~*~

So it’s been an interesting week. As I’ve considered what would be a good followup to A Stray Drop of Blood, I got an idea for another Biblical Fiction that would be a new twist on the familiar Esther story. I wrote four and a half chapters of it a while back when the idea blossomed, and this past week I hammered out a synopsis and a blurb, polished up the first three chapters.

My thought? I’d run the idea past my agent and see what she thought about the possibility of trying to get a big CBA publisher interested. Meanwhile, my hubby/publisher of Stray Drop read it and loved what I was doing with it. Being the fabulous supporter he is, he told me to go ahead and get my agent’s take on the big houses, but that he thought it would be a good title for WhiteFire to do too.

My agent’s response was quick–given my proposals that are under consideration at the big houses right now, she didn’t think it was a good idea to toss a Bib-Fic out there right now. They’re a dubious sell in CBA, and unrelated to what I’m already trying to sell. She advised that I write it–but that I write it for WhiteFire.

I’ll confess–my initial reaction was a rather long, “Oooohhhhhhhh. Siiiiiiggggghhhh.” But then what this meant began to sink in. It means I can write this story in its full scope, without concern for keeping it under 100K. I’ll keep a lot of control over it. And I don’t have to wait who-knows-how-long to gain an editor’s eye. Instead, my husband and I sat down and soon had a plan of attack.

Which means that my second novel, Just Another Wife, will be releasing in summer 2011 from WhiteFire Publishing! My editor’s a real slave-driver, so I have to have the manuscript finished in the next few months (that’s a joke–I decided on this deadline, LOL). And boy-howdy, it feels good to have something I now HAVE to get done! I love direction!

For those of you who might now be wondering what this story’s all about, here’s the blurb I was working on earlier this week:

Kasia thinks she’ll lose herself when she is taken to the palace to wed Xerxes–instead she finds an unexpected love with the king who is regarded as a god by his people. She, of all his wives, is the only one who loves him for the man beneath the crown. She, of all his wives, is the only one to threaten the careful balance of the world’s largest empire. When the king’s advisers realize how much sway this mere Jewish girl has over Xerxes, an intrigue springs up to rival the war with Greece. Kasia knows she will never take the place of the dethroned Amestris, but when she discovers that her best friend from childhood has arrived at the House of Women, she determines to use her influence to work for God’s people. Esther will be crowned–and though Kasia inadvertently turned Persia against the Jews, she knows Esther can save them.

In a combination of the familiar story of Esther told in the Bible and the history of Xerxes as told by Herodotus, Just Another Wife is a story of a love that nearly tears an empire apart, and the friendship that knits it back together.