I have a confession to make. Though I love each and every book I've written, I don't think I've ever been this happy writing a book before. And I haven't really been talking about it much because I know most of my readers are waiting for the next Prince book. 

 

(FYI The Perfect Prince has not been forgotten! It is my next project and I expect it will be coming out late next year!) 

 

I also worry you may in no way be interested in this wrong genre, project of my heart, utterly self-indulgent thing I'm currently working on.

 

Writing BB&HB is a birthday present to myself. (Yup, it's a big birthday year. The wow, how time has flown 4-0.) It's a romantasy story. It's a story I've dreamed of writing (for longer than romantasy has been a genre 😂). And it's a story I worried for a long time that I wasn't a good enough writer to pull off. 

 

But as it turns out, I'm sixteen chapters in and I think it might actually be...good?

 

 

So I'm going to be sharing a little bit more of what's going in the writing corner. I will gush and I will bitch because, though I love it, this book it has been in no way easy to write. 

 

I have, as per usual, over-complicated all the relationships. I have way too many characters roaming the chaotic madhouse that is my head. And I have drawn maps and invented geography and political history and, in short, totally succumbed to world builders disease. 

 

I hope when this difficult, joyous, pain-in-the-ass of a book eventually makes its way into the world...I hope you'll like it!

 

 

 

I have spent all week hard at work on BB&HB. There was a scene that emerged in my head where the main character's grandmother arrived on the scene in a froth of terrifying old dragon lady energy and fixed multiple problems. 

 

...then I realized that having her fix those problems would kill all the tension, and that...that would be bad. 

 

First rule of exciting fiction is: never be nice to your characters. They have to earn the good things that happen to them, they can't just be given the solution to their problems. 

 

So now she's just sitting there off to one side. This awesome, complicated, badass old woman that no one but me may ever know existed.  

 

(I really see how that whole Tom Bombadil section snuck into Lord of the Rings. It's so tempting just to leave them in there. Look at the pretty thing my brain vomited up. Yes, I know it has no real relationship to the current story, but does that really matter? Look, it's so pretty! And my brain made it!)

 

And here's a snippet that actually stayed in the book: