PROGRESS REPORT

It's been several months since I posted anything here besides book reviews. I've been active in continuing my publishing plan. Ryan and Essie has been out since October and is getting reviews. Incidentally it's also free on January 16 for anyone who hasn't picked it up yet. I deeply value this story, but I'm not sure if I'm going to write more stories in this universe. I've been sorting through my projects and since working on them  I'm developing more sense of direction. Thank you to everyone who did read this story and I would encourage you to read it if you haven't, since Ryan and Essie really reflects my childhood and the unique, isolated world I lived in at that time.
December was a very busy and difficult month for me. I really needed God to pull me through some things that happened during the last year. But around about Christmas, in the midst of other things going on, I published Victoria: A Tale of Spain. Moving the story from an imagined world to Spain in 1714 wasn't challenging, since the world I'd created for the Valley Stories was so detailed. The main alterations came in making Victoria's father a duke, not king of Spain, and in tweaking the relationship between Lucy and Alaina to more mirror Victoria's with Bella. Victoria had a really good January Kindle promotion and has been getting steady readership on KU.
The Prince's Ball is taking more time than I had planned, since it is a much longer book than I remembered. At present it's over 100k, whereas most of my stories run about 20-30k. I had trouble remembering its length because 15 years ago I wrote extremely long chapters! The book had only 10, but each was about 10,000 words! Anyway, I'm going to publish at least 2 books before The Prince's Ball is complete. In the meantime, Consuela and Alyce were renamed the first and second Sherban story and given new covers to archive them as discarded material. They will no longer be available on Kindle after The Prince's Ball is published. I thought about making Consuela a companion story to The Prince's Ball, but opted instead for The Miniature Hamlet, which was written close to the time of The Prince's Ball and suits it in tone.

The Miniature Hamlet is not a parody. It is an inversion--an exploration of Hamlet. During college I dashed it off because I was fed up with the admiring way most textbooks and professors spoke of Hamlet. This guy is crazy, unconstructive, and ends up killing everyone including himself. Far from being a classic figure everyone can admire and relate to, he is a warning about the dangers of becoming pointlessly morbid and self-engrossed. The same holds true for the other characters in the play, who come to tragic ends flatly because they're all very stupid people. But this same stupidity can just as easily become funny as tragic. The Miniature Hamlet follows the scenes and dialogue of Hamlet very closely--in fact, my sisters learned much of Hamlet from it because after reading it for 10 years they felt complete familiar with every situation upon reading the actual play. It's not a mockery of Hamlet--rather, it's a way to appreciate who these characters really are. This analytical attitude suits The Prince's Ball, which constantly plays with and inverts literary tropes and stock situations.
And lastly, a little teaser for my next book, The Test of Devotion, a historical romance set in 1860s Texas. I wrote this story a couple of years ago as an experiment to see if I could meet the strict genre criteria of publishers like Love Inspired. It's much more market-focused than my other publications so far, so it has a few cheesy situations and predictable characters. (And a romance of course--actually two.) But it was fun to write and I'd like to try it out on readers. It should be out in February. Here's the blurb:

Hardy Mexican outlaw Viajero holds a strong suspicion of everything, including religion--until he meets an idealistic former plantation owner on a mission.  Henry Trevalyn's wife has abandoned their marriage and he needs Viajero to help find her.  When their search leads them to an isolated hotel in the wilds of Texas, Viajero knows he has to act fast if lives are to be saved.
 
Jenny Forsythe has a secret. One too many, actually. Working in a hotel in Laredo isn't easy for the daughter of an unpopular missionary.  The hotel has become a hotbed for criminals--and one or two very important guests with vague identities. When two traveling men start asking questions at the hotel, it's only  a matter of time before Jenny finds herself deep in trouble. 
 
Only the healing power of faith and forgiveness can keep her from ending up in the hands of a murderer--and  enable Viajero to find his new friend's wife before it's too late.