, actually.

When I draft new ideas, working on another aspect of the Palladia world is never a priority for me. It just keeps occurring to me. And the EC’s origins were not a concept that I first thought of as having any mystery to them. They were just a plot device to get these kids to be in a stalemate with a majority group—so the kids have to be in a minority group, right? But once the idea appeared of Meldono possibly coming back to life and when alive he’s not much like the EC legends said he was, the third book’s brainstorming started to change. A lot. I guess sometimes you can write a story without knowing what it’s about at first—and then, more and more, you find out.

And there will be more updates.

Computers and Cliches

I'm pretty experienced at using a computer, websites, and the internet. So much of my book marketing, my social life, and my writing itself (using things like Microsoft Word) is constructed around these channels. But that doesn't mean there aren't times when computers think they own me and not the other way around. A few weeks ago I was going through all the form fields of a book promotion website as I filled in data for the site to host one of my books as a listing, with a link to a freebie. But my computer insisted on downloading a massive, mandatory update while I just sat staring at it. Anyone who has used the internet or a laptop much knows how this feels.

Anyway, when the computer was working again, I lost the data in the website’s form several times when I accidentally pressed something. It cleared back to the original page I’d started from, leaving me having to start over. After a little while of this—I know it probably sounds funny, but it's stressful at the time—I did things in extremely small stages. First the book’s name. Make sure I select my author profile from a list because it won’t select automatically. Make sure the keyboard isn’t adding extra, irrelevant letters to the book’s name or to my name. Copy and paste the link to the free files, then go BACK into it and upload a cover and a link to what to read next if you finish my download . . . you get the idea.

And then I was finally able to use a little feature on this site. It has an engine for adding common tropes (cliché plot elements that often appear in fiction) and story settings to help describe your book. Now this was so massively helpful that I was glad I did all that other stuff before. There was a drop-down list of possible terms and it wasn’t just fun to scroll through and see common story devices: “Oh, I’ve certainly seen that one!” It helped me click on a few of my own. I saved all of the filters that I selected to share with you. This covers a LOT of the topics that appear in my books, even if the trope appears in only one book.


Plot Tropes
Chosen One; Coming of Age; Different Worlds Romance; Dystopian; Estranged Families; Fairy Tale Retelling; Family Drama; Futuristic Tech; Interstellar Travel; Monarchy; Second Chances

Character Tropes
Action Girl; Anti-Hero; Amateur Sleuth; Damsel in Distress; Celebrity/Musicians; Magical/Enchanted People; Outsider MC; Pastor/Minister/Church Elder; Royalty

Setting Tropes
17th Century; 19th Century; 20th Century; 21st Century; Ancient; Contemporary; High School; Historical; Rural; Space; United States; Europe

And there will be more updates.

Central Five: Bellevere House

Bellevere House is a reworking of a classic novel (Mansfield Park by Jane Austen) and the source material has a sizable influence on what plots and characters appear in the book. It’s a soap opera in which the characters run a pretty big gamut of situations. Like all Austen's novels, knotted family situations and complex romantic character development are given free rein to grow, and Mansfield Park is by nature a complicated type of story. Austen's fearlessness encouraged me to examine situations I hadn't written about before and took me out of my usual storytelling to broaden my writing.

After I worked with them, these Central Five Characters became a little bit mine as well as Austen’s. But you can definitely still recognize that they were once hers.

Uncle Warren is the head of the Haverton family. He is unusually wealthy for the Depression era and is sometimes a threatening figure to others, since he is rather self-centered and motivated by what he feels is a “bigger picture” instead of individual feelings. While far from the world's best dad, he does genuinely try to be involved with his children's lives—like Sir Thomas, who is an imperfect but often misunderstood Austen father.

Aunt Cora is the middle-aged sister of Uncle Warren’s wife. She lives with the Haverton family and spends all her time doing—well, basically nothing. In the past, she was a devious and active woman who got situated around her rich relatives. She was also very much full of herself and now she doesn't quite know when to stop getting on people's nerves, which makes her a really funny character.

Horace was inspired by Henry Crawford, one of Austen’s most dashing and frustrating characters. It’s understandable why the talented young Henry has wowed whole generations of fans, but he has real limitations that contribute to his demise. In Bellevere, Horace Carter embraces religion as a path to gain social acceptance after moral transgressions, sharing Henry’s inability to quite understand those he wishes to be near.

Faye is Uncle Warren’s niece. A quiet young woman, she comes from a poor family and while she's not angsty about it, she acknowledges the social reality of her position and gains from being useful to those around her. Otherwise, she has few opinions on the lives of others, simply trying to deal with opportunities or challenges as they present themselves. But you certainly shouldn't make her mad, as her cousin Ed finds out when awkward efforts to flirt with her by being rude backfire.

Jane Watson appears as a thread in all the VJA retellings. She’s a concept of what Austen might have been like had she lived in the 1930s and although she only appears for a couple of scenes in Bellevere, she is very meaningful. The variations on her differ from book to book, but all agree that she is a strong person and keenly observant without being petty. Family, community, and feminism are all important qualities to her and her work as a journalist makes her objective.

And there will be more updates.

Applying Archetypes: Part 2

Last month I did the first part of this post, which explained why I compared my books to certain Disney Princess movies. It wasn’t a final definition so much as a first step towards outlining some basic identity for the books. The first step of many, I hope! These are really tiny ideas, but that’s how babies learn to walk—they are small and they start moving. There are so many books I broke the post into 2 parts. Here’s the first post if you missed it. This one continues with the next five books:
​The Test of Devotion is a really action-packed story that emphasizes the adventure over drama or comedy, which gives it a distinctive character among my books. So what’s similar about Mulan is it has the main character going off to war, which is very gritty and exciting and provides lots of action.Bellevere House runs along on its own thing among my works because it was designed to fit into a multi-author series concept. It uses the early 20th-century as a backdrop. Anastasia was originally made by a different studio from the other princess movies, so its idiosyncrasy suits it to this book, and it is set in the vintage era as well.A Year with the Harrisons, like Sleeping Beauty, is based on relationships that are all set up before the story starts. Older people influence the young people quite a bit and help to dictate what happens, similar to how the actions of royal parents, the three fairies, and Maleficent determine the situations in which Aurora finds herself.Ryan and Essie is about antagonism between worlds and between people who are different from each other and it’s about valuing everyone’s life and destiny. These themes appear in Pocahontas too and also Pocahontas herself is a spiritual and idealistic person.This Merry Summertime is a light-hearted book. It’s just really comedy and doesn’t have a lot of serious things in it. Family relationships are central to it, but they are shown in a youthful way. Brave, obviously, has a spunky tone and a bit of lack of seriousness and it’s one of the more juvenile princess movies.
And there will be more updates.

In a Nutshell: Victoria and King Felipe

Those who have read a number of the monthly posts that delve deeper into the characters in each of my books already know that the first of these posts started way back in February. But what’s true about these characters is that there are so many of them, with interlocking little relationships over the (now 10!) books, that discussing just a few of them is like scratching the surface of one of those gift cards where you peel off the silver to see the redemption code. But—well, if you’ve ever owned a gift card and I have to say they are one of my favorite things—after all that scratching you find something you really want to see!

Anyway, the two characters highlighted for Victoria: A Tale of Spain today are the protagonist, this brave young girl who’s sort of a classic heroine in a picturesque setting like 1600s Spain. And of course the villain, King Felipe, who is set against her, and who grew from the idea of a similar character in “Millhaven Castle.” Like Lord Timson, he summons a girl to his castle to protect his throne and plans to set her up. And like Lord Timson he has his work cut out for him.

Victoria is the next-to-youngest of 6 daughters of a Spanish duke. It’s a family very, very much full of girls under the semi-watchful eye of their parents. One sister has run off to get married and the oldest sister kind of has a supervisory position at times. So it’s a bit reminiscent of Pride and Prejudice in terms of the family dynamic and this dynamic is extremely important to Victoria. It's her family that’s in danger and she’s the one who ends up finding a solution. She’s an innocent, spunky girl who proves pretty resourceful when this situation opens up in front of her.

King Felipe is the villain with a 100% chance of failure. And what’s fun about him is that he’s like a real person who's quite insecure. He’s not particularly handsome or interesting although he was born in high circles of life and he’s actually very aware of it. His hysteria over some long-buried factoid about the throne comes from his lack of confidence as a person and whether he deserves what he has. He’s also bad at scheming—fortunately for Victoria and her sisters. But he’s a really funny character and makes the plot zip along once he shows up halfway through.

And there will be more updates.

Thoughts on Now, Then, and Tomorrow

I loved preparing the stories in MerrySummer for publication, but it actually takes just as much work to revise and republish an older book as it does to create a new one. And it’s a more analytical process. The fun of exploring a whole new world of ideas isn’t there like it will be with something being discovered for the first time. However, I cut a lot of fluff from “Movies at the Beach” and tweaked “Sarcophagus” and “A Matter of Life and Hair” slightly to make them more generalized instead of referring to a specific book as they had in a few places. "Movies at the Beach" was really a short story concept and it shrank naturally as I fitted it for the anthology because it had been a little wordy before--I had tried, long ago, to lengthen it into a standalone. But reworking also takes creative effort, since it's impossible to remove a sentence without thinking of something to replace it and next thing you know you're rewriting instead of just doing  a few cosmetic changes. Channeling this creative effort into MerrySummer made me look forward even more to brainstorming new projects.

Writing is in some ways my entire life—not excluding more important concepts like religion or giving too much priority to something transient like the effect of a fictionalized world on an audience’s mind. But it is something I focus on all the time, with this desire to bring these imagined places before people’s attention until they respond to them, until they feel—“Yes, that’s real. That interests me because the concepts are just a reflection of what I see around me or what I’d like to see around me in the case of something fantastical or out-there.” So I guess I began to lament that MerrySummer hadn’t made it into a formal state quite a few years before. Because I was torn between on the one hand thinking—“I suddenly realize these stories have got to be there too,” and then thinking—“But that will delay the other things I’m working on by another year at least.”

However, the great thing about telling stories, and the rewarding thing about it, is that they exist for a reason. Every story ever written, not that anyone could possibly keep track of how many there have been, was based on an audience's need at one time. Maybe the need for that story didn’t last very long, like even less than a year or just a few months or so. But while it was there, the story existed for a reason. Some stories, of course, catch a nerve in audiences that makes them last much longer because they express a greater or longer-lasting need. So getting a perspective on all stories as a really vital form of expression, I look at MerrySummer not as yet another older story—or set of little stories in this case, but they string together-- I’ve polished up a bit while there are so many other ideas waiting. You have to think—“It meets a need right now. It has a reason to be out there.” And then I feel very proud of it.

And there will be more updates.