I had to rewrite these stories about 3 times last year in order to complete a merge of them. I wanted to discard “Alyce” altogether, but I just felt a lingering presence in it that wouldn’t go away. However, I didn’t add much new material, like new characters. This means there are now at least 5 things that could be improved and you only notice these when the two stories are combined.

Not that this makes the book low-quality—I mean, no book is PERFECT. (Except I know many people will vouch for their currently favorite historical romance or YA fantasy author. But aside from that, no book is ever perfect.)

• 1 Prince Roderick needs more friends. I didn’t give him any in "Alyce" because it was a really short story, but now it looks like he’s kind of unpopular. He only knows one silent man who helps him in his work, and he breezes in and rescues Victoria all on his own like a sort of anomaly.
• 2 Mrs. Corkum and the English travelers are a blip. This was an area where Victoria saw a parallel family to hers and learned how they looked. Now that Victoria isn’t such a brat, she just travels with these people for a couple of really odd chapters.
• 3 Ignacio was meant to be a hero, but he got more and more sinister and we aren’t told why. One of the few things I added was a small scene where Ignacio runs into Victoria later. Bella has run away from him, but they end up back together and Victoria doesn’t ask about it. WHY NOT?
• 4 The Hirado. Now that he’s helping her instead of out to get her, it’s not clear what his character is about. I tied him into the “Alyce” part of the story by saying he’s warning her about what’s to come with the king. That’s interesting, but it’s still hazy what he represents in the story.
• 5 King Felipe is now absolutely boring. The whole story builds towards him inviting Victoria to set her up, but his personality disappeared somewhere between the time "Alyce" was published and the current story. I didn’t iron him out on purpose, it just happened. This area is still pretty funny (when she’s chased around the castle by the thugs) but Felipe contributes nothing at all.

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And there will be more updates.

I popped back into Pinterest early this week and started making boards again. "Pinterest--haven't been on there in a while. Does it still exist?" I thought lethargically. But I poked back in, reactivated my account, and started pinning lots of funny pics and inspirational quotes. Then I searched vintage fashion for a Bellevere House board and found lots of great ideas.

I knew vintage was a popular search, but my sister (who OWNED Pinterest at that time) specialized in girls with bombshell hair and bright lipstick. So I thought that was all there was to the vintage thing. This week I discovered lots of great dresses from the circa 1930s era--some on models, some on dressmaker's dummies. I saved lots and lots of them in many great colors. I visualize Bellevere as having lots of variety in the colors the women wear for each scene (men are harder to get creative about, but maybe something specific in the argyle pattern of a vest, etc.)

Now I actually have dresses to look at, concepts were just popping out at me. Faye wears a lot of gray, black, and blouse-with-skirt combinations. In one scene she wears a pale blue with pink flowers on it, for no reason. Helene often wears an outfit in just one scene, sometimes very striking colors--like dark maroon with a white collar when she plays piano, or a gold shirt and dark brown skirt at the beach. BeBe wears a lot of pale pink, little sweaters, and coral. I found a long dark blue flamboyant evening dress for Myrtle when she's discovered to have been cheating with Horace, and a medium green with embroidery for Aunt Betty when she talks about whether green is more a color for men or women. (Her son wears lots of green ties, which is odd, and which might throw her off!)

So much fun. I'll narrow down pics soon and put some on the blog.

And there will be more updates.

This month saw a lot of activity on the website, with participation in a promotion at the first of the year drawing a lot of visitors. They continued throughout the month, however, which I was pleased about. I sent out A Year with the Harrisons to get some reviews as well--it's been almost a year since it was published, but with so many other things to do I'm just now getting the ball rolling on this book. I reopened Goodreads, continued to develop my FB presence (those fan pages can be a hassle, but they are worth it), and got on BookBub. I also have a little Goodreads button on my blog sidebar now, which will link to all the books I've read over the past 2 years. I started putting up book reviews before I got back to the author account.

The books on the website have A Year with the Harrisons in a runaway lead. Ryan and Essie, Bellevere House, and Victoria: A Tale of Spain are all tied a little bit back of Harrisons. Facets of Fantasy is trailing a bit and Consuela is lagging far behind. Stats fluctuate quite a bit, though, and Ryan and Essie, which was once one of the lowest on page views, has climbed steadily over the last few months. It's clear though that A Year with the Harrisons is getting a lot of attention right now, which is perfect since it was the most recently published book. It was released during a very quiet time when I didn't have a lot of social activity, so it's taken a while to start up.

And there will be more updates.

Consuela was once based—very, very loosely, I might add—on a novel of Dickens called The Pickwick Papers. Surprisingly few incidents from this book actually made it into Consuela, and after turning a lot of the characters into girls and getting it out of a historical setting altogether and into dystopian, any resemblance to Pickwick became threadbare.

Except for two things.

There doesn’t seem any reason for the book to still be here, yet it is (not unlike Pickwick, which expired about a century ago); and there remains a theatrical flair to the characters. Consuela got some reviews and attention when it was published, but then it quickly lost relevance. However, it sprang back for reasons that still have me scratching my head. Probably trying to tickle my brain into letting me in on the reasons! And the characters do have some of that larger-than-life, honestly bizarre quality that is part of Dicken’s work. People say “Dickensian” for a reason. He could be just blisteringly fake. Really blistering, at times.

Within that fakeness, that tall unrealism that permeates the funny, but almost unrecognizable eccentrics of his world, there is a grain of truth. That can be how we see the people around us. In a very detailed, but honestly unrealistic way. It’s too acid. Our friends and coworkers aren’t really like that because no one is like that. But people do that if there’s something they just don’t want to see about others and so in a way, these fake characters are true to human perceptions. That influence lingers on Consuela’s cast and in working on this story I learned a lot, from the inside out, of what makes characters like that so interesting.
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And there will be more updates.