Although I love Ryan and Essie in a special way—and I think it is a special story, with very unique characters, regardless of how I feel about it—I’m going to retire it from the website. It will still be available for sale, but after examining my website, it doesn’t fit with the look that’s developing. I don’t have any other children’s books and children’s is a pretty specific market. It’s hard to overlap it with YA or adult books. I love to read children’s books, but I don’t write them enough to move the marketing slant in that direction, and Ryan and Essie appears obtrusive.

However, it would still be a great story for people to read. I’ll even keep the ebook around on Amazon for a while (I usually get rid of ebooks and go paperback-only for retired books.) It will also be on the Specialty page, replacing The Test of Devotion, which will give people a chance to pick it up for longer than the couple of days of a KDP free promotion.

Regarding free promotions and what I think about them (and how I use them) I’ll post on that later. The Test of Devotion also has some plans in the future, which I’ll get to as well.
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And there will be more updates. 

It’s time to have a little discussion of Essie from Ryan and Essie. (Very easy to remember, right?) Essie starts out as a child, although the later areas of the book feel slightly older. So perhaps she aged a touch traveling through that wormhole to Caricanus. She seems 9 at the beginning, a very destined-for-something little girl, and is perhaps 12 at the end when she and Ryan have their big growth experience and learn to see each other’s POV.

I can’t describe how long I’ve worked with the Essie character. She truly feels like someone I have always known. Essie’s personality is blazingly distinctive. She is the sort of person who seems created to mess things up. She often does risky, weird, or questionable things with literally no regard for safety—her own or other people’s. She is astonishingly resilient and is so foolhardy because she seems to know she won’t get much hurt. That’s not the sort of thing that happens to Essie. It happens to other people.

Her bounce-back optimism amounts to aggression a lot of the time. She pushes other people beyond their endurance—in the tragic case of the plant-girl Crissy, for instance—because she can’t sympathize. This experience with Crissy helps her gain wisdom and awareness of other people’s boundaries, but it has to go to the ultimate because only then can they get past Essie’s staring green eyes into her head. Essie knows she is special. But she has to respect the gifts and needs of other people and that’s hard for her.

Essie is that brash because she is like no one else. I can mix and match a bit with my other heroines, but Essie has always had an exact appearance. She is short and strong. She has a snub nose, a proud, slightly dimwitted smile. She has curly, tangled red hair and bright green eyes. And she is almost like a force of physics—the Law of Something or Other, possibly not yet discovered, that bounds into alcoves and changes the world.
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And there will be more updates. 

As a kid, I spent a lot of time looking up at the stars. One of the great things living in the country is that astronomy is absolutely painless. It’s just as easy as going outside. No city glare—no need to worry about artificial lighting. It’s very dark. (In fact, after I came back from 2 months living in cities, I was scared of the vast countryside at night. I had to tell myself, “you’ve lived here your whole life, stupid. You were never scared of it before.”)

So as a kid, I looked at those stars a lot. As a teenager, I learned their names. When I was in my twenties, SpaceX built facilities nearby and, ever since, distant thunder and smoke from the rocket tests became a part of daily life. So this story goes way back into my blood, into the little things I was always used to doing. Directly opposite my front yard was the constellation Capricorn (in the summer, that is) and it was an amazing thrill when I actually saw it. I could trace the shape and it was so much bigger than in the pictures in books. It was a “real” constellation. It wasn’t just something you read about. It was actually in the sky! It was not made up! (Okay, so maybe it was stupid to think it would be made up, but that’s what a light bulb moment is about--being less stupid now.)

The original story name was “The Heirs of Capricorn” because Ryan and Essie went into a planet in that constellation. Later, of course, I realized it would be silly for them to be the heirs of a made-up grouping of stars seen from Earth. It doesn’t exist out in real deep space. So I changed it to “The Heirs of Caricanus,” the name of the planet they visit. Then it became “Ryan and Essie” and that’s what it’s called now. Caricanus’ jewel castles came from a different story I wrote at about the same time. I often melded stories into each other back then—and sometimes still do—to create layered narratives. At least, that’s what I’d call them now. Back then I just said, “this combined story is more interesting.”

And there will be more updates. 

Ryan and Essie have always been there. When I was a kid, I drafted a part of a story about them and their twins—very beta, of course, and not the story we read today. But still, they were Ryan and Essie. Even when I was very young, I knew that they represented ideas. I meant them to contrast in every way. I carefully made sure every detail about them was opposite. A little later, when I was more of a teenager, I added characters like Tarvelas and Viltan, and a rather expanded area with just Ryan and his adventures with these characters.

I trimmed this back because I wanted absolute balance between the two and I had written more Ryan than Essie material. I wanted sets of chapters to alternate, so a lot of extra Farlent and Vindillam stuff didn’t make it in. But we still see quite enough of these characters, especially Tarvelas, to understand what they bring to Ryan and Essie’s world. It’s a story I’ve always felt very far from personally, which sounds odd because stories formulated early are likely to be very personal. After all, I was too young to be professional. But this book is about ideas and ideas aren’t personal. They are beyond.

Ryan and Essie has always had a resilient strength from within, a sort of harsh, dry integrity. It is about what it is about and nothing can change that. That’s why it wrote itself rather than that I had much control over it. As an adult I made an ending for the story and linked Ryan and Essie’s duality into a kind of Christian philosophy, because that’s the belief system I’m used to and the story, I felt, should tie into the biggest thing there is.  I’m not trying to preach, just to say this story is about big ideas.

It is a quiet story too. It has never made a lot of noise. And that is what makes it unique.
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And there will be more updates.