A Tale of Two Stories

I am not a multi-tasker. I generally like to work on one project at a time. So the idea I'd willingly assign myself the task of writing two stories at once—both of which need to be finished by the end of the year—seems farfetched. And yet...

It all started with the Common Elements Romance Project (more about that HERE). The idea appealed to me, the lead time was luxurious, and I had several story ideas that could easily be modified to include the “common elements” ie a lightning storm, lost keys, a haunted house (really haunted or rumored to be), a stack of thick books, and a person named Max.

Easy enough, right?

The first story I fixed on was Lightning in a Bottle, a steampunk story I’d had in the back of my mind for years. True, it was originally slated to be the third story in the as-yet-unwritten Winter Hearts quadrilogy, but with the addition of a short prologue, it works even better as book number one. Given the story, the characters and the set-up, it was a no-brainer adding most of the elements. Although I may have stretched the idea of what constitutes a person. 

A robotic dog totally counts…doesn’t it?

So, I settled down to work, interrupted by the occasional necessity to re-release some of my previously published books whose rights had reverted to me, and by the pressing need for an updated website.  And, yes, I knew going in that my non-multi-tasking muse would not be happy with me, but what I didn’t expect was that the witch would seek revenge by planting an irresistible plot bunny square in my path. 

I really should have known better.

It happened while I was editing Going To The Chapel, and making notes for the sequel, Going Up The Country. It occurred to me that I already had a lightning storm and haunted house built right into the flashback scenes. That lost keys would be a perfect goad to increase my heroine’s frustration as she attempts to storm off following a major blow-out with the hero, and there was even a minor character named Max (he and his wife keep trying to insist I call him Maxwell, but I’m not listening). All I need to add are some books.

Umm…yeah, that’ll be hard.

The clincher was that the book was set between Halloween and Thanksgiving—exactly when the Common Elements books are set to release.

How could I not write this book now?

So here I am, juggling two books at once and wondering if I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew. Theoretically, I should be able to finish both books in time, but life has an annoying way of not going according to plan.

To be continued…

Changing Worlds

So, a few years back, Amazon came up with what I thought was a genius idea: The Kindle Worlds Program. In case you’re not familiar with the concept, it was a system that enabled (or perhaps encouraged is a better word) authors to play in other authors’ worlds. It was not unlike officially-sanctioned fanfiction. And if you were an author who happened to have friends who also were authors, and whose books you’d brainstormed, or critiqued, or beta-read before they were even published, it was a whole lot of fun. 

This was the case for me. In Going Back To Find You, I got to take characters from one of my existing series (Children of Night) and write a story for them that was set in a book-world I hadn’t written, but whose birth I’d attended, if you will, one that I’d loved from inception.  It was a win-win-win scenario.

But what Amazon giveth, it also taketh away. Shortly after my second Kindle World book was released, we got word that the program was ending, the rights to our books were being returned to us, and all the books were coming down. In short, we were being kicked out of Eden.

In some cases, the original authors gave us permission to re-release our books as-is, but of course we couldn’t write any new books. This worked out fine for my first Kindle World book. The characters I’d written about were only visiting Sapphire Falls anyway. At the end, they went back to their originally scheduled series. But, as I was writing my second Kindle World book—a hometown wedding story featuring characters from a different series (LA Love Lessons)—I discovered several new characters who desperately wanted their stories told — and whose stories I desperately wanted to tell. These were friends and relatives of my hero and/or heroine, but they didn't exist in the LA Love Lessons world at all. They were deeply entrenched in a world not-of-my-making, and to which I'd just had my visa revoked.

What to do?

I thought about the problem a lot. I could forget about the new stories, but by then I had an outline, title, and cover for one book, and titles, characters and general ideas for two more. Eventually, I realized I had no choice but to re-write Going To The Chapel and set it someplace else.

Sounds easy, right? Well…not so much.

These were fairly short novellas. Using them to introduce a whole new world was going to throw everything off. They'd been written as bridges between two already established worlds. If I had to start from scratch, the amount of world-building I’d have to do was not just daunting, it was depressing. Going To The Chapel had been meant to be, at least in part, a love letter to a quirky, small town that I already knew and loved. Attempting to manufacture a copy-cat town felt wrong, somehow. Not to mention borderline unfeasible. I love fictional Nebraska, but I've only driven through the actual place. I can't count the number of times I've cringed while reading a book set in a place that I know well, and the author clearly does not. Verisimilitude was going to be a problem. But, all the same, I had to set my them somewhere.

That’s when it hit me. Sapphire Falls was not the first quirky small town I’d fallen in love with. To quote Yoda: There is another. And this one was mine: Oberon,California—the site of my very first series.

Migrating the stories to Oberon was not without its own challenges, of course. Challenges that go beyond the fact that, at the moment, the Oberon books are being updated and are not even available for purchase. Making the new books, effectively, a bridge to nowhere!

There is, for example, the fact that rural Nebraska and Coastal California are not even superficially the same place. They have different weather patterns, different geographical features, different geology, different food crops and vegetation, different fauna; their populations favor different sports and recreation, enjoy different food, drink and fashion—the list was bigger than I’d realized when I first came up with the idea. Eventually, however, I managed.

The new version of Going To The Chapel is coming out June 3^rd. And, if everything goes as planned, the follow-up book, Going Up the Country, will release this November—just in time for Thanksgiving. Which in itself is awesome, since I've wanted to write a Thanksgiving-themed Oberon story for years! 

There's not as much magic in the crossover stories as there are in the actual Oberon books,  which makes sense since there's none at all in the LA Love Lessons books. And then again, I've always thought of the Oberon series as Paranormal-lite. 

You can read more about both these stories here:  https://www.pgforte.com/crossover-novellas