I've Sort of Lost It

There have been some huge changes in my life over the last few years and suddenly out of the blue, I needed everything to change. 

I had been writing under my legal name and a pen name but I can't tell you what a huge nightmare juggling TWO social media accounts is.

Actually, three because if you count my editing business then that's three. There was just too much to do and none of it was doing me any good.

So, here I am. Changing and consolidating everything.

Instead of Whitney Sivill and WS Deming - it's going to be Whitney Lynn. Or maybe just Whitney Lynn and WS Deming. I do write Christian fiction and while the majority of my Christian fiction readers could read my other novels, I'm not holding my other novels to the same standards, morally and religiously, as my religious novels. I would hate for my readers to have disappointed expectations.

I haven't come up with an official date change yet because there is a huge to-do list.

- I am re-editing some of my novels. Going back, I'm seeing rookie mistakes that I've been itching to correct that now would be the perfect time for.

- I am going to have all the books reformatted. Again, rookie mistake when you try to do something yourself and you have no idea what you're doing. It's less aggravation to let someone who does it for a living every day deal with it.

- Sweetwater's cover may be rehauled. At the VERY least, the name of the author, of course. But in all honesty, I've been wanting to have the cover reflect the main point of the story - a wheelchair mom who finds love again with a hunky Green Beret. I want a wheelchair to be on the cover. That's what sets my book apart from most other second-chances, military romances. Inter-abled romance.

When I do finish all of these changes, I'm going to have a big relaunch party or something. I want my wheelchair woman flag to fly. I want new readers to discover my books and I want my biggest supporters to have something new to look at.

We'll see how that works out over the next few months.

In the meantime, I might still be doing the edit I should be doing on Ophelia, but per the suggestion of my lovely daughter, maybe it's time to work on something new.

I've had this idea floating around in my head for at least the last couple of years. It started when I was writing a Dragonriders of Pern fan fiction, Free to Fly. The premise is if you're disabled, why couldn't you fly a dragon?

In that same vein, I was thinking if she can fly a dragon, she can be a queen or a princess or someone super powerful despite the disability. Even if you have a disability, you can still change the world.

And thus Daughter of Witches was born. The Crow Queen series basically just about wrote itself without too much help. The thing that has been the hardest is researching pre and Iron Age Irish and Scottish history (also known as the Viking Age) and then using those things learned to create a new vision of Ireland and Scotland that never saw the arrival of the Romans.

What if the druids magic was real? What would that look like in ancient Celtic society? The world is created around the idea that the Celts, left alone by Rome, continued as they always had done, fighting against mainland Celtic tribes and the Vikings.

And then at the center of everything - love and disability. In Celtic lore, it is said that someone who was born with a disability was given certain extra powers to compensate. This usually manifested in people that were born blind were given the power of the "the Sight". With Ferelith, she wasn't born with a disability, but her near-death experience and subsequent loss of the use of her legs, plus her being of a line of very powerful witches, all combined to make her fate something she never dreamed possible and something she may not even want.

As you can tell I'm very excited to start on the first draft of the first book. I've got some of it done but I kept getting distracted with awesome scenes from future books in the series that I HAD to write down.

Keep you updated. There are a few kinks to work out characterization wise, but I know for a fact right now you're going to love the love interest, Eamon.

Happy Reading!