Drafting and Dragons
This week in the Corner: getting into a small town paranormal world and watching TTRPG Actual Plays.
Nic Cole’s Corner is a biweekly (2x/month) newsletter from romance author Nic Cole with all things book updates and babbling about current hyper-fixations.
Hello! Happy day! Whichever day it is…never count on me to know the day of the week. It’s not one of my strengths. But I have plenty of others!
When Small Town meets Paranormal
When I started thinking about the series I’m currently plotting and drafting, I knew I wanted to do something a little paranormal. I grew up on Charmed and Buffy the Vampire Slayer like so many other people. I was far too young and the paranormal of it all imprinted on me like Jacob imprinted on that fetus in Twilight.
Here’s the thing though, I’m also a HUGE lover of small town Romance. For the first several years of my romance reader life, that’s basically all I read. So, of course, when I came around to writing paranormal, I had to bring a little bit of that small town charm with me.
This series, lovingly called Dreadful Desires in my head (not the official series name…but let me know if you love it or hate it…for science!) will be on more on the small town cozy side of things. Now, that’s not to say these books aren’t going to be sexy. They definitely will be. But I’m not writing any epic quests or anything like that.
Think Gilmore Girls but Luke’s a vampire and Lorelai is a witch. That kind of energy.
Dungeons and Dragons anyone?
As we speak (or more accurately as I type), I’m watching a little Critical Role video on Youtube. Okay, it’s not little. It’s actually a very long video. But that’s what you do for Brennan Lee Mulligan.
I know I’m not the only one who got into watching Actual Plays over the last few years and I have to tell you, I’m living for it. Full disclosure, I don’t really watch Critical Role. Not regularly. But Brennan Lee Mulligan is DMing one of their side quests (Downfall) and I’ll watch just about anything he’s involved with. I’ve dabbled here in there with some others, but Dimension 20 will always be my first (Actual Play) love.
Do you watch any Actual Plays? What’s your favorite?
Deep in the depths of self edits
I know this is my first newsletter/blog post but I’ve actually been working on drafting for many many months. I’m working on self edits right now AKA fixing all the things that I didn’t even realize needed to be fixed while I was drafting the first go around. Funny thing about my process is sometimes it takes me writing the whole dang thing before I figure out certain things about my characters or the world or their magic. It makes working on self edits a little stressful at times but my stories end up better for it, so I’m happy to suffer. Just a little.
That’s all for now, thanks for reading folks! Have a wonderful day/night/week :)
-Nic