Allow Me to Explain
Hello again, everyone! Long time no see. Apologies for the unexpected hiatus, I’m just now getting back into the swing of things after a busy couple of months (tbh, things are still pretty hectic for me right now, but I’m really making an effort to get back to regular blogging) and after doing some difficult soul-searching regarding my originally planned rewrite/rerelease of Drawn into the Shadows (aka High Risk). I will likely have another update regarding that soon, but I just wanted to give you all a heads up now that unfortunately I think I am ultimately going to cancel that, or at least postpone it indefinitely while I figure out how I want to handle it. Some of you may have seen my last post (which I’ve temporarily taken down while I think things through) regarding my decision to go back to my original plan to post it for free in serial installments rather than publishing it as a book, and as you can see it’s been weeks and I still haven’t posted a chapter.
Like I said, I’ll have more to say more about this later after I’ve figured things out, but I think ultimately my heart just isn’t in it enough, I don’t have enough free time, and I’m not in the right headspace to commit myself to my old Siena Noble romance pen name anymore. I think I really did make the right decision two years ago when I retired my romance pen, but at the same time I just couldn’t bring myself to fully abandon High Risk knowing I’d left it on a cliffhanger. That’s still not to say that you might never see Caleb, Kiera, and some story elements from both the original as well as my paranormal reimagining ever again, though; part of the reason why I’m hesitant to post it as a serial is that I’m once again thinking about how I can integrate my ideas for it into my urban fantasy WIP and as it stands the best way to do so might be as side characters and plots in future books, rather than a standalone romance.
Also, you may have noticed that I also recently changed the series title for my fantasy WIP from Alchemy and Artifacts to Immortal Artifacts. It’s still technically a working title (since I suck at titles), but I think it’s likely to stick, and ultimately I think it’ll fit the overall series better since due to recent developments I needed a name for the overall series/verse that wasn’t so heavily centered around the twin concepts of alchemy and archeology. You see, another reason why I haven’t had my heart in rewriting Drawn into the Shadows is because while trying to work on some writers block pertaining to a specific idea I had for it I ended up spawning a whole new book idea and it’s kind of taken over my whole brain and creative drive for a while. I’ve actually made a little bit of headway on it and while I’m debating whether or not to finish it and publish (or possibly query for trad pub) it before The Blood Alchemist, but either way, it’ll be part of the Immortal Artifacts series.
I’m super excited about this idea and as it comes together more I’ll share more details about it, but what I’ll say for now is that it’s tentatively titled A Mad, Bad, Dangerous Summer and is a standalone prequel/midquel (since TBA deals with dual timelines) to The Blood Alchemist in which Lord Byron is the villain (or at least one of them). The year is 1816, and what at first seemed like the height of romantic adventure–accompanying Byron into exile on Lake Geneva–has quickly turned to bitter resentment for Dr. John Polidori. Taunted by his lordship and yet unable to shake his painful secret yearning for him, doomed to wallow in the great poet’s shadow, and beset by strange nightmares that leave him physically drained and questioning if he’s going mad, John is teetering on the brink of despair when he’s befriended by the mysterious Countess Laura Breuss.
By all outward appearances a vivacious, wealthy young widow with an overbearing stepmother, Laura is actually something much more scandalous: a young vampire. After saving John from drowning in the midst of a storm, Laura finds herself intrigued by the gloomy young doctor, as well as by the aura of magic surround him that he seems to be totally unaware of and the strange, dark influence that Lord Byron has over him. As Laura and John strike up a friendship that will alter the course of both of their lives, the tangled webs that surround them both become more and more entangled. Laura is determined to figure out the mystery of Bryon’s sinister magnetism and save John from losing himself in it, but the more she’s drawn into the private drama of the Villa Diodati, the more concerned that her “stepmother” and maker Erzsebet is that she’s losing herself rather than focusing on the task at hand: ensuring that the conference Erzsebet is hosting to ensure peace and solidarity among the magical and vampiric communities of post-Napoleonic Europe doesn’t fail. It’s a new, Enlightened age after centuries of war, witch trials, and vampire panics, and if the supernatural underworld is to stave off a return to those dark days the gathering must go off without a hitch. The last things they need are young Genevan ladies being mysteriously drained of life, or a doctor with powers he can’t control, or a notorious exiled poet who seems to have the entire city in his thrall…
A bit of an odd concept, I know, and I don’t want to hype up the “Year Without a Summer” bit too much since those few months will probably only take up about a third of the total timeline of the book, but I’m just so excited to be able to share this much of my idea for it with you.
In other news, rest assured that I will be returning very soon to my Fifty Shades and Dan Brown sporkings, though I can’t guarantee how frequently I’ll be able to post them. Also, if you’re lucky, you may get at least one post from me soon that isn’t book writing updates, Fifty Shades, or Angels & Demons; a while back I wrote up this essay-ish thing about the teen vampire trend in the 2000s/2010s that was supposed to be a script for a video essay. But it got to be way longer and more rambling than anticipated and I haven’t had the time, proper setup, or mental wherewithal to record and edit it as a video, so I’m probably just going to polish it up and post it here. And yes, I do plan to get back to the Angels & Demons recap I started as well; it’s just that sporking Dan Brown is pretty slow-going since I’m constantly pausing to fact-check everything.
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