I've been spending a lot of time recently getting my second novel, "Enslaved Hearts", ready for publishing. I've had to put my writing on hold for a minute because publishing is a kind of a process. First, I sent my manuscript off to an editor (Quirky Pen Editing, highly recommend) who patiently fixed all my mistakes, and I've just finished reviewing it. I'm glad that I invested in editing because I really think it will improve the quality of my novels and make me sound like I know what I'm doing. It also forced me to have to go back into "Eden's Winter" and fix some of the more obvious mistakes I hadn't realized were mistakes. So now I'm just waiting on the cover designer. I used a different (more expensive) designer this time, and I'm excited to see how it turns out.

For those of you who don't know, "Enslaved Hearts" was actually featured in my first book, "Eden's Winter". In the story, Aria buys Eden a book I lovingly called, "Niebla Del Corazon", which if you jumped on Google Translate or just know Spanish, you'll know it means "Fog of the Heart". It's a bit of a joke, see, because I wanted something super cheesy, so I used a romance novel name generator, and that's what it gave me. From there I came up with a quick two sentence plot, where Niels tell Aria, "It’s about a hardened sea captain out to get revenge on the man who murdered his brother. Falls in love with a slave girl on the way.” 

That's "Enslaved Hearts" in a nutshell.

It's less dark than the first one, though it does have magic in it. This one is more of a soap opera than anything, because at the time I was really into this Spanish language telenovella called "Corazon Salvaje" (1993), which is excellent by the way. It has that same kind of melodramatic energy, with lots of unexpected twists. Also, this book my first attempt at a murder mystery, which was challenging to say the least. And I wrote a sea shanty, which was the hardest part. I didn't have to write music since it's in book form, but the thing still had to rhyme—or at least flow somewhat. And the only experience I have with poetry is all the terrible poems I wrote in high school about the boys I had a crush on. Still, it was fun. And the shantyman is a great character. You are going to love him.

So that's where we're at with that. In the coming weeks I'm going to be releasing the blurb/synopsis as well as the book cover on my Facebook page—so stay tuned!