Turkey Day Update: 'Compline' Has Begun

All right, I know I told myself to hold off till December to get going with Compline, but I have a four-day weekend with today being Thanksgiving, so I figured, why the hell not? Especially since I'm all but completely done with The Perfect Rochester. 

art by Chris Rawlins on Deviant Art

There's a detail about the fairy tale that I'm exploring, and I'm gothying it up (Is that a word? It is now!) by mixing it up with traditional ghost fiction, and as a hat-tip to the legend, it's set in a historical fantasy Germany even if Hamelin isn't anywhere in the book at all. Sort of like Voices in the Briars, which I set in a historical fantasy Hungary, this one will have a bunch of made-up place names. No vampires involved. 

I've also been trawling Tumblr a lot lately for visual inspiration not only for this book, but for future ones as well. That's the one social media platform I love the best largely because of its user base, which skews not so much younger but more creative in outside-the-box ways compared to places like Instagram. I did resurrect my old account not to post anything, but to have access to people's art, which I goggle at whenever I'm there, and I write notes as ideas happen. 

There's been a surge of inspiration from that site alone for elements I can use in future books like The Twilight Lover, which follows Compline. I might even be amassing fun stuff for Camera Obscura, but that's not for a long while still. It doesn't hurt jotting down notes as I go, though.

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UPDATE: Oh, yeah -- forgot to mention. If you're interested in previewing The Perfect Rochester, you can go to the book's Smashwords page and click "read the sample online" under the book cover. It's got a generous sampling for customers, and you can read up to the first three chapters. 

UPDATE II:  Aha. So it looks like you have to be logged in to Smashwords in order to read the sample. Never mind. Sorry, everyone. Kobo Books will let you check it out if you're interested. 

'The Perfect Rochester' Book Blurb

While I continue to do some final polishing up, I guess I should share the book blurb:

Being a primordial god has its perks unless one considers maturation, and centuries spent largely isolated from humanity begin to bear awkward fruit. Narcisse Nightshade, primordial god of sleep, is about to discover just how clumsy his coming-of-age at twenty immortal years can be. Prone to collapsing in defensive sleep and finding comfort in his specifically woven dreamscapes, he’s used to enjoying his solitude his own way whenever the ills of the mortal world threaten his waking hours.

Until one night a stranger suddenly appears in his dream—a windswept, raging, Victorian dreamboat who instantly catapults Narcisse into a highly irregular adventure playing detective. How on earth did this invader manage to enter a private dream? What did he want from the god of sleep? 

Narcisse fumbles through his own coming-of-age with the help of immortal messengers, a soulless older sister bent on exacting bloody justice, a hovering mother widely feared by their feuding kin, and Chaos itself. What he discovers about this elusive mortal opens the floodgates to his own inner world and his heart, and perhaps—perhaps—the god of sleep is a great deal more human where it counts the most.

Taking place concurrently as the events in Nightshade’s Emporium, The Perfect Rochester is a romantic comedy about dreams, elusive and otherwise.

As usual, this is the preliminary version, which means changes can still be made. I tried to clean up the prose and whittle things down a bit, and so far this is what I have. 

I had too much fun writing this book as well as Nightshade's Emporium, and I'm really, really tempted to revisit this universe in a future book. I'm still on the fence about it, but the struggle is real. And if it does happen, there'll be some shuffling taking place in the calendar since I'd rather not space related books too far apart.

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UPDATE: The book has been uploaded at Draft2Digital, and you can go here for the pre-order page. Last time I checked, only Apple has it listed, but the stores will increase in number the closer we get to the release date. I'm taking a bit of a break from it to clear my head, and then I'll be going over it again in e-book form to make sure mistakes were all corrected (or at the very least minimized since things can still escape my notice despite all efforts).

Egad! That Went Well

I somehow managed to pull a rabbit out of a hat and got the revisions done for The Perfect Rochester. Whatever overhauls were expected turned out to be a hell of a lot less, and I only needed to change a handful of references to Lorik's backstory to make things work. 

Generational trauma -- that was the key to his present and how he needed to heal for the future with Narcisse's help, obvs. 

So it looks like it's just edits left, which aren't as troublesome as revisions can be, so yay! I've also updated my site's Book News page with the 2025 calendar and the dates already stamped on each book (scroll down to the bottom of the page for the banner). Really, the calendar follows this year's as I'm keeping to the four-month cycle, which allows me a lot of wiggle room in case I find myself at loose ends with the last book written with too much time to spare. 

So far I have story ideas for next year and the year after with Camera Obscura sort of dangling just beyond 2026. Past that, I don't have a clue what to write next, but what I currently have is plenty. The Perfect Rochester aside, that's six books altogether coming up that I also have extensive notes for. 

I've been asked before what I'd do if I ran out of ideas. Simple. I stop writing. That's it. And if Camera Obscura happens to be the absolute last book I'm able to write, so be it. But I don't think so since at the moment I'm not actively looking for inspiration anywhere. I do have a folder on my desktop that's being filled with all sorts of images I stumble across online that look promising. Maybe I'll come up with more stories eventually, but I do need to stop looking or thinking too much about it now that I've already filled up two-plus years of new books. 

If and when I do retire from writing, I'll keep this blog up and running still. I'll be more than happy to talk up my older books since they're not getting gallery pages. At any rate, it'll all be fine, and I'm really happy with where things are heading with me. Onward, indeed!

Okay, So I Did a Thing

I decided to open a Bluesky account -- clearly going against my resolve never to touch social media again -- and so far all I've done was go straight into my default setting of lurking and liking pretty pictures. I've yet to post anything, but then I'm also not keen on maintaining one more account online. I've already settled down nicely in this cozy little space online, and I've yet to regret doing this. 

Anyone who's curious about the place can check it out, and as far as I can see, Bluesky's been enjoying a massive bump in new accounts.The only thing I'm not too keen on seeing is users marveling at engagement and boasting follower counts -- the inevitable disease that's worked into the fabric of social media -- and when I see someone post that, I automatically avoid that account (sometimes even muting it). Popularity contests are just not my thing.

I'm frankly still on the fence but am more likely to delete my account there or just abandon it for the time being. I haven't posted anything on my own timeline, so there's nothing to see save for a follower count of five, and I don't care. I prefer to follow accounts that don't follow me back (like Larry the Cat!), but as noted, I can also go without. 

It's a work-in-progress if you were to call it that. I'm just happy sitting back and watching while not promising anything beyond that. Because I'm weird that way.

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UPDATE: Account deleted. I gave it a week. No bueno. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the platform itself. I actually love how spartan it is and how it's like a really stripped down version of Twitter, but the desire to interact and put myself out there was nowhere to be found. If anything, I felt more and more mentally drained every time I got on and read people's posts, no matter what they were. 

I'm just not cut for social media anymore, I suppose, and that's okay. The closest thing I've ever done to going back to that is logging back into my Disqus account so I could read and comment over at Joe My God, and that's about it. 

At any rate, it was an eye-opening experience for me even if it only reminded me why I decided to withdraw and carve out this dusty, cobwebby corner for myself.

One Day Later, and Post Titles Still Suck

I've got today off from work, and it'll be my last mental health break before the holidays eat me alive. It also means extra time for even more revision and editing work, which so far has been coming along pretty well. In extra good news, I've committed to "the perfect Rochester's" backstory, and Lysander is now Lorik. I'll be discussing in more depth in the book's gallery page once it's set up, but for the time being, I'm writing stuff down in my notebook. 

In the meantime, I'm looking into the future and already amassing a crap ton of notes for Compline. You know, it's funny how numerous closer readings of a story yield all kinds of interesting and promising stuff. And for better or for worse, I've decided to take a different angle in re-imagining "The Pied Piper of Hamelin". 

See, it started off with a bit of a macabre jolt of inspiration, but it's now evolved into something else entirely after I went back and reread the fairy tale and its variants for the bajillionth time. It was a small detail in one of the variants the fairy tale -- just like there was a very short variation in one of the myths involving the god of sleep -- that ultimately turned me down a completely different path from my original notes, and I actually like the possibilities even more. They're more promising and work very well with what I have in mind for my retelling. 

So! As with The Perfect Rochester, the main conflict of Compline is smaller and more personal and a lot more doable from my end. Seriously, I should stop defaulting to looking at the big, BIG picture when planning a book since that only dumps me down a rabbit hole of way too many possible side plots, which end up turning into a morass of whatever-ness that doesn't make any sense. 

And so this song ended up taking over my inspiration pile. I happened to listen to this while working, and it jarred loose a bunch of ideas that were already tapped into by those fairy tale variants (or a very specific detail in some of them). It definitely shows how much more private the angle of the story will be. 

Now I'm totally jazzed and really looking forward to writing it.