The past few years have been less than smooth for me writing-wise. Losing my publisher and having to navigate the waters of self-publishing while trying to write new stories - it’s a miracle I managed to get one new book out and re-release an old one. The pandemic didn’t make it any easier even if it forced so many in my corner of the world into stay-at-home mode for long lengths of time since the damn virus started its bid for world domination.

You’d think that would have allowed me to indulge in non-stop writing. Nope. It was alarming and depressing to hear almost daily about relatives, friends and colleagues landing in the ICU or dying. Which of course led to constant worry that my husband or sons or I might wind up with severe cases, which was a real possibility before the vaccines came out. And then I found out that certain members of my extended family are anti-vaxxers who, for reasons I can’t fathom, took it against us for getting the shots. Ironically, a few of them did eventually get vaccinated but only after they got awfully sick with the Delta and Omicron variants. To top it all, the economic situation hereabouts is steadily deteriorating thanks to abysmal leadership. Needless to say, it’s been a trying two years and a half.

On the positive side, I managed to republish two more books and if I’m lucky I’ll re-release another three (or all) before the year ends. As with Sacred Fate, Books 2 & 3 have all-new covers and a few corrections - typos, reinsertions of unintended deletions the first time around, etc. One major change though affects the term Adda or the caregiver parent. I changed it back to the original word used when I submitted the manuscript of Sacred Fate. Ama is both the formal Filipino word for “father” and a variant spelling of the Chinese term (amah) for a nanny or nurse.

Frustratingly enough, my editor at the time told me to change it because ama reminded her of the Latin word for love. Even after I explained to her that the term had its roots in two Asian languages, she insisted readers would misconstrue it as the Deiran word for “lover.” I didn’t want to change it, but newbie that I was, I didn’t feel confident enough to challenge my editor on this. So I changed it to Adda which is obviously from the Elvish word for “Dad.” Hence the altered spelling which I never thought fit in with Aba, Opa and Oda. But I shoehorned it in anyway. And never ceased to regret it. So, yes, expect the original/new term Ama from hereon in all the CoY books from the first to the last.

As for Book 9, I’m happy to say I’m 3/4 of the way done with Of Great Price and hope to publish it by the end of summer at the earliest. I’m really excited but also nervous. For the first time I’m devoting a whole book to a mature couple in a long-term marriage - Rohyr’s Chief Counsellor and favorite uncle Yovan Seydon and his spouse Mered. I’ve only written short stories about mature couples in my LotR fanfic. Anyway, I’ll be going into more detail about the decades before Rohyr’s reign, Yovan’s youth and how he wound up married to Mered. I hope it will please.

Buy: By Chance Met

I finally managed to republish Sacred Fate! Not only does it have a new cover, this also gave me the chance to correct typos and other errors including the reinsertion of a bit of dialogue I discovered had been edited out only after the book was published the first time around. Rest assured, other than these two matters, there have been no changes to the storyline or characters.




Buy: Sacred Fate