After concluding a month of talking about my first books (The Birthday Present; A Year with the Harrisons; and two versions of Facets of Fantasy) I realized Victoria: A Tale of Spain does deserve its own print even if the story is shorter now. I also moved Jurant into a single, with its own paperback, and moved the Facets collections off the website.

Over the next few weeks I’m moving forward into the next books--Ryan and Essie and the Chronicles of Palladia. City of the Invaders, Consuela, and Alyce were all published at a similar time and are now being linked into a series. Very tidy, right? I’ve already done a few posts on Ryan and Essie and will do more, as it’s an exciting story that’s certainly worth a look even for the reluctant.

A Year with the Harrisons will be published in a couple of weeks, I hope. When a book's been delayed by 8 years, it can’t get out fast enough. There’s a gap in my publications that won’t be filled until it’s available, but the page for it is already up and you can take a look. I’m not sure yet about The Birthday Present. I think of it as my “extra” story and always have—that’s why it was gone for so long. But it gets steady attention, so I’ll throw in a post here and there about it too.

Just because I’m turning the Palladia stories into a series does not mean I am automatically "keeping" them. The series makes me able to sort a lot of jumbled material, but if it doesn't perform well I'll stop marketing it like anything else. I just feel the stories have to be in a series before I can begin to have an idea of their value.

And there will be more updates. 

With 2 Palladia books completed and 2 more coming quickly (I hope) there might be a question why I’m doing this series at all. City of the Invaders was a beginner effort and there didn't seem much more to say after it. The world didn’t have a lot of unanswered questions at the end. But once I put Invaders into a print form I knew I wanted to include Consuela, crossing it over from the now-defunct Valley Stories series that was a problem for me a few years ago.

After deliberation, I decided more needed to be done to dissociate “Alyce” from The Prince’s Ball. The fake-history setting of the Valley Stories was too similar and people might remember it. I’d already turned the final Valley story, Victoria, into a historical short story that spun off on its own thing. But Alyce was just lurking around and I wanted to make it absolutely separate.

So currently I plan for Alyce to follow Consuela into the Palladia world. One girl in a review (now deleted along with the ebook) said Alyce was confusing because it felt medieval, but some areas were like dystopian. I thought this was the silliest thing I’d ever heard. That would be like saying Romola Garai’s Emma was dystopian. But if people could interpret Alyce as dystopian, that should make a transition to Palladia natural. There will also be a third book in between Consuela and the rewritten Alyce. It has not been published before.

Putting Alyce—a bit longer, of course, and set in outer space—in the Palladia series will move it far enough on its own that it stops being a wart. I won’t even use the same names for the heroines and if “Alyce” is now trademarked to this story, I’ll change her name in The Prince’s Ball.

And there will be more updates.

After working on the VJA project, I was glad to be out in the fresh air again. It truly was a personal endeavor for those who started it, especially the leader who was feeling irked that one of her stories had been rejected in a contest. Negativity is not a good reason for creating a project because it creates a self-focused passion that's not healthy when working with other people. There might also have been a touch of sarcasm in Bellevere that I wasn’t aware of when I wrote it. Because honestly the whole thing grew to be a leetle bit silly as the years piled up. Just a little bit. I didn’t mean to satirize their writing—or that of countless other young ladies I’d read over the preceding 4 years—but it might have been there unintentionally because I always write what I feel is there.

By the time of publication, tensions were high and communication had been poor for over a year. The beta feedback on Bellevere showed strong feelings, but didn't take that lack of communication into account, and my sister was almost yelling at me through a chatbox when I changed my book cover model. I felt it was essential because Faye’s hair color had switched from black to blonde. I did the changes myself to save her the work, because it was my call to change the hair color so late. (I didn’t even have to tell her about it, but I wanted to be upfront.) But she cared passionately about the covers. Passionately, passionately, passionately. This should have been a light hobby project among some friends. Some homemade fanfiction about Jane Austen. That’s all it was. Just because your reactions are genuine does not always make it okay to voice them.

Because it’s difficult for me to sort this book when it’s so drowned in associations from the project, I’m going to send Bellevere out solo. I no longer view it as part of the series, nor should readers. That’s a formality only, at least for the time being. I’d always wanted to market this book separately after the collection was done and that will give me a chance to decide whether I want to keep it among my works.

And there will be more updates.

Jurant was first published as a stand-alone short story—inasmuch as it wasn’t linked to any other world or set of characters. About 5 years after I joined it up to the intergalactic world of Ryan and Essie. Partly because isolated short stories tend to drift around and disappear unless they’re pinioned to a larger storyline. And partly because Jurant’s setting is identical to Ryan and Essie’s—a distant part of our galaxy humans visited or colonized in the past which is now a complex civilization with many planets.

Jurant is set on Chaldon, a planet closer to the center of this galactic society. Ryan and Essie is set on the now almost abandoned planet of Caricanus, on the edge of this civilization. Caricanus is by now a mythological place. It was the first to be inhabited by humans and the society created there eventually spread to a larger number of planets while Caricanus became a forgotten place. (Which is not the same thing as an uninhabited place.) Chaldon, on the other hand, is at a hub of things, as one of the Alliance’s premier military training facilities is there.

The Kinari, Sekana’s people (the ones who are making a rebellion) are far on the other side of the galactic civilization from Caricanus, and also far from the center near Chaldon. Viltan, a teenage scavenger in Ryan and Essie, is partly Kinari. This is why he has purple eyes. (Sekana turns into a girl with purple hair when she assumes her true form.) People rarely mix with the Kinari, so he is highly unusual, which is why he ended up running into Ryan and all the other doings on remote Caricanus.

I was pleased I could loop the story into a pre-existing structure like Ryan and Essie, because although Jurant is a stand-alone and probably not for quite the same audience, I wanted it to be grounded outside of the Facets collection.
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And there will be more updates.