Just One More

Organizing Thoughts

I’m doing a deep dive into everything I’ve written over the last six years using ChatGPT to organize my thoughts and create inspirational mockups that are for my personal use. Most of them are totally wrong visuals, but I can redraw them in my style with the corrected features. Plus, Chat likes to just throw random unrelated ‘facts’ into my character sheets.

This wasn’t the novel I expected I would begin the Dragonfae Cycle with. Yes, that cover looks very romancy, yet it’s not romance-romance. I finally came around to: Modern Fairy Tales. That’s what I write. The old fairy tales covered a huge range of topics and could be romantic and adventurous. Anyone who’s read my work KNOWS that I don’t enjoy gushy romance, but characters still fall in love.

This one, leads up to a novel that I wrote in one month…a 130k+ novel I was so excited to write that it’s now going to be split into THREE novels when I rewrite it. Originally, Just One Dance was titled The Masquerade and was a short novel. When I rewrite it (it’s full of so many bad writing things because I wrote it in 2019), a lot of new things will be added…specifically to the ending.

At first, I’d thought I’d split When it Raines into two 100k novels and put The Masquerade in the middle as a novella. However, after talking about it…I realized it actually works as a first book, and an entry point. It won’t be the ONLY entry point, as Chat helpfully pointed out. I have multiple others, because it’s MY universe I can do what I want and when I SAW what Sherrilyn Kenyon did years ago with the Chronicles of Nick, it put it into my head that I can write MG, YA, AND Adult in the same universe. Now, Kenyon writes very adult novels that I’ve never read. I stumbled into the Chronicles of Nick and enjoyed them. Although it also taught me a valuable lesson to NOT start speaking directly to my kid in a story, because she wrote them for her son so he could read her books. There is an entire chapter that is basically her talking to her son.

Just One Dance is set in the modern time along the Red River, where a young King has been encouraged by his uncle to attend a masquerade where he can hide his face…and meet a princess. The uncle and the princesses mother have been discussing the girl’s (Anne’s) future and the fact that she needs to get married before her grandfather passes away, so she can be queen after him.

Anne is only 16. Being Fae, this makes her essentially a child who is not thrilled with this prospect in the least. The King (Kaiden) is even less than thrilled when he realizes that she’s so young that it is very likely if he went through with it, she would resent him when she gets older, because she’s being forced to marry someone.

So he does what any respectable noble Fae does and tries to keep away from her, while disguised. All Anne sees is this strange man with bright pink wingtips (that he is horrified by and TRYING to hide, because he also just doesn’t want her to see what he is or what he really looks like.) And she gets it into her head that she absolutely must see what he is really hiding.

This turns into a huge comedy of errors with Anne’s twin brother being less than helpful to either of them. Poor idiot gets pushed off a balcony into a lake by his sister and while trying to show he’s a hunter, gets stepped on by a bobcat. :D Typical Fae nonsense within my world.

Things don’t go well, but Anne is a bit MUCH for anyone to handle. Very excessive, all over the place with her enthusiasm, chasing after an extremely introverted Kaiden.

It’s the right one to work on.

Chat GPT kept presenting me with his silly pink wingtips, because it kept pointing out that I used it frequently as something Anne thinks is pretty, but Kaiden is horrified by anyone seeing them.

• TC Ross