I will have a new novel available to readers in December 2011. It will be an e-book for the Kindle, Nook, Sony, iPad, and in pdf for reading in the Adobe Reader. It will also be a trade paperback. BANISHED is a supernatural novel about fallen angels--one who is the Queen of all the Fallen, who takes the dead body of a little native girl in Haiti. And her partner and helpmate, Nisroc, who she calls down to inhabit the body of a dead tightrope walker from a circus in England in the 1800s.
In the beginning this novel was two novels. I began telling the tale of Angelique, who reincarnates in a child's body, following her story from Haiti in the 1400s before it was known as Haiti, until she wound up in England 400 years later. But I was also telling the story of Angelique living today, in present time, in New Orleans, and how a woman in Houston, Texas found her way into this evil child's sphere. It came to me eventually after three hundred pages that I had two stories, two books. It was more imperative to give my readers Angelique's story throughout the hundreds of years before she came to the New World than it was to flip back and forth between the past and the present day. I took out all the present day scenes and I had my first book of what now will become a trilogy, though I will take care that each novel stands on its own feet as a complete novel that needs no other to exist.
In BANISHED Angelique and then her cohort, Nisroc, command the stage and the story. This is my first published novel since 2004, making it seven years between novels. Never before has it been so long. I had a writer's block, a doozy of a writer's block, and it doesn't matter that much what caused it, but it was a long drought. I began novels and discarded them. I would write a novel half way and put it away and forget it. I would begin another and never finish. This has never happened to me in all my writing life so you can imagine how difficult it was for me. I thought it was over, the Muse had flown its coop, I was done for, over and done. I thought maybe it was time to retire. It isn't as if many a better writer than I had quit when the stories failed them. But this past year Angelique came into my life and changed all that. I knew she was interesting to me and I really wanted to know what would happen to her.
That is the greatest reason that I write stories and novels at all--to discover the story, to have it told to me, or dictated or taken from the movie screen I see flickering in my head. I want to know. I am interested. I want to read the book, this book no one else has written and only I can write. It's my book, but I don't know it until I write it. So I began again, page one, chapter one. I got half way, as usual, and it all fell apart. Again. Because I was writing two simultaneous stories in one. Once I had separated them, cut apart those Siamese twins, I had the story that had to be written and it had to be written FIRST.
I am a lucky writer this time to have finally overcome the dreadful writer's block that left me impotent to write. I don't know who to thank or how it happened except that I just kept trying. I knew I shouldn't quit--I never had before. I knew I had more novels to write. I just kept trying.
BANISHED will be out soon, just in time for Christmas, and it's a whooper of a tale, a supernatural tale with a thin stream of horror running through it, and love inside it, and characters who come alive no matter they have wings and they have been kicked out of heaven. I hope that you will buy a copy and try it. It would encourage this writer to find her audience has waited for new work with her all this long time.
In the beginning this novel was two novels. I began telling the tale of Angelique, who reincarnates in a child's body, following her story from Haiti in the 1400s before it was known as Haiti, until she wound up in England 400 years later. But I was also telling the story of Angelique living today, in present time, in New Orleans, and how a woman in Houston, Texas found her way into this evil child's sphere. It came to me eventually after three hundred pages that I had two stories, two books. It was more imperative to give my readers Angelique's story throughout the hundreds of years before she came to the New World than it was to flip back and forth between the past and the present day. I took out all the present day scenes and I had my first book of what now will become a trilogy, though I will take care that each novel stands on its own feet as a complete novel that needs no other to exist.
In BANISHED Angelique and then her cohort, Nisroc, command the stage and the story. This is my first published novel since 2004, making it seven years between novels. Never before has it been so long. I had a writer's block, a doozy of a writer's block, and it doesn't matter that much what caused it, but it was a long drought. I began novels and discarded them. I would write a novel half way and put it away and forget it. I would begin another and never finish. This has never happened to me in all my writing life so you can imagine how difficult it was for me. I thought it was over, the Muse had flown its coop, I was done for, over and done. I thought maybe it was time to retire. It isn't as if many a better writer than I had quit when the stories failed them. But this past year Angelique came into my life and changed all that. I knew she was interesting to me and I really wanted to know what would happen to her.
That is the greatest reason that I write stories and novels at all--to discover the story, to have it told to me, or dictated or taken from the movie screen I see flickering in my head. I want to know. I am interested. I want to read the book, this book no one else has written and only I can write. It's my book, but I don't know it until I write it. So I began again, page one, chapter one. I got half way, as usual, and it all fell apart. Again. Because I was writing two simultaneous stories in one. Once I had separated them, cut apart those Siamese twins, I had the story that had to be written and it had to be written FIRST.
I am a lucky writer this time to have finally overcome the dreadful writer's block that left me impotent to write. I don't know who to thank or how it happened except that I just kept trying. I knew I shouldn't quit--I never had before. I knew I had more novels to write. I just kept trying.
BANISHED will be out soon, just in time for Christmas, and it's a whooper of a tale, a supernatural tale with a thin stream of horror running through it, and love inside it, and characters who come alive no matter they have wings and they have been kicked out of heaven. I hope that you will buy a copy and try it. It would encourage this writer to find her audience has waited for new work with her all this long time.