A Sterling Journey . . . (heh. . . see what I did there?)

This is the first thing I saw when I posted Sterling in the Kindle Store. This is the moment I let myself go take a nap, finally!

It's pretty hard to believe that it's been around three weeks since then, isn't it? Well, for me it is. Sterling was rejected several times by agents, which was a big factor in me deciding to sell through Kindle. And I don't blame them! Not only am I a new author, but Sterling is also a strange book! Is it an adventure, is it a romance? Is it about a knight or a Champion (a Champion, silly)? Is it a Coming-of-Age tale or is it an intrigue? 

It's all of those things! And as I work on the next book in the series, Lovely, I'm starting to realize that it's not so much a first book as a bit of a prequel. 

In it's very first incarnation, Sterling wasn't the title -- the title was Empress, and it was about a girl who had been chosen by an old man to lead a race of winged people (think The Young Victoria meets Maximum Ride, only way less interesting). I was 15 when I wrote it. 

YOU WILL NEVER SEE IT. 

It was bad. Really bad. Whereas Sterling is only 45000 words or so, Empress was over 100,000. Where Olivia has a set personality, the main character in Empress (called Sterling) was kind of all over the place. I had been trying to copy what I saw was popular in YA literature, and failing miserably. I'll never say I wouldn't piggyback on trends, but I'm definitely doing my own thing with this series and loving every character to death, even the villain. In fact, I love the work I do in these books so much I can't even bear to delete anything! I keep it all in 'notebook documents'. 

It's taken three years for me to par it all down, but somehow along the way, I ended up making it even LONGER with sequels! Originally I had planned for only two books, Empress, and then a second unnamed sequel about Sterling's lost little sister. 

Corvyn used to be named Chriss, the Claude-like character used to be named Wycliffe (a name I intend to recycle), and Lucas used to be named Silva. I know I was watching too much anime at the time, but I look back and say, "no. just. . . no."

So basically it's been a long, bumpy, terribly written road from Empress to Sterling, this post is way too long, and I would never ever go back. :}