Category Archives: writing

I hope you enjoyed my post last week about my new paranormal romance series, Eternal Mates, and the sneak peek at the hero and heroine. I have a new sneak peek for you this week, from a point further along from last week’s scene.

I’ve been busy writing the book all week, trying to get through my other work as quickly as possible to fit in as much writing time as I can. I’m really on a roll with this one and don’t want to slow down, although I did have an off day on Tuesday. It just wasn’t happening and my writing output dropped to a whopping 1000 words. It was hard to get going this morning too, but I got there in the end and powered through a love scene and then another chapter.

The book is up to 74000 words now though, and I think I have around another 20000 to go, so it will probably be coming in just over the mark at maybe 95000 words in total, give or take.

It’s been an exciting week though. I’ve introduced a new character. It’s a species I had wanted to bring into the series during one of the first three books and I had an opportunity to bring this male in when a scene I had planned out decided it wanted to run a little differently. Now I need to write up his character profile sheet while I know him. I think you’ll all like him. Picture cocky self-assured bachelor jaguar shifter club owner who believes that bonds are like collars, and best avoided.

I’m also at a point where I will introduce another character, this one a planned appearance, and I’ll mention a second character. She doesn’t make a physical appearance in this book, but she is in the second and the third books.

Now that you’re up to speed on the book and the progress I’ve made, I’ll share another peek at it…

This sort of follows on from last week. Olivia is a doctor/scientist and has just been bitten by the hero, Loren, whom she had on her inspection table after hunters brought him in rather worse for wear.

Again, all first draft, so forgive any errors!

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After my post last week about my new paranormal romance series, Eternal Mates, and the fantastic response by some of my readers, I decided that I would move my schedule around to accommodate writing the whole of the first book in the series through in one go. The idea of stopping after only a third of the book was written in first draft didn’t sit well with me. I didn’t like the thought of going back to the book and having to complete it at a much later date, when my style and flow of language might be different from what it had been at the time I had written the first part.

So, on Thursday I sacrificed my day off to get the character profiles for eight main characters written up, finalised the outline of the first book, printed everything out and was eager to get going on writing the first book. I managed to get a lot of words done during just the first day of writing on Friday, clocking up 14000 words. I added a few hundred to that on Saturday but had other work demanding my attention. On Monday, it was another mixed day, but I got another chapter written. On Tuesday, I took a day off because I was about to go insane from the pressure of my current workload and deadlines, and my husband swept me out of the house for the day. I came back refreshed yesterday, hitting a cafe and getting another 13400 words of the book down in first draft. Today, I continued to work on the book, and wrote a further 9000 words.

The book is now 10 chapters long, and has 40776 words. I have around another 50000 to write, but if I can keep on top of my other work and keep this pace, I’ll have the first draft completed by the end of next week. I’m quite pleased by that.

I know you’re all desperate for Unleash, and my writing this book through from start to end is going to delay it, but truthfully it will only be a few weeks difference and Unleash needs more time to rest. Writing this book is helping clearly Unleash from my head and that will mean I can do a better job of editing it when I come back to it. See, there is a good side to this delay… because if I edited Unleash and did a poor job of it, that would be an even bigger delay. I won’t release anything until I’m satisfied with it. I’m all about putting quality books out there, not rush jobs.

Back to Eternal Mates. I’m really enjoying this world so far. The females stand on their own two feet and are more than happy to give hell to the males if they overstep the mark. The males are brash, dangerous, and more than happy to verbally spar with the females in an attempt to make them listen to reason / behave / not ignore a command (delete as appropriate) and will protect them when things go south.

The hero in particular is dreamy. He’s noble, a prince, and has that beautiful desire to take responsibility for his actions and suffer the consequences of self-sacrifice for the good of his people. You’ll like him… in fact, why don’t I introduce you to him?

Note: This is first draft material. Forgive any errors. I have skimmed it to avoid spoilers and such, but it’s unedited.

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It’s a WIP Wednesday post with a difference this week. You may have noticed the big shiny, but unfamiliar graphic up there. That’s my holding graphic to give you a taste of what I’m working on. Rather than talking about a series or book you’re all aware of, I’m going to be talking about a new paranormal romance series that I’m working on right now. I’m writing this as a proposal for my agent and hopefully she’ll think it’s good enough to tout around the publishing houses.

I know that many authors wonder why I’m interested in having an agent and breaking into NYC on a traditional publishing contract when I’m doing so well as an indie author. I’m a very cautious person, who prefers to deal in calculated risks, and I like to have my fingers in lots of pies. On top of that, one of my dreams has always been securing a big publishing deal and seeing my books in print with a major player, and I’m working to make that dream a reality. It doesn’t mean I’m giving up on being indie. It just means I’m extending my reach by choosing to play for both Team Indie and Team Contracted (I was going to say Published, but technically I’m published… so went with Contracted, as that’s the only major difference between the two really).

Back to the series. Originally, I was going to write the Guardians of Hades series for this proposal, but I had my reservations about using a series I definitely want to be seven books in length as material for approaching a publishing house in these unpredictable and rocky times. Basically, I was damned if I was going to risk my baby being butchered if the series didn’t do well in print and the publisher wanted it cut short.

I went back to the drawing board to come up with a series dreamed up solely for this proposal. I ended up with two. The Bonded by Blood series and the Eternal Mates series. I spoke about the fundamental differences between the two in this post, but didn’t mention the name of the series: http://www.felicityheaton.com/blog/2012/12/wip-wednesday-a-new-series-plus-updates-on-bonded-by-blood-and-unleash/

I thought hard about which to go with first and decided that I would take a shot with the Eternal Mates series as I was really into that world and I had three books straight off the bat, and knew very clearly what would happen in each.

I’ve spent this week so far, since Monday, working on the series. It’s mostly gathering notes together at this stage and splitting them into different files. We have a file for the world, including the species involved and other details, and one file for each of the first three stories with the scenes I had written down in those, and then one file for other story ideas. I already have another three bare-bone ideas on top of the fleshed out three I’ll be using in the proposal.

Tuesday was a wash out because I wanted to get most of the Vampirerotique Winter Tour posts done and sent out. I had really wanted to continue working on Eternal Mates in the evening, but was tired. Today, I set about pulling the notes for the first book together.

I wrote up what I like to call my plot checklist that I had scribbled down the other day, listing the protagonists wants, why they want it, what the crux of the story is, what the antagonist is after, etc. I typed up a rough outline of the main events and other ideas I had scribbled down during a brainstorming session about the book on Monday. Then, I had to pull those together with the 7000 words of notes I had in the book’s word document in my folder, lacing in those scenes with the events, and forming a complete outline I can work from. It’s done now, and I have it split into 17 rough chapters at present. It will probably expand closer to 20 or more. In the end, it’ll be around 90,000 words when written. I won’t be writing the whole thing right now. I just have to write around a third of it and polish it up, and add it to my proposal.

I’d love to write it all the way through, but with everyone baying for Unleash in my Vampire Erotic Theatre romance series, I don’t have the time. It’s a shame. I’ve never had to stop part way through a book before, and I just hope that if it gets picked up, I won’t have lost whatever style I had flowing when I was writing that first third of the book.

I suppose what you really want to know is who is the hero and who is his heroine, and what are they up against? I know how your mind works.

The hero is a dark elf prince. Elves in this world are the progenitors of vampires, and share traits with them still, such as fangs and a thirst for blood, but they’re far more powerful and don’t have corrupted souls. The elves do have pointy ears, generally all have black-blue hair, and have a tendency to mask what they are when in the mortal realm by changing eye colour from their natural purple and making their ears appear normal. They’re all rather tall, dark and very handsome, and have some pretty nifty tricks up their sleeves.

The heroine is a doctor working for a hunter organisation, who also happens to be the hero’s eternal mate, but neither know it until they’re thrust together and he unwittingly bonds them by taking her blood to heal himself.

That’s all I can say right now. It’s a very big world though, packed with demons, fae, elves, angels, fallen angels, vampires, werewolves, sorcerers / warlocks and sorceresses / witches, and shifters.

I’ll have more about the first book and the series next week. Hopefully, I’ll have all the character profiles and world-building work done by Friday and I can begin writing the first book on Monday.

What do you think about the sound of the series so far though?