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 All of them became a very similar page count (250-280 pages) and suddenly all the little random "stories" had been replaced by streamlined books.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 rewrite of Victoria took off after I worked with the old Alyce manuscript. When transferring Alyce to Spain, it slowly merged into Victoria until the two became one. I changed Alyce’s name to Victoria, changed other character names to blend in, and voila! A perfect answer to all the endless riddles of “what to do with Alyce.”

As the second half of Victoria’s story, “Alyce” takes Victoria on a lighter-hearted tone that balances the opening and expands the world. More than that, giving her Alyce’s adventures and a quick tie-in to the Hirado for continuity developed Victoria’s character hugely. She actually seemed to learn from her earlier adventures and the second half shows her applying the skills she learned in the first. This gave the story of Victoria what I’d always been worried it lacked—a point.

The only differences are: some areas in which Alyce was a Cinderella figure—which was hard to work in once I blended her with Victoria, a duke’s daughter. (But the “Mrs. Codge” character was preserved in a few moments as a greedy, funny woman named Duchess Almezia.); and some of the “fake-history” politics of the end of Alyce. Moving it to a real country made many of these null. 

The longer, extended Victoria should be available soon, I hope. 

​And there will be more updates. 

After working with the two remaining Valley Stories (Victoria and Alyce) I realized enlarging Victoria just isn’t going to happen right away. The story I was trying to do stalled and I couldn’t seem to get it going. Any writer knows what that’s like and it’s abominably frustrating, especially on a deadline and with many projects planned. But stories have a will of their own. Perhaps I can pick it up after a while, months from now, but I have other books to deal with.

So I switched gears and dealt with the related issue of Alyce. I’m not sure that moving Alyce into Palladia will be required, because I’m only doing that to make sure it doesn’t overlap in any confusing or annoying way with The Prince’s Ball. As I’ve been popping back into the Prince’s Ball (so nice to be back) I am getting an idea that might just possibly make it separate enough that changing Alyce isn’t necessary. If this idea works, I might not have to change Alyce. In that case, I would release the story largely as the one that was published before, joined in a paperback to Victoria. (The two Valley stories other than Consuela could be packaged together.)

​The only difference would be very mild tweaks to update the fake-history setting to an actual historical setting. A historical setting is I believe what interested people about the story in the first place and the switch would be intuitive and a matter of a few sentences here and there. Another good thing about Alyce is that, unlike all other Milland versions, Lord Timson's castle is based on a place in Spain. So it would be effortless to make the story go with Victoria--actually more than it did in the original Valley stories release. Working with the story again has been fun and messing with the plot enough to have Lord Timson be from Spain made the story really downright funny in a way it hadn't been before. Why would a Spanish ruler invite an English country girl from a town like Emma's Highbury to his castle? Sounds fishy if you ask me.
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Just a thought . . . planning . . . planning . . .
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And there will be more updates. 

I started Victoria as a retelling of Snow White and female relationships are incredibly important to that fairy tale. I’d thought to show Snow White from the outside because stories from her POV always seem angsty and failed. So Victoria, her scheming younger sister, would play the lead, and Bella—the beautiful—would be Snow White.

But the story didn’t turn out that way. In fact, Bella became a rather shady character. And unlike in Snow White, the world of Victoria got filled with assassins and thugs and gained a very different theme altogether. When I created Ignacio, I’d had an idea of him as a benevolent character who would care about Bella. But he became more like Boba Fett. (Yes people keep writing romances about Boba Fett and I don’t know why they do that. I wish they would stop.) Ignacio can pretend friendliness, especially when he’s trying to get information, but he is always up to something and is very confrontational.

The Hirado is a trained and hired mercenary who goes around killing people—again like Boba Fett, or like any criminal or bounty hunter from other stories. And Webster, though lighter, is always verbally aggressive. I call historical from 1400-1800 “Bigga” because of the Bigga dresses, obviously. Everyone who’s into Bigga seems to have a bigga attitude too. And I’ve noticed something bad always happens to people after they get into Bigga historical. They always divorce, or lose all their money, or get caught in being deceptive and lose a friendship, or it’s found out what they really believe about something, or they disappear and their friends don’t hear of them again.

And there will be more updates.