Avon Van Hassel

You know about Magic Beans and Golden, and I’ve introduce you to Gaslamp. So you might be thinking that’s all I’ve got cooking, but you’d be so wrong. Here are my other current and ongoing projects.

The Tower

My first NaNo, I played around with a novella called, The Tower. It was inspired by a pagan-themed guided meditation and The Lightning Struck Tower card from the tarot. In it, my main character finds solace in a tower she’s built in her mind, but she can’t hide from her problems forever.

This is the first of a four-part story, each part dealing with four different characters, all four Wiccan elements (the tower represents air), and four different tarot cards.

Greenstalk Novellas

Between Golden and Siren Song, there are big changes in Viehland. These changes are explored in a series of novellas, cleverly titled, the Greenstalk Novellas.

In the first, Alois hosts a holiday party for the local aristocrats. So much can go wrong, and every eye will be out for the slightest misstep, he and Johanne can’t afford a single mistake.

Next, we go with Sulat as she learns how to sail a ship, finds a crew, and navigates the choppy waters of life on the sea.

Back on land, Alois and Johanne spend the Season in the Capital. But Alois commits an almost unforgivable sin at Court and it’s up to Johanne to set everything right and maybe even change the course of Viehlish culture.

Lastly, we meet a new member of the Court of King Bertold and she schemes and manipulates to secure her position at the top.

Siren Song/Sleep/Big Teeth/Huff and Puff/Reflection/

And those aren’t the only Greenstalk stories I’m working on! I have 5 full sized novels and many other novellas in various stages of completion, just waiting to see the light of day. Siren Song is about halfway done with the first draft, Sleep and Big Teeth are sadly still mostly outline, and Huff and Puff and Reflection are little more than titles with general ideas behind them.

Dollface

NaNoWriMo 2013 was a great year for me. In the summer, I wrote quite a bit on a murder mystery (no magic or supernatural elements at all!). Set in 1930s San Francisco, it follows Maggie Mann from her job at the newspaper, through the murder of her boyfriend, her quest to uncover the murderer, and the beginning of her relationship with Private Investigator, Benny Chesterfield. This book was meant to be the prequel to a series focusing on Benny, but I’m not sure if I still see it going that way.

A Kingdom for a Stage

Probably my most successful NaNo project, A Kingdom for a Stage is the most me of any book I’ve ever written. While on holiday in Britain, I went to see a show at The Globe and bought a book there about theatre during Shakespeare’s time. 32 pages in, this story plopped into my head, fully formed. It has everything: Renaissance drama, intrigue at the glittering court of Queen Elizabeth I, a cast of real-life historical figures, as many details as I can cram into every nook and cranny, and at the heart, the answer to a mystery that has plagued the Tudor and Seymour line since the 1560s.

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So don’t worry, even when Alois’ and Sulat’s tale is told, there is plenty more in the box. But they won’t be done for a while.