Sylvia's Soliloquies

New Covers - 9/8/23

Hi all, it's been awhile since I've done one of these updates! Things have not been going to plan. My hope had been to spend the summer wrapping up The Vampire's Harvest and working on my checklist of updates for Her Christmas Legacy. I was able to make progress with TVH but not as fast as I would have liked and I got nowhere with HCL.

It's frustrating, but it's not that the summer has been unproductive. I have been working on something offline that I will hopefully get to share with you someday. Anyway, that has taken a lot of my time. I've also been enduring an onslaught of medical issues. Nothing big, but all of it obnoxious. The amount of money we've spent on medical stuff makes me sick--three cheers for the American healthcare system...

Anyway, if you follow me on Threads you can read my whole sad story with my medical woes, but I won't rant about that here. Just know that I should be almost at the end of this journey, but it's still worth knocking on wood and crossing fingers.

That all said, my son is back in school so I have more time during my day. In these first couple of weeks in the school year, I've managed to finally finish up TVH. I'm using the new scheduling system on Wattpad (I did a happy dance when we finally got that feature!) so it won't be fully posted until Friday the 13th in October. It wasn't intentional that it timed out that way, but it feels perfect that a paranormal story ends on Friday the 13th.

So I'm really excited about marking that one complete! I've been working on this story for years, even before I started posting it here. For those that don't know, it started out as a script for a visual novel I was working on. I gave up on coding the game (though I still hope to do it one day) but since I had the script, I figured I'd convert it to something that works on Wattpad. It was a lot more work than I originally thought it would be, but I made it to the end. And just to really sell how big this project was, there will be a total of 234 chapters in this story. So, you know, I at least think that's a lot.

To celebrate reaching this final milestone, I wanted to make a new cover. The old one was in desperate need of a makeover so the change was long overdue. Check out the new cover below!

I'm pretty proud of it! Of course, anything is an improvement from what it was...

Now that I've wrapped this up, I'm actually going to be focusing on more cover makeovers. Spooky season is a time I like to push the Delilah Cross books, so I'm giving all of Delilah's books a new cover. This will also mark my official shift on how I'll title the books.

I realize not everyone will be happy with the changes I'm making with titling, but I've never been happy with the titles for the first two books. I also realized that with my plans to continue writing in the Whisper Valley universe, but not necessarily following Delilah's story, I needed to add some subtitling to better indicate books that are Delilah's arc and books that are part of the wider Whisper Valley universe. So now books will be labeled as being book # of the Delilah Cross series and that it is a Whisper Valley novel. When I release the anthology that I plan to have after the last Delilah Cross book, it will simply be labeled as a Whisper Valley anthology. Then the series that will follow will have a new series name and will restart the book count.

Does that make sense?

Anyway, as for titles, here's what the current books will be called:

1. The Death Thief

2. The Phantom Touch

3. The Blood Moon

4. The Bone Chapel

So if you haven't gotten yourself a Delilah Cross and the Stolen Bride paperback copy, do so now because it will soon become a rare collector's edition ;)

I'll be sharing those come October (hopefully I'll actually have the covers done by then). There's a chance, a very small one, that I'll also debut a book 5 cover and title. That's only going to happen if I actually come up with a title by then. That being said, I intend to focus on outlining the next book between now and November since I plan to do NaNoWriMo this year with a fresh take on Reverse Christmas (more on that in a future post).

Now as much as I'd like to start shifting into the fall and halloween spirit, I do also intend to work on the Her Christmas Legacy updates. My hope is I'll have all the bells and whistles for HCL, like I did for Love in his Lie, done by Christmas. So stay tuned for more about that down the road.

That's it! It feels like not much has been happening since the end of Bone Chapel, but I really have been doing a lot of work that you just can't see. Which is kind of how things will be looking until NaNoWriMo. Until then though, look forward to an upcoming update with the new Delilah Cross covers!