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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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Happy New Year Everyone! As you might remember from last year, I intend to release anthologies of my previous work. Three anthologies are still in working cover design stage (I like the designs, not sure about the colors for them) and each anthology will have three books in it, grouped by theme. Birthday and Victoria aren't in an anthology because there isn't a third book to go with them. The reason for the anthologies is obviously practical efficiency. I have published a lot over the years and the books can look cluttered, especially to a first-time reader. While interest in the individual books of course remains, they are starting to unify into broader general categories rather than loads of individual titles. It's much less overwhelming to show people five books instead of eleven. I have not published these anthologies because of two factors. The first is that I'd like to write a small story, at least one per anthology, that is unique new material exclusive to the anthology and not available elsewhere. I haven't had time to do this because the last six months have been hysterically busy. Our family has been in a state of transition as a beloved older relative died, one of my sisters had a lot of trouble at work, another sister is in the final semesters of medical school, my mother had heart surgery, and I spent all my time keeping the household running over a slew of continual emergencies and the hottest summer I've literally ever experienced. (And yes, I've lived in Texas my whole life. I'm quite heat tolerant.) I also made a commitment to much better fitness and exercise, which often left me tired, but I feel great about my new body even though it's been less than a year of changed lifestyle. So I did not have time to write anything new. Our house also went through a major upheaval as we wanted a lot of old stuff gone.  out out It's been over two years since I updated my picture. But this is the only new one I have, a random selfie, because I haven't had time to take serious author pictures. You know, the ones where you dress up and smile like you're wearing a wig even if you aren't? Don't worry, I will take some of those in the spring. The second reason I haven't done the anthologies yet is that there IS still some individual attachment to some of the books. Readers feel these stick out from the others in the planned anthologies. This attitude is natural and it takes time to change. If you read the book pages on my website, you'll find a structured logic that I've applied to the anthologies when grouping books. For instance, if you look at Bellevere House outside of its original multi-author project, you'll see it has a lot of similarities with Devotion and Harrisons. But many people will struggle to see Bellevere that way because the Vintage Jane Austen is where they first got to know the book. Gradually it will make sense to think of Bellevere not as "that book that wasn't as liked, but very often read, in that series of books" and more to think "what genre is this book? It's a similar setting and genre to the other two books." Other prickly bug areas included The Birthday Present, (because readers didn't want to accept moving Millhaven Castle away from Facets of Fantasy), and Ryan and Essie (because readers didn't like this book and didn't want it included with a book they'd had interest in, Facets of Fantasy.) So really, the prickly bug is actually Facets of Fantasy. lol. But nothing in Facets needs to be changed, it's just melding it with other placement of books that's a problem.  However, Ryan and Essie became quite different last year and the cover was redone to this lovely green color. Nice, huh? I noticed no books I've published currently have green covers and I was like "so that's what is missing." It's nice to find those leaks and patch them up. Not to mention, the cover is flat-out gorgeous.
I am planning a new cover for The Birthday Present because it and Facets are both blue and that helps link it to Facets, an outdated idea I'm getting tired of. Instead, I need Birthday to unify better with Victoria, which has a regal and austere black and gold. I just haven't had time to do the new cover yet. And yes, that third book in the Birthday trilogy is poking along, with a new working title "All My Brother's Friends." I am REALLY hoping I get a chance to put a book with a fun title like that into a published form. Don't you think I should? And there will be more updates. In my last post, I detailed how I would be minimizing Facets of Fantasy, Ryan and Essie, and Bellevere House because they didn't match with my target audience of young adults--middle school and high school kids. Yes, I know these kids are not adults in the real world, but in Bookland this age bracket is called Young Adult. And that was fine until I began examining more books and realized I'd have to cut even more. These were subtler--This Merry Summertime, The Test of Devotion, and A Year with the Harrisons were often about teenagers, but were teenagers usually the audience?
The answer was no. They are mostly interesting to adults and also at times to children because they are a "for the whole family" sort of genre and kids like that genre a lot more than teenagers do. So I was like "I have to find a solution to this instead of cutting out the books." Then I went back to an idea from last year, which was to divide into 4 genres that I do. I even put that on my business cards. These genres are Science Fiction; Coming of Age; Short Stories; and Middle Grade. The Science Fiction is especially a young adult area, whereas the books that would be cut landed in the Coming of Age and Short Stories categories especially. We're talking 100% of books from those two categories! I decided to stick with these 4 genres, with a twist--I would place each book into a trilogy and replace individual book pages on my website with trilogy pages that list each book in the trilogy on that page. It helps keep track of them and make sure they are evenly divided across 4 categories. In reality, I feel a lot of these books represented interpolation of other audiences than mine into my written work. It's a bit sad that so few of my books were really for MY audience, meaning few of the people who followed me were really that audience either. But since these books DO exist now, I have to find a way to manage them. Trilogy 1: The Palladia Trilogy. Science Fiction. Obviously, this is the 3 Palladia books already written into a series. The Palladia Trilogy of YA action-adventure stories is set in the future civilization of Palladia, a country that exists 300 years from now. This future society puts people into contrived divisive groups, and it opposes rebels who try to ignore these artificial differences and build a shared world. The three books focus on Palladia, but also include the countries of Belaria and Dorilantz. Trilogy 2: The Americana Trilogy. Coming of Age. (The Test of Devotion; Bellevere House; and A Year with the Harrisons.) At first this seems crazy because Bellevere is already in a series, but after reading the description it does make sense. The Americana Trilogy is a loose umbrella term for three novels for adults written with a realistic American setting. The books are set approximately 100 years from each other (1850; 1937; & 2015) and explore American small-town, rural, archetypical western, and religious life. They were not originally written as a series and Bellevere House, the second book in the trilogy, is listed with its original publication grouping, the Vintage Jane Austen, on some retailers. But they are often linked together because of their shared genre and themes. Trilogy 3: The Worlds Across Time Trilogy. Short Stories. (This Merry Summertime; Ryan and Essie; and Facets of Fantasy.) Largely, this is anything fantasy and it also comprises a large bulk of my older writing, some of it gestated long before it was published. The Worlds Across Time Trilogy is a group of for-the-whole-family short story collections. They showcase teen or 20-something protagonists as well as older adults and children for a balanced aesthetic that offers something for everyone. Fantasy, historical eras shown in a light-hearted way with modernized dialogue, and daily contemporary life mixed with a dose of fantasy are the primary genres. Trilogy 4: The Prince's Invite Series. Middle Grade. This has the 2 remaining books (Victoria: A Tale of Spain and The Birthday Present) and I decided to play off of the fact that one was partly a rewrite of the other. I need a third book for this series so I can (FINALLY) get back to work on Temmark Osteraith also sometimes called The Prince's Ball. It uses the same plot devices and is I guess a rewrite of first two. The Prince's Invite Trilogy is an informal grouping of three stories for middle-school girls. Each book in the trilogy uses a similar storyline--the first half sets up a historical or adventure story about a young girl. In the second half of each book, a girl is invited to a dance by a wealthy ruler of her country, who is threatened because she owns something that discredits him. The third book, Temmark Osteraith, is planned for publication in 2024. I also plan to release a Complete Trilogy Anthology of each series because it will be so much faster and easier for reviewers to have the books all in one volume. Sending series to reviewers can be really clunky because you have to give copies of every book in the series along with whichever one they are reviewing. Unless they are reviewing the first one, but of course I want them to move on and read later ones! And there will be more updates. |
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