A Year with the Harrisons is FREE on Kindle today and tomorrow! Be sure to grab your copy and help get the sales ranking up during the promotion. Oh, and so you can enjoy the book too, of course! 😊
 
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Growing up in the country, Luna, Letty, and Lamia Harrison are as close as three teenage sisters can be. During a very special year one adventure follows another as the girls grow up—especially when it turns out their aunt, a famous singer, has been blackmailed for years by the father of Letty’s handsome new friend. A story with a little football, a little gravel on dusty backroads, and a whole lot of music.

One of the areas I had most fun with when working on A Year with the Harrisons--when it was first drafted or this year when it was published--was the music theme. Music is something I've always loved (I am practically glued to my MP3 player and I've run through more pairs of earbuds over the years than could be counted.) But it hasn't played a large part in any story except The Harrisons, at least so far. 

There are two aspects of music that spiral their way through The Harrisons. Mainstream popular music--a blend of pop and country, very likely to be heard on the radio or even in grocery store background music; and music played in churches. The church scene is quite diverse--classical cantatas, traditional choir music, modern worship choruses, and a dash of instrumental and orchestra, and a lot of story is generated by the conflict between people who argue about these different kinds of music. On the mainstream music end, a prominent subplot concerns the Harrisons' cousin Betty and her family, all of whom do popular music professionally. 

Snatches of lyrics poke into the story now and then. Even when Lamia gets herself into a little trouble befriending a boy whose brother is throwing a house party, the errant teenagers hum and sing themselves all the way to jail. Music isn't just a plot device in A Year with the Harrisons--it's part of the story's heart and one of the reasons it continues to resonate with people. Music is . . . well . . . resonant, after all.

And there will be more updates. 

The five published books on my website are all the same length, about 52K, except for Consuela. It's a little bit shorter. At first I presented many books as novellas, individual longer short stories, long collections of stories, or even the occasional novel. But as I worked with the books, stories took a more mainstream shape. Novels got cut. Novellas merged with each other. Extra stories that padded out books disappeared. All of them became a very similar page count (250-280 pages) and suddenly all the little random "stories" had been replaced by streamlined books. 

I didn't start out with this in mind, because although my stories were often an awkward length, I've read and enjoyed books of any length and I didn't plan to add or crop words just to fulfill someone's idea of a book. But I'm glad it happened. Nowhere is this new streamlined kind of book more visible than in "Victoria." It started as a novella of 30K words, then it shrank to a much shorter story. Then it blended with "Alyce," an even shorter story (about 18K) that had been once released as part of the same series. After I went back to the old, longer version of Victoria--keeping the merge with Alyce--I had to rewire my mind to realize this is a novel now. I'd become programmed to automatically think of Victoria and Alyce as short. But together, they became a full novel. 

How nice! 

A Year with the Harrisons shrank to become a similar length and when two of the Facets stories were removed, Facets of Fantasy was also comparable. And so is Bellevere House, which started longer, but after a special rewrite just about Ed and Faye's relationship, became exactly the same length as the others. 

Yes! My books, like tangled hair, got themselves straightened out. 

And there will be more updates. 

The more I do with my books, the more things spring forward that need to be done. Getting a story articulated in a way that will make readers understand why they should pick it up is hard, but I'm getting better at it. 

As I examined A Year with the Harrisons, I realized it had been a variation on Little Women all along. I started the book years before I began doing my other "retellings," and so I didn't spot that it was a retelling at first. But as time went on, the characters began to look familiar--Meg, Jo, Amy, Laurie, Mr. Laurence, Aunt March, Marmee and Mr. March. I really did leave out Beth. The story started with 3 sisters and though I sometimes considered adding a fourth, it just never really happened. So there are still just 3. Aunt March (Brenda) also gets a lot more screentime than in the book and I enlarged on her immediate family as well as her relationship to the "Marches" (the Harrison family.)

The Birthday Present is now a small prequel to The Prince's Ball and helps to set up its futuristic world. After using Alyce-type characters several times in a historical sort of setting, this story needs a fresh new look and futuristic should shake it up in the right way. 

Pricing now ranges from $4.99 to $1.99 for short story singles. I'll begin promoting widely using KDP Select soon, so stay tuned for that! 

​And there will be more updates.