What's New?

What’s new?

Well, let me answer the question. Since my six-week course with Lucinda Halpern’s Agency that taught me the importance of marketing and how to do it, I have been spending some time working on ideas to get me out there where I’m not a faceless writer. Oh, I’d prefer it if I was one. I enjoy writing anonymously, creating magical stories without being known outside my small writer’s world. However, I know that isn’t how it works in the publishing business. Still, the product must be worth selling. So, what’s new?

            In finishing The Woman of a Thousand Veils, I’ve had to decide whether to write another Cuckoo Bird novel based on the desires of a growing audience of readers who have read the series or embark on a new historical fiction novel such a spy in the Muslim camp attempting to take back Spain from the infidels. Or the story of a female warrior knight fighting in medieval Spain, whose bones and armor archaeologists recently unearthed. Instead, I have decided to write the next in the series for The Woman of a Thousand Veils, new working title, The Swallowtail. To prepare for the new book, I’m trying something new. I’ve created a Character Murder Board. Like a detective might put the faces and the facts known about suspects in a murder, every character in the new book gets a tab on an Excel file and I ask a series of questions in which I must answer. The results of this have been amazing. Creative ideas for the story have come out of finding answers to the questions.

            Here is a shortened example of the Murder Board for Sultan Baybars. I’m limiting what I show here to avoid spoiling the first novel. To give context, Baybars is the Sultan that rules Mamluk Egypt and is determined to build a greater army to protect against another Mongol invasion and to rid the Crusaders from Levant. Jamal is the main character of The Woman of a Thousand Veils.

Baybars’s Murder Board tab:

Will Baybars require Jamal to keep campaigning with him?

·         Yes. Jamal goes out with him on every campaign.

What are Baybars’s plans for conquest of the Crusaders in the Levant?

·         He plans to remove every fortress year after year. He starts with Acre, but realizes he needs better battle solutions to seize bigger fortresses.

What are Baybars’s plans to prevent the Mongols from returning?

·         Baybars sets fire to all the land along the border to prevent the Mongol army from foraging for food.

·         He builds towers to view the frontier.

·         He creates an amazing communication system known as the barid to pass messages directly between him and the frontier. It’s like the pony express.

·         With funds from religious sources, he hires mercenaries to help with guarding the border.

·         He takes a border fortress and rebuilds it stronger, so he has ready troops to fight any incursions by the Mongols.

How does Baybars handle siege warfare as a man used to open country combat?

·         He builds the biggest catapults ever employed against massive fortresses.

Does Baybars come up with any other innovations for his strikes on Crusader fortresses?

·         He employs a Syrian alchemist to design explosives against fortresses.

·         He employs a new pyrotechnical explosive using small ceramic pots filled with naft which will be lit and flung over the walls of the fortresses like incendiary devices dropped from planes in World War II.

I stop that here for fear I’ll give out too much information that comes from the linkage to the first novel, The Woman of a Thousand Veils. The Murder Board has created new ideas for intrigue and danger to keep the story interesting. It is the bridge book between Baybars true beginning in year-to-year fighting, but it will have all the historical interest and fun the first book had.

To begin this BLOG, I asked ‘What’s new?’ There is more. I have rewritten my Espionage Thriller Cuckoo Bird (The first book) and, with help from a good friend, created a new Query Letter for it. Also, I have joined Reedsy for manuscript help and Critique Circle to critique other writer’s new work building up credits I can cash in so I can get receive critiques to difficult chapters when I need it.

Last, I’m considering publishing parts of Cuckoo Bird on Instagram Reels. I need people to see what I’m doing. Get a following and show I’m marketable. So, outside of two surgeries in three months knocking the bonkers out of me, I stay committed to writing, and now more than ever, marketing. That’s what’s new. Hussah!