Just when I think my work on old books is done and I can (finally!!) get to some new material, I get another setback. Of course, “setback” is an angsty way to put it and quite incorrect. In fact, each time I’ve had to redo a book or a portion of my website, it’s been a really good step and I’ve been grateful for the result. But when you’re trying to move forward to producing new books, delays to get things right again can happen. It’s just part of the process.

Anyway (lol), just a word of update on the books as they’re being processed now:

• The Test of Devotion was out of availability for a while and I planned to discontinue it. But instead I’m moving towards a substantial rewrite of the book, similar to the ones I did for Harrisons and Victoria, to pull the ages of the characters down more. This worked really well with those two books, so I have hopes for Devotion after doing it with the others.
• Jurant is back on the website, with a new description. In fact, there are new descriptions for everything. I installed little captions to highlight each book as you enter the website and it was fun coming up with these slogans—a sort of crystalline approach to the story’s content—for each book.
• The “Chronicles of Palladia” series is not going to include City of the Invaders. Future books have spun off into a focus on Consuela and her friends, not on Katia, her brother, and their angle. I’m not certain what to do with Invaders now, as I do feel it is an interesting story. I considered eliminating it, but it is currently available in paperback.
• Victoria: A Tale of Spain has merged with the former Alyce into a nice little story suitable for roughly 5th graders. I have a new cover in the works, although I do like the current one as well. But I think the fairy-tale aspect (Victoria was originally based on Snow White, Alyce on Cinderella) didn’t make it into the final book and the old cover would better suit a fairy-tale story.
• Still working on Bellevere House. I’d like to bring it into a bit more compatibility with the general tone of the website—this book is a bit of a sore thumb and I’d like to turn it into a green thumb in a dexterous way if I can.

And there will be more updates.

There are still a few loose ends that need to be tied up with my other books (Victoria’s rewrite was so total that it will need a completely new cover.) But I’m starting to look ahead to next year and to working on Temmark Osteraith. I wanted to do that months ago, but things can get set back. It’s important to lay a solid foundation and getting all my books in order was an essential part of that. It’s actually building a house to last instead of throwing some sticks together because you need shelter in the moment.

The world of Temmark Osteraith used to be the “Milland” world and appeared in a couple of stories about a girl named “Alyce” who got into all kinds of trouble. So it feels long ago—but also moving forward in an important way. I finished most of the story of what will now be Temmark Osteraith fifteen years ago and I’m such a different person now, in a lot of ways, that I think the audience attitude to the book now will be quite different from what it would have had at that time. Or even from the attitude towards some of my other books published more recently.

Temmark Osteraith has maybe a bit of a wilder aspect than the old world of Alyce’s Milland. It was this very off-beat, funny, kind of adventure in a period-historical type of world. Whereas in Temmark Osteraith we have a futuristic world, characters that aren’t even human, and a house that still a bit resembles an old mansion, but with an unpredictable personality of its own. A lot is different now from that original draft—setting, character names, some of the plot, you name it—but it still has things that are similar too. A bridge between the past and where my writing is today, to the extent I think it actually brings out the story that was always underlying Milland instead of replacing it.
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And there will be more updates.

When dealing with anything set in modern times—today for instance—you have to start taking computers and phones and medical equipment and transportation and all that sort of thing into account. It’s going to impact the character’s lives in a personal way, and in a way it wouldn’t if you were writing, say, historical or fantasy.

This is even more true for a futuristic world.

As I worked on Palladia—and as I’m still working on it, since there’s going to be a third book you don’t know anything about yet—what was foremost in my mind was creating a sense of realness, of normal daily life, to this very advanced kind of society. It’s several hundred years in the future, so you’ve got lots of devices these young people and their families have around them that we don’t have to deal with or think about at all. I want Palladia to feel like a real place you could live. That instead of being an expansion of all kinds of technology for the future, from our point of view, this is just ordinary life for these kids. They have to make schedules, fill out paperwork—wouldn’t it be fun if a societal collapse could get rid of that by bringing on a simpler time? But I doubt it will happen.

And in the midst of all this abundance of what is slick and gadgety and high-powered, they’re jumping off of little starships to go into an old church and practice plays based on moldy classics. They have this symbiotic relationship with the past too. They aren’t self-conscious about what surrounds them and that’s important to me to show about the characters because they wouldn’t be. Self-consciousness shows our minds poking into the story and going, “oh wow, look at their weird world!” But they wouldn’t feel that way. It’s daily life in a fantastic world, so it feels daily as if you were living there yourself. 

And there will be more updates.