Tag: Toi Thomas

Greetings Dear Reader,

Life is hard. Things happen and all your plans go out the window. This year has been rough for me and my family and I’ve had to shift my focus so much away from my writing. Long story short, I’m still processing grief and change but I’m also moving forward with life.

I’m happy to report I’ve made the slightest bit of progress with this project, so this won’t be a long post. I previously mentioned in another post that I lost a lot of the research I used for the original series and some that I’d done for this rewrite. I’m happy to announce that, I think, I’ve finally recreated all that research. While these aren’t words towards a novel word count, it’s the stuff I need to be able to move forward.

At this point, I’m tightening up my outlines and filling in the gaps of changes from the old series to the new, plus I’m developing subplots and characters that weren’t really in the original series, though the ideas were there. I hoped I would be further along than I am, but at least I’m no longer at a standstill. Maybe I’ll be ready to start adding to a novel word count by December.

Before I go, I want to talk about the one thing I’ve already mentioned that will be different in this rewrite. The mark of blessing. The main character has many names but the one his mother gave him is Bletsian, which is Greek for blessing. In the original series, I never explored the meaning or origins of the word blessing any further than to say that’s where the MC’s name came from. In the new series; however, I will highlight characters throughout time who have been given a special mark to indicate they have a significant blessing over their lives; which of course, my MC will be one of those people.

That’s all I have for now. I hope life doesn’t shift again for me anytime soon. I’d like to be settled for a while and simply write.

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BTW- I now have Public/Free content over at Patreon every month, so please check it out. This is what I do instead of a traditional newsletter.

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Thank you for making it this far down the virtual page. Kudos to you! I’d love to know what you thought of this post in the comments below. Stay safe and be blessed.

Greetings Dear Reader,

Welcome to my journey of personal growth, self-expression, and a complete and total rewrite of my Eternal Curse Series. So, before I dive further into this, I want to clear out any haters lurking about. This rewrite, like the original, is based on a Judeo-Christian worldview but is not Christian fiction.

I want to be clear when I state that I have no problems with Christian fiction, it just so happens that what I’m writing isn’t that. I have actually drawn knowledge and inspiration from many tales and histories stemming from all three major monotheistic religions: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, as well as other various cultures, polytheistic religions, and some lesser-known mythologies. My aim, here, is to tell a great story but to also be true to myself. I know what I like in a good story and am not afraid to blend my many influences to achieve the results I want. I am creating a world of fiction, inspired by a dream, based on a Biblical foundation and a bunch of other stuff.

While most people who read paranormal fiction are used to reading about angels, demons, and other related content without any reference to religion or spirituality, but I will be including those elements in my story. I will not be trying to hide a message of faith in my story, I’ll just be telling a story that happens to include characters dealing with spiritual struggles. While I think it makes for a great story, this will clearly not appeal to some, and that is okay. I’m just stating here and now, that if my characters talk about and or actually engage in prayer, it’s because that’s just their reality.

Outside of my monthly IWSG posts, I plan to provide weekly updates on how this process is going. Today, I’m starting with 5,787 (1,000 just added) words of clarified terms, characters names, locations, biblical research, and more as I start this process. I had started updating my Patreon community on this project a while back but abandoned it when I hit a wall. Moving forward, this is where I’ll be tracking my progress, even if it’s just a handful of words or ideas. I will reserve any special excerpts I want to share with the Patreon community, but otherwise, this blog will be focusing on the development of this series. So, to round things out today, this first day of a new journey, I thought I’d explain why the series is being rewritten and why the series name is changing, and what it means.

First, I absolutely love my original Eternal Curse Series and all its flaws. I have reread the books (the two published ones and the third unfinished one) and still really enjoy the overall story and the individual characters. The main reason this series is getting a rewrite is that I grew so much as a writer between the first and third books that I was struggling to maintain the same voice I’d started the series with. My voice had changed. Plus, there were so many aspects of the story that I wanted to change for clarity and to fill in the gaps.

The original series’ name was a reflection of the struggle many of the characters lived. I’d written about characters that were clearly cursed and yet, they had chosen to do good or be good despite their curses. The story is ultimately inspirational, but it’s also very dark- not afraid to touch on a few hard topics. For the rewrite, I wanted to focus on the many character’s, especially the main character’s, choice to be a blessing despite their circumstances. I even go so far as to introduce a mark of blessing to the overall theme, but I’ll explain more about that later.

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BTW- I’ve posted my public/FREE monthly update over at Patreon so please check it out. It has a really cool video that I’m not posting anywhere else… And, I posted a channel update on YouTube. Check it out.

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Thank you for making it this far down the virtual page. Kudos to you! I’d love to know what you thought of this post in the comments below. Stay safe and be blessed.