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Author Sarah Scheele saying hello again.
A lot happened to my writing platform this year, including a new private email domain for my business; a restructured website; a second mailing list specifically for reviewers; more printed promotional materials than I've ever had in my life before; improved book descriptions; and new author photos to display random places online. Then I saw a wallpaper template and thought one day—”If I wanted an image for my phone screen, what would I feel inclined to download?”—and it really grew from there. My youngest sister and I worked together to design over 230 wallpapers. (It's great to have 2 sets of eyes to catch all the details.) It's creative work, in a way, as you're telling a tiny story about your book with an image, but it helped me explore different angles of my books in ways I hadn't thought about. Some were super-simple, just a basic template and some large text. Some were elaborate, with many layers and blended elements to get right. Some had to be downloaded, tested, and then redone because words went off the screen in an annoying way--but sometimes words bleeding off the edge looked stylistically perfect. I will be releasing these gradually during next year, but I'm still deciding how to do so. I am currently working on desktop wallpapers to match them. Meanwhile, I followed through on a years-old plan to dabble in video--short animation slideshows set to music. Click below to see one such tiny animation about the first series listed on my website—The Americana Trilogy. This video is So Severely Short that it is barely there at all, but it's just to introduce audiovisual as an element in my author toolkit. Watch a Short Animated Video on My YouTube Channel I plan to post frequently but not too much and, hopefully, strike a balance--right now, that means aiming for a new update about every 6 weeks. I used to vary between So Frequent People Got Bored or So Rarely People Forgot Me. So I am really grateful to all of you who are still here after that. Reply to this email if you want to catch me up on how you've been, or you can comment on the blog. And there will be more updates.
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Hello again, everyone! (waves.) Hi, I'm Sarah Scheele. By now you may hardly remember me, since you haven't heard from me in a year, and that would be assuming you opened last year's email. If you opened even farther back, then it's been years since you got one of my little notes.  Last year was quietly monumental and steadily busy. A lot of relationships really changed in our lives. I feel like someone who has left a bad marriage and is now single and moving to a new country. Looking, I might add, for a lot more fun this time around! A trend of the few previous years continued as writing took a backburner position in my life. I grew used to saying, "Oh, I've never had time to get back to it. I barely even think about it" when people brought up my writing. Or "writing thing," sometimes abbreviated to "your thing" or "that thing." I started to enjoy not hearing clever responses to efforts to talk about my books, including my all-time favorite "just keep writing." In fact, continuing to write was not what I needed to do, and I've greatly benefitted from some time away. Instead, learning other aspects of the craft, especially marketing, and just plain old working on myself as a person were more important. I'm sure these types of statements sounded very smart to them at the time, a subtle way to get rid of reading my boring, annoying writing without being caught. I thought they sounded like people picking on a married woman who can't get pregnant. Like her, I should just keep trying. Minus, the husband, of course, since I don't have one.  One of the major milestones of development as a human being--of gaining maturity--is when things that offended you start to look just funny. It shows you've learned your lessons and seen how transient negative actions can often be. Many times we lose a sense of what's important. In a world where so many tragic and dark things happen every day, maybe it doesn't matter if people are arrogant, snobbish, rude, belittling, selfish, and unsupportive. As Gui-Gon Jinn says, "there's always a bigger fish." And this applies to bullies too. Gradually, I found the time away was absolutely wonderful. I now chuckle at many things that used to anger me. And I've put my life where it belongs, focusing on my personal well-being, physical health, spiritual strength and faith, and rudimentary efforts at what I hope one day will be called wisdom.  In terms of my actual writing goals mentioned last year, I did turn the Birthday Present cover more grayish to match Victoria's black and white. I won't write a third book for this series as I think the concepts behind these two books are old and I think they don't need particularly to be rehashed again. So The Prince's Invite series became a duology.
Ironically, after saying that, I actually have a large amount of Millhaven/Alyce material still in my desk drawer, including a long novel spinoff called The Rubric Plate; a screenplay version of Millhaven Castle which I had copyrighted over 15 years ago without remembering I'd done so; some original skits of the Milland world that go back to my teens and contain many characters who never appeared in the published stories; and more. I would like to work with some of this material again. In writing advice to a kid who asked him, C.S. Lewis said not to abandon these old manuscripts, as some of the best stories come from old forgotten stuff that is dug up and reused. But I want to give it a fresh spin instead of using the exact same Girl-Gets-Invited-By-Man-Who-Is-Threatened-By-Her plot and tying it into two older, already published books. I moved Bellevere House officially into the Americana Trilogy and this listing is now visible everywhere including Amazon. Normally, updates on Amazon take a few hours, but this one took DAYS. It worked out fine though. I wrote little teaser epilogues that lead into the next book, for The Americana Trilogy and the Prince's Invite Duology. In plain, simple speak, that means I put a little extra bit at the ends of The Test of Devotion, Bellevere House, and The Birthday Present. This worked excellently, I felt, when I did it with The Palladia Trilogy, so I did it for these 2 series as well. The Worlds Across Time Fantasy series has not been internally linked in this way yet, just placed as a series on retailers. All the other books were worked on in a burst of about 2 weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas and I want to give WAT a little more time so its growth is unique. If I write everything at once, it will sound too similar. Most of my old manuscripts (the infamous ones that lie in writer's desk drawers) aren't in my desk anymore, but in a large gray storage box in the guest bedroom with many older family papers. Literally, I would not care if guests went through them, although I fear they could not read my handwriting! However, that extra Millhaven Castle stuff, an original copy of The Trouble with Taranui before it became City of the Invaders, some skits about Shakespeare and the classics, and a limited amount of extra Heroes and Halogens material remain in my desk. Heroes and Halogens had a small appearance as Halogen Crossing in Facets of Fantasy. But it was once much larger and had many arcs and characters that didn't appear in the short novella available in print. I even printed out some of this material instead of just writing it down, but I never used it. About 70% of it is useless, but I did find a few things I thought were kind of interesting building blocks for a story. And as with the Milland world, I have started to wonder why all this stuff was hidden/purged in favor of a much abbreviated storyline with a different plot, which is what got published. Not that I dislike what I did publish, but it isn't the same, and a lot of the stuff that never saw the light was maybe more interesting. Just maybe. Readers would have to be the judge of that. So yes, I am still here. If you look forward to hearing from me again, I hope to send you many more emails. If you didn't want me to continue--sorry to disappoint you and you can always unsubscribe. (winks and makes little finger heart gestures.) And there will be more updates. |
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