Those Old Valley Stories

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.