Digging deeper into The Test of Devotion always brings rewards, as I found when I returned to the first draft last year. It has such a great plot, in which interlocking characters pursue separate journeys with one goal in mind—what to do about beautiful, possibly out-of-her-depth, rebellious Arabella. It has POV characters for both sides of the plot, and we switch back and forth between them pretty systematically. Outside of Devotion, the only other novel where I've used multiple POV is Harrisons, but its function is merely practical for incidents that the narrators (Betty or Letty) might not be able to show if I used just one of them. In Devotion the two plots frame each other and head towards one conclusion, swirling around Arabella, as we follow two teenagers who are approaching the same story from different angles.

Viajero is a boy who is born and raised into the outlaw lifestyle, since his father is an outlaw. He also likes it pretty well and views it as a dashing role in society, which causes him embarrassment gradually as he meets new people while finding Arabella and he learns that becoming a criminal is not really an admired life decision. After he is hired by Arabella’s boyfriend to help him navigate an unfamiliar western landscape in search of her, we follow Viajero’s view on the adventure instead of Trevalyn’s.

Jenny, similarly, is a girl who is viewed as a helpful figure around Arabella and balances the Viajero/Trevalyn chapters with feminine situations in a hotel where she spends time with Arabella as a companion/assistant/friend. Her father, who runs the hotel where Arabella is staying, isn’t very popular and Jenny is self-conscious about her role in society, unlike Viajero. Although not formally hired as an attendant, she rapidly becomes one and we follow her efforts to help the attractive protagonist get out of danger.

And there will be more updates.

The Palladia series began with a small novella—which grew into a standalone book—which eventually got joined to another standalone book that had been written separately—which is now developing yet another book after it. This new book, like everything else about Palladia, is taking a direction I hadn’t foreseen and hadn’t particularly wanted it to have at first.

​I posted a while back on possible ideas for this story, which included a fun, rather juvenile-feeling sort of romp in the outer-space colony of Alphea. And, as happened for what feels like the thousandth time, the story moved itself forward in a quite different direction. Towards the hidden past of the EC instead. There’s a character called Meldono who is mentioned briefly in Invaders as the “founder of the EC,” at a time that appears to be about a hundred years from now and two hundred years in the past from the time of Invaders. Nothing else is mentioned about this man except that he had been an Invader who took the side of the EC and Katia looks at a statue of him.

City of the Invaders was never really my personal favorite of my books, nor was Consuela. I enjoy working on every story at the time of writing, but like all authors it’s hard not to feel particularly fond of some for whatever reason—personal emotions, association with a family event or a special location, a feeling of achievement in showing a character or social issue, etc. As I mentioned last month about Victoria’s King Felipe, he’s a little bit a favorite character of mine. I’ve never felt that way about any of the characters in these two books. In fact, I wrote Consuela as a filler and then dismissed it as a dud. It looks a bit different now when compared to its original, silly first draft even though the story components weren’t changed very much. But the series gradually, slowly develops more on its own arc than in line with my feelings about it. It's a little bit humbling, actually.

When I draft new ideas, working on another aspect of the Palladia world is never a priority for me. It just keeps occurring to me. And the EC’s origins were not a concept that I thought of as having any mystery to them. They were just a plot device to get these kids to be in a stalemate with a majority group—so the kids have to be in a minority group, right? But once the idea appeared of Meldono possibly coming back to life and when alive he’s not much like the EC legends said he was, the third book’s brainstorming started to change. A lot. I guess sometimes you can write a story without knowing what it’s about at first—and then, more and more, you find out.

And there will be more updates.

I'm pretty experienced at using a computer, websites, and the internet. So much of my book marketing, my social life, and my writing itself (using things like Microsoft Word) is constructed around these channels. But that doesn't mean there aren't times when computers think they own me and not the other way around. A few weeks ago I was going through all the form fields of a book promotion website as I filled in data for the site to host one of my books as a listing, with a link to a freebie. But my computer insisted on downloading a massive, mandatory update while I just sat staring at it. Anyone who has used the internet or a laptop much knows how this feels.

Anyway, when the computer was working again, I lost the data in the website’s form several times when I accidentally pressed something. It cleared back to the original page I’d started from, leaving me having to start over. After a little while of this—I know it probably sounds funny, but it's stressful at the time—I did things in extremely small stages. First the book’s name. Make sure I select my author profile from a list because it won’t select automatically. Make sure the keyboard isn’t adding extra, irrelevant letters to the book’s name or to my name. Copy and paste the link to the free files, then go BACK into it and upload a cover and a link to what to read next if you finish my download . . . you get the idea.

And then I was finally able to use a little feature on this site. It has an engine for adding common tropes (cliché plot elements that often appear in fiction) and story settings to help describe your book. Now this was so massively helpful that I was glad I did all that other stuff before. There was a drop-down list of possible terms and it wasn’t just fun to scroll through and see common story devices: “Oh, I’ve certainly seen that one!” It helped me click on a few of my own. I saved all of the filters that I selected to share with you. This covers a LOT of the topics that appear in my books, even if the trope appears in only one book.


Plot Tropes
Chosen One; Coming of Age; Different Worlds Romance; Dystopian; Estranged Families; Fairy Tale Retelling; Family Drama; Futuristic Tech; Interstellar Travel; Monarchy; Second Chances

Character Tropes
Action Girl; Anti-Hero; Amateur Sleuth; Damsel in Distress; Celebrity/Musicians; Magical/Enchanted People; Outsider MC; Pastor/Minister/Church Elder; Royalty

Setting Tropes
17th Century; 19th Century; 20th Century; 21st Century; Ancient; Contemporary; High School; Historical; Rural; Space; United States; Europe

And there will be more updates.