This includes all three books. This is my main focus project and a huge rewrite because I pantsed the First Draft and it was very fun and whimsical, but made no sense; the Second Draft was where I figured out what the story was actually about; now I need to actually tell the story I’m trying to tell. A huge clarifying draft that I am feeling much more secure about, and it is coming together much better than anything I’ve written before.
The draft that shall not be named.
And can I say that it continues to come back and plague me? I keep envisioning new scenes for this draft against all logical sense.
Friends, I don’t watch movies or read a lot of romance novels that aren’t steeped in paranormal bullshit. If your barely of age human isn’t having a crisis over that hundreds-of-years-old vampire, I don’t usually want it. Because I’m almost 40 and I’m having that same crisis.
So why in the world would I write a romance novel… I mean, at all, but like… between two normal humans? That was totally not paranormal in any way?
But the brain will randomly hijack all my faculties to dream up more scenes and scenarios and character depth and backstory for these two–Julian and Avery–when it’s least convenient for me and I just have to roll with it and write it all down.
Do I ever intend to actually write this book? Fn no. But like… maybe? I mean, it has playlists and a whole outline and all these scenes…
The very first thing I ever, ever worked on seriously was a two book project that I pitched to a publisher and who kindly said, put it all in one book and sell that. And the publisher also said many, many other things that were seriously good pieces of advice that I took at the time to mean, “your book is shit and it’ll never sell” because that’s what my scumbag brain heard. It took me several years to actually process the feedback in a healthy way and to come up with any kind of want to revise this series again.
Do I currently have a plan? No. But this is a huge part of my masterwork–what I call my Urban Fantasy Umbrella Projects–and I absolutely need to get this revised.
Another Umbrella Project, this is a 3 part novel that I only halfway have a plan for. That sucks to say because one of these three books already has two full drafts.
And I say I only halfway have a plan and that’s true because I now know what each of the three books are about and how they fit under the “umbrella” as it were, but with everything else going on they have not had a full outline.
Yet another Umbrella Project, and one that I absolutely adore. This one having to do with Greek Mythology and specifically with the Three Fates!
I had this idea many years ago now where I woke up in a hotel on some business trip somewhere, and was almost late to work that morning because I was frantically trying to get this idea scribbled onto the page of my notebook before the day consumed me and I lost it.
With the recent popularity of things like Lore Olympus and Red Rising coming out, both of which I’ve been FERAL for, I am absolutely frothing at the mouth to write this, but I absolutely do not have enough of a plan for this book yet, and it is very low on the totem pole for things that need to be written for the Umbrella Projects.
A friend of mine and I wanted to write a story once. We ended up coming up with five. But we disagreed on where it was going and why. We honestly have not done enough thinking and talking about this story yet to fully flesh out the world or outline the books, it’s still in idea phase.
But I keep thinking about this world because it’s my one High Fantasy thing and it has magic and dragons, so of course I do, because I literally love reading books like this.
This is a project that is near and dear to my heart. However much I want to tell this story, and no matter how much I want to do the story proper justice, I am still not sure I am #OwnVoices enough to be the one to tell it.
This is also a project that is very different from anything else I want to write, and has nothing to do with my Umbrella projects. Because it is so different and so difficult a story to tell, I am still in the research phase, very much still trying to decide if I will write this or not, and still telling myself I absolutely have to because it is the project of my heart.
Even if it takes me my whole lifetime, I don’t feel like I can give up on trying to tell these stories in a beautiful way. This epic is surprising, wonderful, adventurous and devastating. It is going to give you hope and it will rip you to shreds, and I know there is an end for these stories that lets you know that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. The work is hard, but we can all strive for it every day.
