Before I get into what I’m writing this Fall, I want to let everyone know that Fairest of Them All is available for pre-order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Apple.

I put it on Google Play for pre-order, but it “needs action” for some reason. I’ll check back on that in a week or two. There’s just too much going on at the moment for me to worry about that.

A quick heads up about Payhip: I will be putting the book up there on August 31, and I’ll offer 50% off over there again. (Payhip doesn’t allow for pre-orders at this time.)

This book is one of my top favorites. I was only able to gloss over key elements in the Snow White fairy tale. The apple, the mirror, the emphasis on beauty, and a villain’s selfishness all play a role in this book. It just doesn’t play it out like it did in Snow White. My characters had their own ideas on how the story should play out, so I wasn’t able to make it line up like the Snow White fairy tale that we’re all familiar with. But Snow White was the original source of inspiration that launched this book.

There is a definite villain, but it’s not obvious who that villain is. It was fun to write this book and wonder up until halfway into it WHO the villain was. Once I found out who it was, I had to go back and revise portions of the story to line up with the final reveal. Honestly, I loved that the person I originally pegged as the villain didn’t turn out to be the bad guy because it kept me on my toes while I continued to write the story. I had to trust my subconscious mind to piece things together at the right time. As always, it did.

If you’d like to pre-order this book, here are the links:

Amazon US

Amazon UK

Barnes & Noble

Kobo

Apple

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I’m still working through edits for Nelly’s Mail Order Husband and Forever Yours, so I’ll gloss over those books at this time. 🙂

Now for the books I’m going to start in mid-August!

I got the cover for The Duke’s Secluded Bride yesterday!

Here are the books in the Marriage by Fairytale Series:

Remember Marcy’s cousin in One Enchanted Evening? He was the Duke of Edmondstone. I introduced him at the very end of that book. I also bring him in during the course of Fairest of Them All. I really liked him, and I wanted to give him his own book. Fortunately, the perfect plot idea came to me last month, so I can now write it.

I love this Marriage by Fairytale Series. The whole series was designed to be an experiment in gothic romance. I wanted to explore some darker elements in fiction, but I didn’t want to give up the happy ending or a strong love story while doing that.

What I love so much about writing for passion is how flexible it is. I can go in any direction I want to. I’m not boxed in by what’s popular in the romance genre. I don’t have to worry about how well the book fits with the market’s expectations. I can start the story and let the characters have full control over everything. (When you’re writing to market, you have to put boundaries that characters can’t cross.)

Anyway, this series has been a real joy to write, and I was thrilled to come up with another book I can fit into this series so that I can keep on writing it. The Duke’s Secluded Bride has its inspiration from Rapunzel. The heroine has spent her life in one wing of the manor at the country estate where her family keeps a close and watchful eye on her. Because of that, she doesn’t know how to react to the hero when she first meets him. I’m going with an arranged marriage scenario for this one so the two will meet on their wedding day. It’s important to the plot that the hero marries her before he comes to realize how strange everything around him is. I don’t know exactly what elements are going to be strange in this book, but I’m going to have a lot of fun finding out. The only way I’ll know is by writing it. I can plot all day long, but until I start writing, I really don’t know what is going to happen because the subconscious mind (or characters) will take over.

I finished reading The Earl’s Inconvenient Wife to get ready for writing Breaking the Rules.

I will probably need to give The Earl’s Inconvenient Wife another skim through during the course of writing this one, but going over it now does help to get reacquainted with Lilly and Mr. Morris, so I’m familiar with their personalities. I still need to match up timelines with this book and A Most Unsuitable Earl.

I also want to use the fact that Mr. Christopher Robinson had a role in helping Lilly and her sister, Claire (who was the heroine in The Earl’s Inconvenient Wife), sneak into a townhouse as chambermaids to my advantage in this book. I think I can use it as a way to get Christopher to help Lilly get into White’s once she disguises herself as a gentleman. She’s going to need to get to Mr. Morris without him knowing it’s her. Mr. Morris is going to be pretty upset with her for ditching him time after time in the past, and he’ll have written her off by the time this story begins. My plan is to for her to force him into a marriage through some kind of scandal, and then she’ll realize just how upset he is with her. As a result, she’ll need to come up with some ways to get through to him. Going to White’s as a gentleman will be one of them. I suspect this book with have some great comedic moments in it based on Lilly’s personality in The Earl’s Inconvenient Wife and the fact that her “partners in crime” are going to be Christopher and Lord Edon.

I don’t know if this is going to start a series, if I’ll merge it into the Marriage by Scandal Series, or if it’ll be a standalone. We’ll see as time progresses.

Regarding the Wyoming Series…

This is Book 1:

I need to read through the 32,000 words I have done in this so far. I don’t know if I’ll start that process on August 1 or wait until I start writing to do this. This is the rewrite of The Stagecoach Bride I wrote with Stephannie Beman. The characters have changed a lot, but the main plot is the same.

I need to work on a description for this book. I’ve been putting that off because so much other stuff has been going on. If anyone wants me to remind them of what the book’s about, let me know. I assume everyone reading this blog has already read it, which is why I’m not rehashing it in this post.

This is Book 2:

Stephannie and I had started this book, but I’ve wiped the entire slate clean for this one because I’m not really sure how things will develop. I only know that the heroine is going to be injured and will show up in the hero’s barn with her young nephew. Beyond that, I have no idea how things will play out.

Her main goal will be to keep her nephew safe, but she also needs to get her nephew to her brother (who is the boy’s father). The problem is she doesn’t want to get the hero involved because the stuff her family is dealing with involves the most dangerous man in town, and she doesn’t want the hero or the hero’s niece to suffer because he happened to find her and her nephew on his property before she could get out of there. (Her injuries will be the reason she was unable to escape before he caught them, and he’s not going to be willing to let her leave when she needs to recover from those injuries.)

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So those are the four books I have on my To Write List for the rest of this year. 🙂