Project Sneak Peeks
If you’ve been following me for a while, you might dimly remember my very first post from waaay back in 2021. In that post, I talked a bit about stuff that I’d been working on back then. When I tried to think about a blog post to write for this month, I remembered that very first one, and thought it would be fun to do that again. Talk about some current projects, and see what became of the ones from 2021.
Right now, I have three things that I’m working on, though I’m using that definition loosely for at least one of these.
The first is The Warlord’s Healer, a planned romantasy trilogy. This will be the first serialised story I’ll be publishing. I’ve had my share of attempts before, I think every fantasy writer starts out with that one grandiose plan for a fifteen-book epic until they realise sooner or later how terrible an idea this is for an early project. So I worked my way through a few standalones before I decided to tackle this three-book story. We’ll be following Kisha, who gets sent to a warlord as a personal healer in exchange for protection; and Velika, the warlord in question, who is struggling with a curse that’s been put on her, and searching for a way to break it. There will be scheming, betrayals, battles, and of course romance.
I’ve been playing around with these characters for a bit before I started writing, and I think it’ll be a lot of fun to write and read. There are some dynamics outside of the romance that I enjoy a lot, specifically the way Ranik interacts with Velika, and later how he’ll grow to have this cautious alliance-friendship with Kisha. Before everything goes horribly wrong, that is :>
The second book is the space horror I’ve mentioned here and there before. It was supposed to come out this year, but then I had a period of being stuck in the muddy middle, followed by an exhausting summer due to personal reasons, and before I knew it it was the end of September, I’d released BLADE OF THE CROWN, and the horror was nowhere near finished. It’s still an active project though, albeit one that probably needs some bigger rewrites. I’ve recently started to think it might work better in the novella format, so that’s what I’ll be trying out over the winter.
The third one is relatively new. I say relatively because it’s been floating around my notes for quite some time, but mostly as a pile of disjointed character notes and plot points. Then, as you do, I had a Shower Thought, went ahead and picked it all apart, put the previous protagonist and her love interest into an entirely different story and pulled new ones from my general notes file. One of the supporting characters came from a different abandoned idea, and then the story sees the return of Roslyn, our trans lady knight from The Alchemy of Love, which I shelved a few years back. I think she’s a much better fit for her role in this story.
The overall vibe I’ll be going for with this one is, as I put it on Bluesky, what if the Elder Scrolls was really, really gay, and the people whose job it is to save the world were the world’s most chaotic bisexuals? Right now this thing is tentatively planned to be multiple books, not sure how many, and in the detailed notes stage. Meaning I’ll be developing characters, constructing the general plot, and working out the broad details of the world. So it’s still a few years away from seeing the light of day.
Well, now we know what happened to The Alchemy of Love. I plundered it for parts, essentially.
A Thousand Suns has been shelved for now. I still like the idea, but it never really felt quite right. It stalled out at around 25,000 words, and I never got back into it.
Infinite Empires, however, is still on the table. Still nowhere near “main project” status, and considering that it’s science-fantasy, as opposed to regular fantasy, I’m not sure what to do with it. It’s a candidate for a new pen name, but that’s not a priority right now.
As for Chasing Eden, this one… Okay, I strictly speaking can’t blame it for the three additional story ideas that have popped up since that all fit broadly into the same dystopia/post-apocalypse genre. But it did play a massive part. I’ve since put together a concept for a pen name in that genre, and Chasing Eden would definitely fit there much better than it would this name. But I wouldn’t want to launch a pen name with a single book to publish under it, so for now, all four of those books are on the back burner. Notes, yes – actively working on it, no.
And with that, I’ll leave you this gloomy November. As a parting gift, enjoy a little glimpse into the first draft of The Warlord’s Healer.
If Pjetra had been intimidating, Kisha needed a stronger word for Kholat’s warlord herself. Lady Velika wasn’t as tall, but she more than made up for that in bulk around her shoulders. She wore her dark blonde hair in a braid, parts woven back along the side of her head, exposing sharp cheekbones with a dusting of freckles, and a pair of piercing green eyes. When those eyes landed on her, Kisha felt a turmoil in her gut. That was Lady Velika, then. The woman who now held all their lives in her hands.
A formidable woman indeed, that Lady Velika.
See you in December!
– Cara
BLADE OF THE CROWN is available in paperback and through Kindle Unlimited! Get swept away with a princess and her royal guard as they find themselves stranded on a strange island, trying to find their way home – and into each other’s arms.
