Is it possible to fanfic yourself?
It sounds crazy and full of hubris, I know. *cringe* But here’s what I’m working on while waiting for Mal to hit the world.
I’m on several Facebook groups for pre-made cover artists. Mostly I’m just watching for sales, deals, and getting a taste of each artist’s work to know whether I want to hit them up in the future. All of them are new-to-me artists that I personally had never heard of.
One day, someone posted a cover that literally made me gasp out loud.
It was so ME. The old me, the core me, the original Dreamer. The person who wrote the bloody Shanhasson stories. Blood, menage, it screamed ME ME pick ME.
But it was clearly contemporary.
I could not shake that cover. It haunted me. Within hours, I had to buy it. Even though I’m seriously strapped right now after remaking all the Connagher covers and generally having very little royalties coming in since I haven’t had a new release in ages.
I HAD TO HAVE IT. Even though I didn’t have a story for it.
It already had a story. I just had to write it.
After payment, I made that cover my wallpaper. I also printed out a small version and taped it to one of my notebooks. And I started writing down my dreams, because yeah, I dreamed the book right away.
It’s been a long, long time since I dreamed a book. (This is Dreaming in Rhyme, after all, but I’m generally too tired nowadays to dream a book that I can actually remember the next day.)
It’s basically the Shanhasson premise, copied into a contemporary setting. With vampires. I mean, I already had the blood, the biting, the whole bonding thing in Shanhasson. It was always vampiric without actually bringing out the fangs.
I condensed a couple of characters into one. I set clear boundaries for myself, that this would be ROMANCE only. No major character deaths. But otherwise, it’s Shanhasson in a modern world. With vampires. Did I say vampires? I swore I’d never write a vampire book but there you go.
All first person. So you get first person Dharman/Rhaekhar scenes. First person Sal scenes. First person Shannari scenes. AND I CAN’T WAIT FOR FIRST PERSON GREGAR scenes. Sorry, I’m shouting. But I can’t fucking wait – though that will likely be book two the way I have it set up in my mind.
And now, I’m more confident in a BDSM setting too. When I wrote Rose, I had no idea that was the direction I’d eventually go. (It was my first book.) I had no clear understanding of masochism and submission – just what the characters needed and wanted. I didn’t have the labels.
I didn’t know the significance of a Blood kneeling before his queen and offering his throat, yet still being fully alpha and tough.
Yeah.
Oh, and this menage won’t cheat the boys either. It’s all MMF, baby. Then some MMMF.
Another oh, I think this will be my first MMMFF too. Yeah, I will go there, a first for me, in book 3. I’ve had a certain somebody ask if I’d ever do FF and the right character and book world has arrived.
The only cramp in all this will be purchasing covers for books 2 and 3 because she’s $$$ if it’s not premade. The chances that she’d do another premade exactly like what I need are slim, so I’ll need to set funds aside for custom. Ideally I’ll release these close together, but it depends on how quickly I can get covers turned around. She’s already booked into December, so by the time I raise the funds, it might be 2018 before I can get the covers made.
I’m a damned fast typist, but this is the kind of book that I literally cannot type fast enough to capture. I’m planning to blow through these 3 books as quickly as possible and have them written, ready to release close together. Then see what I can do for covers. And no, I won’t show you the cover that started all this until I have everything lined out.
But I promise. It’ll blow your mind.
It sucked to be twenty two years old and still afraid of the dark.
Bad things always happened in the dark. I’d learned that at an early age, when my father was brutally murdered in front of me. My mother met the same fate when I was seventeen.
Waiting for the sun to set, monsters were real and they were always hungry. Always hunting.
Demons with pasty gray skin, wasted bodies down to skin and bones, with red, glowing eyes. Mom always said they were hunting her, but after she died, I kept seeing them.
They were still hunting… me.