Hi all,

It’s been a while since I’ve done a post that doesn’t involve me going a tad psycho or me having to apologize for going a tad psycho.  I’m going to talk about where my writing is at, what my ambitions are, where my heart is drifting regarding writing…etc. etc. 

Around a month ago I finished writing a first draft of a co-authoring project with Mia Darien (or K.B. Thorne as is her more recent pseudonym) called Help Wanted.  She’d done an outline and passed on her notes…I went through her research, watched Ghost Hunters a few times and penned the story.  She’s gonna fix/edit/add to it and hey presto we have a paranormal romance set in Connecticut revolving around a psychic lady and the lovely man she hires to help her out on ghost hunting jobs.  There’s demons, there’s rituals, there’s history, there’s love.  My kinda party.  When I know of the release date I’ll let you all know.

Regarding In Love With the Past, which was more or less edited and ready to go over a year ago now,  I’m fixing some timing issues…amongst other things.   This is a paranormal romance, partly set in North Dakota, partly in Eastern Europe.  The time frame is from early 1900s to roughly modern day.  History is a factor…namely Danube Swabian (or Banat Germans or German Hungarians as my mother’s family called themselves) homesteading in North Dakota.  It’s taken a lot of research and contacting people from this community with more ties to the Old World (my folks left Europe in the 1890s –early 1900s so no one alive remembers the Old Country or properly speaks the Schwob dialect).  I’m really quite proud of it…but it’s gonna need (yet another) pass and re-format by my editor friend as I’ve fiddled about with what was supposed to be the final draft.  I’ve been working on this for…geez four years?  I’ve decided to not query anymore and just release it when I can.  To be frank, it’s a bit obscure…maybe if it was Amish romance or something it might find a romance publisher interested but also…and I don’t know how to say this…there is an aging Catholic community who I believe would like it and they are the audience I was originally writing for.  I also wrote it for myself as the tragic and…conflicted history of ethnic German communities living in Eastern Europe is something I’ve been interested in for a while.  The story’s focus isn’t on how Nazi ideology & war crimes infiltrated & damaged those communities or much on what happened to them after WWII (disenfranchised, made enemies of the state, etc.)…it’s more about the romance and the haunting.  Hence it remains a paranormal…not a historical romance.  But history does play a role. There’s love, there’s immigrants, there’s art, there’s a real bastard, there’s ghosts and heartbreak.  There’s chicken paprikasch and wine.  Again…my kinda party.

Sidenote/thought:  I suppose one way of doing homage to the darker side of that history would be to tell a tale of a Danube Swabian woman falling in love with a non-German neighbor (A Serb or Romanian man for example…possible but from my research these folks did really “stick to their own”), then WWII hits, the Germans roll in telling the ethnic Germans how awesome they are and that they are better than their Serb, Romanian, Hungarian, Jewish countrymen (remember, the Austro-Hungarian empire…though having collapsed many years before WWII was very multi-ethnic and German speaking folks had lived in relative peace with the many other groups for centuries).  There wouldn’t be knowledge of Hitler’s “final solution” amongst the general population at this point (early 1940s)…just the stirring up of prejudice and intimidating locals to go along with it.  Anyway – my plot – the Serb or Romanian lover gets killed by an uppity young Danube Swabian male horrified that a DS woman would want to marry someone outside their group and that she doesn’t subscribe to the Nazi propaganda.  The war proceeds…her heartbroken….horrors ensuing…he goes off to fight on the Eastern Front.  Then after the war, the Germans retreat, leaving the villages under the control of Russia and local communist partisans.  The young woman has her house/belongings etc. removed and she (being of working age and considered a Fascist German pig) is sent to a work camp in Siberia…probably dies.  The DS youth, having survived the war and comes home to his village having fought for Hitler (let’s not have him having worked in one of the concentration camps where millions of Jews died…that’s real horror…not sure I’d cope with trying to fit romance amongst the full sorrow of mass murder and hatred).  He believes he is just returning to his village and normal life will continue…after all he is technically of Yugoslavian nationality.  He thinks he can just go back to working on the farm for his parents.  Wrong.  His parents are dead, being considered fascist pigs by now occupying Russian forces.  All the family belongings have been taken.  What should happen to him?  In a twist of fate, the family of the Serb he shot help him (being broken but compassionate people) escape to Hungary and then Austria where he dies in a wintry refugee camp, disillusioned, broken and guilty of things he can do nothing about now.  Fellow refugees will hate him for losing the war, others for corrupting their village and not fighting AGAINST the Germans, others will hate him for being an ethnic German.  He was ultimately a tiny, pathetic little cog in the wheel of evil.  It will keep on turning once he breaks off and dies as rusty dust in the wind.  Hitler, the shouty weasel coward twat, got his place in history but his distant little man syndrome minions & how they fell for the bullshit could offer us some insight into why extremist ideologies are fucked and only lead to other extremist ideologies and we should allow love to happen, however it does, without being cunts.  The end.  But I didn’t write that story….maybe someone should.  Maybe I should.  Has someone already done that? 

Okay, side note/random plot thought over. Sorry about that it came from nowhere. 

Regarding The New Aristocracy – my dystopian romance which I wrote, rewrote, lost, rewrote etc., etc., I’ve had this beta read a few years ago and was told by a more successful writer friend that this has serious potential and would be really worth querying for.  I was about 45,000 into another re-write when I wanted to gauge my eyes out I was so sick of looking at it.  So, I did what any self-respecting writer would do…I begged on Twitter for someone to look at it.  One friend obliged, though he is kinda busy as he writes full time so let’s just say I’m not holding my breath.  I just desperately wanted another opinion as to whether this story is still relevant and would work or if perhaps I should kill it and/or re-think the whole darn thing. 

So…the future…well…part of it is poetry.  I freaking love writing poems based on the Twitter prompts.  Poetry forces one to use language as necessary while at the same time you can get a little flowery (long as you’re being original and not too annoying about it).  I love writing poetry with swear words, or old fashioned under used words…it’s something I like.  So I’ve started collecting some of my poems. 

Also, I’ve got a whole mess of vampire short stories just hanging out on my laptop.  I’ve started a new one and…I think it’s gonna be novel length.  I like this one.  I’m debating how sexy it’s gonna be.  My writing thus far remains…PG 13.  But that could change.  I do follow a few erotic writers on Twitter and to be honest…they tend to be super cool.  But one thing they (and a lot of writers of other genres) have in common is that they totally write under a pseudonym.).  I don’t.  I actually am Jessica Nicholls. I’m not saying I want to get a pen name so I can immediately get smutty (although…I do like steamy stuff. I feel it adds that other level to a relationship and while hinting at it in romance is fine…the audience gets the point and all…it is realistic that, unless your characters are asexual, they are going to fuck at some point and it’s a writing challenge I’m itching to take on).  I am talking about privacy, the fact that I’m a Mom with a teen who tells friends I’m a writer and I don’t want to embarrass anybody.  Not that writing sex scenes is something to be ashamed of (quite the contrary), but it is something that could get a little awkward amongst certain circles and frankly, kids can be assholes. 

Funnily enough, my dearly departed mother who was quite old fashioned regarding her views of how a young woman should behave…read my writing once and said “Jeez, Jess…I mean some of your descriptions…you could write porn.”  Thanks, Mom.  When she would occasionally step outside constricts of her era & upbringing she always gave hints of being rather forward thinking and intellectual. 

There’s a part of me that wants to go back and make Into the Arms of Morpheus more intimate by adding…well…ya know…intimacy.  There were moments when writing it all those years ago when I felt getting a bit saucy would have been appropriate but I held back as I was like…”oh what will people think?”  Sure enough a certain in law actually said “well, it’s very difficult to separate that it’s you who’s written this.”  Let’s just say I care a lot less about shit like that now. 

So many tropes, so many avenues to explore.  I need to get more writing out there.  Like…need to. 

I’ve heard two rather well known writers mention how they need to sweat and get some energy spent before sitting down to write.  I kinda get this. Actually, I really get this.  After working out, the mind is so clear.  So, I’m back at the gym.  You wouldn’t pissin’ know it from looking at me right now but there it is. Last week was hard as it was “half term” school break and my other half was around so that meant….more or less seven straight days of constant family time and getting errandy crap done around the house.  Lovely…good but jeez I need to be alone.  

Also, when there’s no pressure of doing the school run/work/gym in the morning I tend to have wine in the evening.  I’m better than I was at one point…but it’s still a vice I have.  Gym time helps balance my crazy and I’m able to have a drink without feeling as though I need to kill every and all brain cells as I haven’t sweated out my madness before I could try and write it out. 

So…the gym it is…I’ve always liked it. And it’s always made me a better person and a better writer.  Also, some days there are just other commitments/things to sort out/ we also have a dog now (the little walks we go on are nice but…not adequate sweat wise).  So I need to be able to write whenever the opportunity presents itself.  There’s no more oh the moon must be in Leo and the incense must be burning I have to have had one coffee and one green tea and Gregorian chant must be playing.  Don’t get me wrong I love that shit but expecting everything to be perfect when a free couple of hours comes along isn’t going to help my progress. 

So, there you have it.  An update from me.  Apologies for the ramble but then…I am a bit wordy. 

Take care all.