Sarah Scheele's Blog, page 9

Bubble, Bubble, Goes the Idea Fountain

Right now I'm part of an all-genre sales bundle for April. All books are $2.99 or less. The sale even includes non-fiction and it's a grab bag of interesting books that might not appear in other, more specialized genre promotions. There are many gems in here, including more cross-genre or unusual books. It’s a very entertaining bundle! My book is Consuela and it is priced at $1.99. There's no pressure to buy (although all the authors would love it if you did) and it’s a great way to find samples of the books on retailers, and scout out authors you'd like to bookmark or follow. Follow this link! ​

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​My next book will be an anthology of shorts—a couple of funny fairy-tale stories, some screenplays satirizing popular entertainment, and an adventure novella about homeschooled kids, called “Movies at the Beach,” which never made it into any other publication. All but one of these have not been published before, though a few were linked as files in blog posts years ago and circulated among friends. (My blog was a very informal affair back then!) The little pieces are roughly middle-grade or younger YA, and just good clean fun. I would think if I was very fortunate they might remind you of the mixture of zany humor and strong emotion in L.M Montgomery’s Chronicles of Avonlea.

​After this book, I have three ideas for the future. I'm just not yet settled on the publicaton order. The first is another historical project, this time set in Scotland. When I found all the stuff I’m putting in the upcoming anthology. I also realized I had many uncompleted, rather crunchy story bits drifting around in manuscript form. These little drafts never went anywhere because they lacked a final element. Something about them just wasn’t coming together. But the Scottish setting (which is a really neat one to work with) gives them the missing piece, which is a strong location in which to place the new story that is exploding on a sudden tangent out of those old scattered bits.

I’ve been up in the air about whether to do a third Palladia book. (To turn City of the Invaders and Consuela into a trilogy.) These two stories were written very close together—6 to 7 years ago. A third book would be written years after the others and my life and audience have changed so much this book might not have consistency. However, the main pro for the idea is that trilogies have a finality that two stories just don’t provide AND that authors do sometimes work on a book in their series much later. These books usually have a different “feeling” to them, but that’s not necessarily bad. So we’ll see.

The third idea is for a Christian fantasy book, for adults. I’ve tried the “Christian” genre label with some of my books before, but they are now happily settling into other genres. One of the reasons several of them lost this label is that they were for young audiences. Many readers of the Christian genre want to read about flawed characters and spiritual themes in books for adults. Writing this genre or reading it does not make you more or less Christian. Many Christians prefer mainstream fiction and those who write Christian fiction want it to be meaningful to non-Christians too. It’s about a particular type of story. And I’ve always wanted to broaden and find the characters in that story.

And there will be more updates.

Day by Day

Because of COVID-19, my trips to town are rare these days. I go mostly to buy a few groceries, especially produce, and the stores are usually out of EGGS and always out of TOILET PAPER. So far the virus has stayed away from my family, but with an outbreak nearby our movements have become very limited. Coronavirus news from close to home and around the world draws my attention each day and I wonder how life could have changed so fast. A few weeks ago I was in the library on a routine visit and now . . . it's closed. 

But while an emergency requires upheaval, another essential part of human life is a sense of normal. Of things that remain in place no matter what. Steady rocks that provide anchors. Whether it’s just watching a favorite movie, finding encouraging prayers and verses online, walking or snuggling pets—anything—doing these things reminds me of a world without COVID-19. It provides perspective. I can remember what things were like before and what they will one day be like again. Even if there are permanent changes, things WILL become a little more normal eventually.

Routines are precious because they link us in a crisis situation to what we were like in an ordinary time before. It keeps us from losing our identity. All over the world, people are trying to keep a sense of normal in the midst of this situation--even doctors and nurses, although their lives are anything but normal right now. Sending these posts to you helps me maintain a bit of my life the way it used to be because I've written and blogged for many years. I trust in each of your lives you are also finding hope in the things that have survived around you. The things you’re still able to do. 
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And hope is what’s always really out there, if we know how to find it.

And there will be more updates.

Central Five: City of the Invaders

This month there’s a promotion running where you can download some great FREE historical fiction books. It features 9 authors and all kinds of historical fiction for kids and adults. The event runs through April 15 and you can steal this chance to not only grab some historicals, but to find some of the authors who are doing this genre. Download by subscribing to author’s newsletters! My book is The Test of Devotion and you can get it along with the other books by entering your email here.
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If that doesn’t work, try this link instead, but only for my book. Be sure to check out the other books too!

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​City of the Invaders shows a near future society that abounds in crime. It is primarily run by crime lords and most people are uneducated pickpockets and kidnappers, though a few have more skilled, technology-based jobs. Non-criminals belong to a minority group called the EC, but that doesn’t mean they just let themselves be run over. After all, in a place where the population of criminals per square mile is truly excessive, you have to understand their thinking to get anything done.

The Garden of Storytelling

My parents have always gardened. Spending my childhood on a farm, my earliest memories are of things growing in the soil and of animals that eat the growing things. Tall corn that’s green when the short waving wheat is golden. Cattle chewing on grass and feed in large square fields separated from me only by a fence. Corner plots of soybeans, acres of yellow canola (grown by somebody else, not us), and the many fruit trees that have come and gone in our orchard. Fruit trees have a limited life cycle, assuming borers don’t get to them even earlier.

Saving Those We Love

With more coronavirus cases reported close to home, grocery shelves stripped bare, and stores and public places closing each day, the pandemic of COVID-19 occupies a large part of my thoughts as it does for everyone these days. No one is free or safe from being affected by this situation, or even from contracting a case of this deadly virus themselves. My thoughts go out to each and every one of you, wherever you may live or however the virus is changing your life right now. Pray for your friends and loved ones, respond to your community’s crisis in a sensitive and wise way, care for those more at risk among you, and never forget to wash your hands!
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"How The Test of Devotion Was Saved,” a little play on words from the classic movie “How the West Was Won,” would be appropriate for talking about my only western story. Very much like the West itself, Devotion’s road hasn’t been easy. It didn’t fit with my other work. Like Victoria: A Tale of Spain it used Spanish-speaking culture as a backdrop, but the stories Devotion most resembled were actually City of the Invaders (with its criminal angle) and Bellevere House (with its use of historical Americana.) These stories already utilized those elements in my work. So I often wondered if Devotion was even necessary.

It was a challenging book for me to write. I couldn’t remember Lanmont’s first name. I couldn’t remember the alias he used for the first few chapters until his identity was revealed. In the middle part of the story, where Arabella was rescued, I found my eyes sliding off the page. I couldn’t concentrate. (Not a great mindset to be in when looking to publish a book!) Even this year, when the book pushed forward a notch, I still had more typos than average for my first drafts. Giving it to an editor got rid of that problem. But it sounds like Devotion was a largely merited flop. It was too late to recover it and maligning of the early launch by readers was pretty fair.

But then . . . some stories take time. They grow in the telling. Slowly, Devotion slipped into place. It didn’t jar as much, I found the material much easier to work with. The character relationships started to make sense, the errors disappeared, and I could see Lanmont more clearly. In fact, he’s one of the best characters. (Even if he is kind of a jerk.) And so The Test of Devotion is not what it used to be. It’s become a really good story. Even with its many flaws, bumpy launch, and gritty, abrasive tone, there's something to love in this book. It's a story of unlikely friends overcoming differences to help someone else out and that's one thing the world always needs more of. Because it was published fairly recently, I’ll be talking about its characters in posts a little bit down the road.

And there will be more updates.

Two Genres Can Actually Be One

Last week I talked about the central five characters that bring a focus to Facets of Fantasy and about how this is one of my oldest--and most interacted-with--books. And this week Facets is part of a giveaway bundle of fantasy books. The giveaway lasts until the end of March and contains a wide diversity of books--epic, high fantasy, coming of age adventure, young adult, fairy tale, mythology-based stories, etc. There are several books I really liked the looks of! You can download as many of these books as you want by subscribing to author's newsletters here. You can also get Facets of Fantasy along with the other books if you want to read it--just enter your email. If that doesn't work, use this link instead to get it directly.

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All of my early books were sci-fi or fantasy. Beginning with the first part of Victoria published as an ebook in 2014, I started to do historical writing which continued for several years. Of my first 5 books, 4 are sci-fi, fantasy, or dystopian. Of my last 4 books, only one is (Ryan and Essie.)

Some people don’t like to read speculative fiction, particularly. They prefer realistic, especially historical, works. So I wanted to try and capture new characters who might be more likely to appear in a realistic setting. It’s not like you’re going to hate my speculative or my historical because they are for entirely different audiences. If I wanted to reach two audiences, I’d have two pen names. Some readers prefer the feel of historical and others prefer sci-fi or fantasy. It’s two ways to tell the same type of story. In fact, I’m open to doing both in the future.

In Consuela, these two sides of my work are almost absurdly manifested. Consuela was originally set in a quasi-historical world (think Disney’s recent Cinderella movie) that it shared with early drafts of Victoria. Later it was unpublished and when it returned, it became part of the City of the Invaders dystopian world. (City of the Invaders is the highlight book for next month, so I will be talking more about it soon.) Consuela remained a comedy story even though that’s not the norm for dystopian. I just felt that it was more emotionally connected to Invaders now than to Victoria, which was steadily moving in its own direction as a historical work set in Spain. But it goes to prove that the bridge between my two main genres is easily crossed. In fact, I'd describe my books as interconnected. That’s why I’m looking forward to publishing more. Every new story adds perspective on the earlier books as well as introducing new characters for readers to play around with.

Central Five: Facets of Fantasy

Facets of Fantasy was the first book many of my readers discovered. It had two editions, different cover tweaks, ebooks and paperbacks published years apart, and at one time it contained both “Millhaven Castle” (which had already appeared in The Birthday Present book) and a shorter version of City of the Invaders. So Facets has been continually molded and changed into the book we see today. It is pared down, in a sense, to a core of 3 stories that never had a life outside of this anthology while others spun out or moved on. Finding the central characters can be tricky when people's original concept of what this book was about included stories that have since moved elsewhere. But these three stories, unlike the others that came and went, really are “fantasy” stories. Even Jurant is space fantasy rather than sci-fi. And they all have an adventure that calls the characters into action whether they want to sit back or not. Doing nothing is never an option when the world—or your family—must be saved.

The central five characters reflect the book’s essence as its identity solidifies. (And about time too. This book has been seriously bopping around for far too long.)

The Past on Fast-Track

During the last 2 1/2 years, I’ve steadily blogged and posted on social media about working on all my previous material. My goal was to develop a coherent label, something people could recognize and feel confident about reading. They would know who I was and what I “offered,” a connection that was lacking in my early publishing years. Everyone drifts at first until they get a handle on something new, including publishing. At least, I really hope this is true—otherwise, I was just a super-clutz at first.

The Changeless Place That Finally Changed

There's a fun promotion running right now where you can get a lot of YA and Children's books for free, including my book, Victoria: A Tale of Spain. The giveaway runs through March 16 and includes a wide diversity of kid's books from preschool to YA. There's something for everyone. Download as many books as you want by subscribing to the author's newsletters here.  If you're already on my newsletter, you can also download Victoria: A Tale of Spain from the promo. Just enter your email. If you run into a problem, use this link instead. And be sure to check out all the other authors at the link in the first paragraph!

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For almost 15 years, A Year with the Harrisons remained the same. The book was begun in 2005, released to some early readers in 2010, and the primary difference when it was finally published in 2018 was that people weren’t as friendly about it as they’d been when reading the manuscript years earlier. A few touch-ups to polish it further and trim a little padding last year were just cosmetic work on a book that had lost its first audience and was now at a standstill. But the story itself remained steady like a heartbeat. In the book, the characters themselves, a family of homeschooled girls, comment on how stationary their world is. Their home, visited by their aunt 40 years ago as a teenager, is just the same when she steps back into it.

But this year, the Harrison time-warp finally isn’t there anymore. Something really changed. It used to be a very bouncy, cheerful sort of book, packed with slightly cartoonish, slice-of-life incidents. (Think Dickens, since 19th-century novels were an inspiration for writing the Harrisons.) And that content is still there, but somehow A Year with the Harrisons has become very quiet. Letty, the heroine, seems to have changed a lot more than just her age shooting down from the first draft. She had been a college girl and now was in high school—not a huge change and mostly made to market the book a little younger since I publish a lot of books with that angle. But Letty is . . . different. After all these years of working with the character, I feel as if I suddenly don’t know her.

Betty, Letty's father’s cousin, helms the second half of the story, which is about Mr. Harrison’s side of the family. I included her to give a small-town flavor to the community where the Harrison girls live. Originally Betty seemed a bit cynical, a working woman and a rather bored single mother managing her life. But lately it seems there’s more to her plot than that. Her interest in the homeschooling family is shown in the first chapter and while it’s not aggressive, I’d call it watchful. Observant of them. Every time she sees Letty, she asks her questions—to which Letty replies off-handedly, not aware that Betty might be watching her family. Letty’s lack of insecurity about this means she and Betty are pretty cordial considering they have little in common and Betty is much older.

And that’s just one of the relationships. In A Year with the Harrisons, something is not what it used to be. People have gone from this quiet story—but they’ve been replaced by someone else.
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And there will be more updates.

Central Five: The Birthday Present

This Friday (the 14th) Bellevere House will be $0.99 along with other books in The Vintage Jane Austen. Since a lot of you won't see this until Saturday, I'll keep the discount price for my book through the 15th. I don't know how many of the other series books will still be on sale, but you can look around. Here's the Amazon link for Bellevere and once you're there you can find the other books by clicking on the VJA series.

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The two stories in The Birthday Present book go together even though they look dissimilar. One is angsty-looking sci-fi—but it’s not really as depressing as it seems and has a happy ending. And the other is a comedy about a Cinderella-type girl who goes to a prince’s ball, but it doesn’t work out the way it’s supposed to in the fairy tale. But what makes them similar is they’re about daring escapes, just enough comedy, and a feeling of removal into a world that’s not yours. The heroes have improbable successes in which they find a way out of situations when you really thought they were tied in a box. And with a high proportion of interesting main characters, most of the central figures really do carry the story.  (Unlike in some of my other books, where side characters took off.) 

So, to capture all that daring escape etc emotion into five characters:

Alyce is the girl who went to a Cinderella-ball that ended up comically wrong. Once she discovers the Prince is the most selfish letdown in the history of princes, she manages to deal with it in a way that’s more amusing for the readers than it is anything else. It’s hard for the Prince to use her in a political scheme because he has no understanding of her personality.

Lord Harry, of course, ought to provide a bit of a solace as he is the Prince’s younger brother and he does actually like Alyce a great deal. But he’s not good at showing it because he’s a bit self-absorbed and not a good listener. He really ISN’T and this is something Alyce notices about him, but she likes him anyway because he does sincerely help her while she’s at the castle.

Lucy takes life seriously. And she has this hard-to-describe relationship with a man who is like a brother to her. Although he was against humans for a time, as he is not human, he and Lucy also have a lot in common because people can view her as a challenge to their status quo and someone they feel distant from, as they do him.

Emperor Aure is a super-powered humanoid called a GMF. His almost endless youth and strength meant he was impossible to get rid of. He was also a surprisingly fierce person and when he opposed humans, he was a menace. Although very old he still looks young and can communicate with Lucy, who he calls his “little sister,” because of their shared background.

Ralph is a boy from Alyce’s village. Like everyone in this town, he knows only other people from the village. He complains all the time and is never up to dealing with situations. Alyce barely notices him, but her friend Lulu freaks him out by pretending to want to date him. Ralph isn’t quite what he looks like—at least, for his sake I hope not!

And there will be more updates.