I am so excited about this new book that I am writing and I feel like it’s really coming together. I am so close to publishing Small Town Witch, so I haven’t forgotten about that and I will be doing a lot more work on that very soon to give everyone some excitement for the new release, but right now I just want to let you all now about my newest project and how well it’s going.

I don’t have a title yet, because I am horrible at naming stories. I usually use just the name of the main character as short hand for the story until well into the first draft or even during revision. This book’s main character is Korinna, and since she’s probably going to fill up at least three books, I’ve labeled the project “Korinna Book 1”. Here is the plot in a sentence:

The illegitimate daughter of the murdered duke must capture and tame a dangerous monster in order to take control of the city away from the greedy council before the curse that killed her father destroys them all.

Okay, so the sentence is a work in progress. I am still trying to get the wording just right to really capture the flavor of the story. But the point is that it will include exciting elements like an evil curse, a conflict over inheritance, political intrigue, monsters, true love, and how difficult it is to create peace with military power. And that’s just the first book!

The most important monsters in the book are the marewings. Now, if you know two things about me, you know that I like flying and I like horses, so flying horses are a logical combination. But horses with feathered wings (Pegasus from the Greek myths was one, and that’s his proper name; Bellerophon was his brother) are used a lot, and I wanted to be a little bit different. I wanted half-horse, half-demon hybrids, and of course demons have to have leathery bat wings. Also, all the hybrids are female (and they breed with demons to  have offspring, so it’s not a full-fledged species), hence marewings.

Marewings can be captured and tamed, but they can’t be bred in captivity. (The demons are hard to come by.) Capturing one is difficult because they can fly and usually stay away from people. The only way to catch one is to jump from a very high place and grab a marewing before you plummet to your death–and then you’d better hold on tight. If you make it to the ground alive and still holding on to the marewing, then you’ve made the biggest step toward taming them. And because marewings can live thirty or forty years, you’ve also just made a lifelong commitment to caring for an animal that won’t let anyone but you get close.

So why is Korinna, a seventeen year old girl with no experience catching monsters, going to try to catch one of these things? And how is a marewing going to help her save the city? Will anyone else believe that she can do it long enough to give her a chance? You’ll have to wait for the book to find out!

But wait! There’s going to be snippets of the story on this blog as I write it. Starting this weekend (which is Easter and Game of Thrones day), I will be posting Six Sentence Sundays with content from the story. I can’t wait to introduce you to some of the characters and the world that they live in. (World building on this story has been going for a few years already.) I hope you’ll enjoy reading it.