What's on the Writing Table: The Valespian Pact Update

Over the last couple of weeks I've made some changes to the blog. I have been working on The Valespian Pact and have been reviewing the information on the series (and there was so much I was staggered by the amount). I wanted to ensure I have all the details and such in place so that I can go forward, and along the way I discovered I needed to do more world building.

As I was compiling and updating the species list I decided to designate Thursday blogs as Pact Days. On that day of the week I'll share the updates. 

I also decided that I would work on a few flash fictions to help me with character development so that the last four books of the series were more cohesive. It was there I started working on Prince Mestor and Warlord Sohm'lan who has a rocky relationship seen throughout the rest of the series. But their romance started in Striker and  thought I'd put a couple of flash fictions together so I'd have something to push off of when I got to their scenes in the books. 

That didn't work out like I thought it would. I'd anticipated only needing to write two flash fictions. The two scenes in my head turned into eight. I realized I could easy have a novella for them that could be a side story within the series. I can't give them a HEA in that side because the rest of their relationship is interwoven in the plot, but I could give them a HFN. So after this coming Friday, you won't see any more flash fictions for those two. I'm working on a list of other FFs I can write instead. 

So instead of the following list of books in the series... 

#1 - Alpha Trine - Zeus, Dargon, and Alpha

#2 - Striker - Zeus, Dargon, and Alpha

#3 - Bespoken - Prometheus, Malek, and Vipre

#4 - Chosen - Axis & the Chimera triplets

#5 - Boundless - Madux & Star Eater

#6 - Legends - Prometheus, Malek, and Vipre

I will be adding one more... Well, or so I thought until I started considering some things. I've been working on Bespoken off and on this year. Molly's death in January sent me on a downward spiral and I had a difficult time creating. For months I couldn't finish anything. What I did write was rather dark and bordered on depressing. So I concentrated on editing and working on stories that were already written or did world building on projects that were on the table.

These past couple of weeks I've really enjoyed writing about Sohm'lan and Mestor. The first time in months I'm happy writing. It has been almost a year since something that I wrote made me as happy as Sohm and Mestor did. 

You see, October of last year was when we found out Molly was dying of cancer. For the last couple of years, I've struggled in October because two years earlier my father was diagnosed with cancel in October as well. He then passed in November of the same year. Needless to say, I sorta hate the month of October. Since I found out Molly was dying this time last year, my writing mojo has been inconsistent, to say the least. But the last two months I've been feeling steadily better (so much better). The dark part of me is cackling because we just got dumped into October again, the month that I get morose and weepy. But if I learned anything over the last couple of years was to acknowledge the pain. I won't shun it or try to hide it because it will rear it's ugly head and try to eat me later. 

So I will give a respectful nod to the sorrow that I will experience this month, but I will also give voice to the things that bring me joy. The past two weeks Mestor and Sohm'lan have made me weirdly happy and the move to give them a novella feels right. I haven't finished or submitted anything this year and I was beginning to think I wouldn't have anything done before the end of the year. Subbing Mestor and Sohm's story will make me feel good, like I finally accomplished something this year. So there is a novella added to the book line up.

#2.25 - Constant (Prince Mestor and Warlord Sohm'lan)

On the coattails of the idea of subbing a novella for those two, I turned my thoughts to Bespoken. If you've read my blog this year when I've talked about writing Bespoken, you'll know that the story is going to be Loooonnnngggg. It is divided into three parts: Lost, Spies, and Reunion.

Then I read some reviews for Releasing Chaos. I don't want to say that I doubted what I'd written on Bespoken because for me it was essential to show the story of how both Prometheus and Zeus were lost. Things happened during that time that important to know for the series. But just because I thought it was pertinent and would give the reader a great grasp of what was going on didn't mean that readers would like it or even care to read about. People don't like to read about kids in their romances. They don't like more than two or three POVs. They don't like reading POVs from kids. Nothing wrong with it. I don't like reading about a slave as a romance interest. We all have preferences.

The first part of Bespoken tells Prometheus's story about how he became lost and since he was there for Zeus's birth, how Zeus was "lost" as well. In Part One: Lost, the story starts when Prometheus is five and ends when he is twelve-ish. There is more than three POVs. They aren't frivolous but from characters who have a part to play through the series. The book Bespoken is different from the two books that came before and the two books that come after. Those focused on romantic couples and the events around them. Bespoken straddles a very large time period and all of it is about Prometheus or pertains to Prometheus. The timeline covers events that happened before Alpha Trine, then has events that happened at the end of Striker, and then hits the present day with the reunion for Prometheus, Vipre, and Malek. What happens in Part One of Bespoken begins the relationship building between the three crown princes. Part Two: Spies links events of One and Three. For me, all these parts in concert enhance the story. 

But while I was talking to my FB group about what I should or shouldn't have in a story, I realized that while I do write romance, the romance isn't the plot. I love reading and writing meaty stories with a good plot and an awesome yummy romance on the side. I like stories that have families who are vivid and part of the story. I like including all kinds of love. The love between the MC and their friends, the love of a family, the adoration of siblings, the love and pride in who we are.

I am considering splitting up Bespoken, though I'm not sure that it can be done. If it can, the content of the books won't fall within the lines of the publisher's required submission content and I'd have to self-pub. I don't know. I'm on the fence about it. If I do go head and break up the book, then there will be additional books.

#2.5 - Lost

#2.75 - Spies

I might wait and see if these sections can stand on their own. What I need is to meet up with my local author friends and have a discussion of the pros and cons of the situation. It's seriously bugging me.

Well! There is the news on The Valespian Pact and the general state of my well being. Y'all have a great day!

Thank you for stopping by and reading!!

The Ups and the Downs

Hey guys.

I thought I'd give an update of what I'm up to. This exercise is mostly for me, to keep myself... I guess you could say focused. Mourning is crappy with stuff like focus. I'm having a hard time following conversations. My poor husband. I keep asking him to repeat stuff. There is a part of me that just not home and I lose track of a lot stuff other than conversations. 

I'm still so very tired. The bad dreams are there and sometimes my mind just doesn't shut down. I keep thinking about Molly and those last days. There's this part of me that knows I couldn't have done more but there's also the other part that is micro-analyzing everything that happened, always questioning. So, I've been trying to keep busy.

Last week I blogged about Salvaging Toby's Heart and asked for suggestions/comments. I'd figured the "dusting off" would be quick but some really good suggestions came in and the fleshing out I'd thought would be around 10k looks like it will be a bit more. :) 

So I dug out my binder for the book... You know when I write a story by the seat of my pants when the binder only has a character list and two pages of story ideas. The rest of it was the first draft of the story. LOL! I'm creating a new binder the will include detailed character pages and outlines for what I want to add. The new binder will also house the info on the other books I'll add to the series.

Funny that. I never meant Salvaging Toby's Heart to be a part of a series. At the time, I didn't see any romances for any of the other characters until I wrote a flash fiction for Max last year. Then a possible plot came to me for Wolf. (A warning for the strictly MM readers, Wolf's story will be MMF. That's how he rolls. :)

Now I'm sitting here looking at a few more stories to add to my board as well as making Toby's better. But this is not something I'm going to work on exclusively because I still have Bespoken and an upcoming due date for Lucky Charm.

Before everything happened, I'd set aside the month of February to put Lucky Charm together, and I'm going to keep to that schedule the best that I'm able. I don't want to wait until the last minute to get the story written. I get too flustered, stressed, and anxious when trying to write on a deadline so best get it done now even though I'm struggling with words that aren't darkly emotional. But Lucky Charm has one character, Navinder, who is darkly emotional so I began pouring words into his narrative. I completed almost 600 words on Sunday and today I'm up to 2400. Whoot! I'll take it considering I haven't written anything for more than three weeks.

Annnndddd... I'm transcribing Bespoken. I have more than 55k (one third of the story) to type up. I'm struggling with this too because I usually edit as I go. I have to be careful otherwise what I'm adding is dark and negative. So that's slow going, but still going.

I'm not stuck, just not going anywhere fast.

When not at my desk staring at the screen, I've been cooking. Not that cooking isn't something I normally do... mostly. Admittedly, Jason does a good portion of the cooking for us. Usually when I do cook, it's uncomplicated and simple. The more upset I am the more I cook complicated dishes. Jason said he could always gauge me by what I do in the kitchen. Last week, he threw his hands up in the air when he brought home a list of ingredients from the grocery store for another detailed dish. (That one turned out fantastic.) "You're unhappy. Go write on your book." At the time, I couldn't. Nothing was coming and I told him so. We've had sandwiches for dinner the last couple of nights, and strangely, he's very happy with that. :) Go figure.

There have been ups and downs. I know this. My father's passing two years ago taught me a lot about the stages of grief. This time around I'm not constantly wondering when I'll feel like my old self. I know that it will come eventually, to have patience and allow myself to grieve. I no longer worry that it's too much or that I've been mourning for too long. When Dad passed, I thought I had to keep pushing and pretending everything was okay because at sometime it would really be okay. I'd fake it until I got there. Now I know I shouldn't push or pretend. It's okay to cry as much a I need to. It's okay if I don't accomplish anything but getting out of bed. It's okay if I spend the day out of the house doing absolutely nothing.  Today was a balmy 61 degrees, overcast and windy and all I wanted to do was spend time in the backyard and listen to the wind blow through the boughs of the trees. All of it's okay. If I only read through my series notes or only transcribe 200 words or review my to-do before I leeave the office for the day, that's all right, too. 

Thank you for stopping by and reading!!

When Did I Become Superstitious? #Bespoken

It wasn't until after my first several books were published that I started to become superstitious about writing. It was as if every time I made a statement, something would happen to counter the statement. And I was left looking like an idiot.

"Woo-hoo! I'm rocking! I should be done with this ms in a couple of weeks."

Murphy's Law strikes. Three months later I'm still trying to slog through the last 20k.

"I'm going to have this self-published by the end of the year... January... February..." 

Murphy goes up to bat. Kapow! Blam! Smash! 

"Forget what I said. I have no idea when I will have this self-pubbed. Live revolving around the story is not co-operating."

(Murphy cackles with sadistic glee because I'm now his bitch.)

I'm terrified to talk about my writing project because watch, I'll get writer's block or suddenly I don't want to work on this project anymore. It's happened, and now I'm sorta superstitious about the process. I'll announce I've started a project and then won't say anything else because that bastard Murphy will just love to throw a wrench into my work. I don't talk about the first 30k because 75% of the time I'll hate it and end up trashing it. It's happened time and again. Both Dragon's Eye and Releasing Chaos was like that. I scrapped three versions of Releasing Chaos until the story clicked.

Admittedly, I was a little scared the same would happen to Bespoken. I'd anticipated story being long because there was so much going on that needed to be covered. I estimated the word count to be around 100k (groan) and believed that was enough. But writing this first 30k, which I'm keeping by the way, no re-do here, I realize that this is going to be longer than 100k and told in 3 parts. (The 3 is wrecking havoc on me because the small part of me that is OCD wants it to be 4 parts for no other reason than 4 is an even number. I'm trying to stick with three. We'll see how that works out.)

I'm dividing the ms in three parts because Bespoken covers three specific times in Prometheus's life: Betrayed, Lost, and Reunion. Right now, at just over 30k, Prometheus is still five years old. I kinda worried about this for a while because it's 30k and the boys haven't grown up. But this is where the answer to the question, "Why is Prometheus the better Bespoken?" is answered. Plus a couple of other burning questions which I'm not giving away. So This part of the story must be told, plus it's showing instead of telling how Prometheus, Vipre, and Malek bond. 

Plus, I agonized over this 30k quite a bit. Who wants to read about the early life of the main characters in a romance? I don't mind it myself because I feel as if I become more invested in a character when I see the past that made them into who they grew to be. I know  there are others who would disagree, only interested in the adult versions of the characters, and satisfied with any telling required to give background. So as I'm writing away, I keep getting hit with thoughts about how people are going to hate this or that or all of it because... reasons. Dozen and dozens of reasons. I keep reminding myself this is the story that needs to be told. (And that I thought only 10 people would like Alpha Trine and look what happened there. I need to just write and not dwell on what I think others are to going to say.)

Oi! Did I tell you that I'm 30k in and it's all handwritten? Hence the picture of the empty pen cartridges. That's how many pens I've gone through. LOL! I keep thinking I'll start transcribing using Dragon, but the program has to learn all these new names and places, and I just don't want the hassle right now. I'll probably end up writing another 30k before I break down and put it in MSWord.

So. Bespoken is about a quarter done and I hope to get another 20k finished before the end of the month. I am going to take a week or two off at the beginning of January, otherwise I will stall out on the story. That is something I really don't want to happen. I'm giving myself permission to take time away from authoring to do whatever I want to to keep from burning out. I plan on reading a bunch and maybe there will be a bookstore in my future. :)

Until then, I'm going to push through the rest of this part one and into part two, spend time with family, and sit with my best friend and make sure she has a fantastic holiday. Oh, and imbibe in some tasty wine and cookies. :)

Thank you for stopping by and reading!!

Bespoken: Where Are You?

So far for the month of November, I've been prepping to write the third book of the Valespain Pact, Bespoken. Writing Sumeria's Sons taught me a lot of what to do and not to do when writing a series. I took those lessons and applied them to the rest of the Valespian Pact series. 

For those who haven't heard, this is now the series line:

1) Alpha Trine - Zeus, Dargon, and Alpha
2) Striker - Zeus, Dargon, and Alpha
3) Bespoken - Prometheus, Vipre, and Malek
4) Chosen - Axis and the Chimera triplets, Cilix, Phoenix, and Cadmus
5) Boundless - Madux and Star Eater
6) Legends - back to Prometheus, Vipre, and Malek, but there will be returning POVs from the previous books.

Now I know there are a few who werelooking forward to Canry's story and honestly, I couldn't fit in a side plot that was attacked to the overall plot of the series. What I have in mind for him will happen outside the issue of the grid. The same goes for Mestor's romance but you will see hints of those two emerging love stories throughout the Valespian Pact. *evil grins*

Other than outlining what I could of Bespoken, Chosen, and Boundless, placing anchors so that I had plot/character goals to write towards while still allowing for flexibility if something didn't work, I've expanded the showing to other POVs of key players in the series. I strove to answer the questions of how Zeus came to be in Atlainticia space, which is as far as one can get from the approved travel route for the humans. What happened to separate Prometheus and Zeus? There are reveals and twists and sacrifices. The Ancients play a larger part going forward, which I think Striker laid the ground work for. 

This series will also include a broad range of LGBTIAQ characters. Prometheus is intersex, which shouldn't come as a surprise since all Fal Amorics are intersex. Athena will enter a bisexual poly relationship (which again shouldn't be a surprise since the Fal Amorics need two sperm donors in order to conceive), and depending how things turn out, she might have more. There will be genderfluid Ancients (The children of the Alphazetamite). Axis is asexual and there is another character yet to be revealed who is aromantic.

I've worked hard to flesh out all the pertinent characters for the Valespian Pact, a mistake I made with Sumeria's Sons. When I sat down to write Releasing Chaos I had to take a couple steps back and fix that before I could go anywhere with the final story of the series. I didn't want to make the same mistake in the Valespian Pact, especially after I had to figure out what made Prometheus a better Bespoken than Zeus or even why Athena couldn't stand in for the Bespoken. That took me a long time to answer and make sure that it could be interwoven into the plot.

Another thing I did was play with Ancient Greek settings and stories. Sometimes names mean something and sometimes they don't. I re-imagined all kinds of things like, Knossos and the roll of the Minotaur, the river Styx and it's gatekeeper... and just a ton of stuff that I hope will entice and thrill the reader. I know I'm excited. There might even be a redemption story in there somewhere for Rathmar.

Anyway, this whole blog post is just the long way of saying that I've started writing Bespoken and it's going to be awesome. :)

Thank you for stopping by and reading!!

Birthday Bash - What's Happening with #Bespoken ?? #giveaway

The next book on my writing schedule is Bespoken. Yay! Finally, right? 

Bespoken was one of those storylines that I had to discover answers to because of what I'd written in Alpha Trine and Striker. 

Why wasn't Zeus as good as Prometheus for the new Triumphant that would take over as the Galactic Emperors and manage The Grid? What did Prometheus have that Zeus didn't? HOW did the Triumphant manage The Grid? 

Unknowingly, I'd built Prometheus up to be indispensable and I had no clue how. The answers had to be plausible and fit the realm of sci-fi not fantasy. Hell, following a fantasy, the answer could've been easier to devise, but I needed something that was believable and made sense. I tossed aside many different answers because they weren't strong enough for what I envisioned the last book of the series. I hope readers will enjoy what I came up with.

I should probably also talk about the number of books in the series. The 5th book, Canry's love story titled Rebirth, won't be included in the series because the story I have in mind doesn't fit into the overall plot of The Valespian Pact. So the number of books for the series has dropped by one. Tentatively, the list will now go as follows:

1) Alpha Trine
2) Striker
3) Bespoken - Prometheus, Vipre, and Malek
4) Chosen - Axis and the Chimera triplets
5) Boundless - Madux & Star Eater
6) Legends - wrapping up the plot arc.

If I do write Canry's story, it will be a standalone in the Valespia-verse. 

Unfortunately, I haven't completed enough of Bespoke to include it in the readings but I have the play list. It will give you an overall feeling that I'm shooting for.

Goo Goo Dolls - So Alive

"Breaking down the walls in my own mind

Keeping my faith for the bad times

Get up, get up, stand like a champion

Take it to the world, gonna sing it like an anthem"

Ingrid Michaelson - "Afterlife" 

"You and me

We got this

You and me

We're beautiful

Beautiful"

Sheppard - Geronimo

"Can you feel it?

Now it's coming back we can steal it

If we bridge this gap,

I can see you

Through the curtains of the waterfall"

Gin Wigmore - Black Sheep

"Make me mad, I'm not here to please

Paint me in a corner but my colour comes back

Once you go black, you never go back

I'm a black sheep"

Of Monsters And Men - Wolves Without Teeth

"I'll be the blood

If you'll be the bones

I'm giving you all

I'm giving you all

So lift up my body

And lose all control

I'm giving you all"

James Bay - Let It Go

"So come on let it go

Just let it be

Why don't you be you

And I'll be me

Everything's that's broke

Leave it to the breeze"

X Ambassadors - Unsteady

"Hold, hold on, hold onto me

'Cause I'm a little unsteady

A little unsteady"

Of Monsters and Men - Crystals

"Lost in skies of powdered gold

Caught in clouds of silver ropes

Showered by the empty hopes

As I tumble down

Falling fast to the ground"

Skylar Grey - Cannonball ft. X Ambassadors

"And when they light their torches, when they scream and yell

I'm gonna raise my flag and gonna give 'em hell"

Oh Wonder - Without You

"Cause I'm kicking up stones without you

Can't pick up the phone without you

I'm a little bit lost without you

Without you"

Black Stone Cherry - Blind Man

"So we will try not to cry

When we're walkin' in their shoes.

Have you heard the news?

Hey have you seen the blind man in disguise,

Lookin' for his eyes?"

X Ambassadors - Gorgeous

"Nobody understands you

You ain't nothing they can handle

Every man you put your hands on

You make him feel so god damn handsome"

Katy Perry - Rise

"I won't just survive

Oh, you will see me thrive

Can't write my story

I'm beyond the archetype

I won't just conform

No matter how you shake my core

'Cause my roots—they run deep, oh"

So there you are! A bit of insight to Bespoken! It's going to be awesome!

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Thank you for stopping by and reading!!