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Monday, January 20, 2014

The E’steem series




What would Monster high look like all grown up?


Imagine a world where Draculara, Clawdeen Wolf, and Cleo De Nile all graduated Monster High, went to College and started careers.


That was what inspired me to start writing E’steem stories.


E’steem was the former villain turned Heroine from Isis and The Temptation of John Haynes. While I wanted to use her in the Isis series, I also wanted to develop her in her own stories as well.


While John Haynes has his struggles with Lucifer, E’steem has hers as well. And since their conflicts with The Devil are both distinct, I couldn’t write about them both in a Temptation of John Haynes sequel.


So I spun her off into her own series.


My original plan was to make E’steem stories short vignettes in the style of Monster High videos I watched on YouTube. Short simple stories with a heavy emphasis on humor. I felt that the humor and the light tone would make for a nice contrast to the dark subject matter of demons and Hell.


I always thought the concept of a demon the idea of a grown up monster making her way in a world of human monsters was fascinating. After all corporate jobs are Hell, Bosses are demons and some people we run into in life act like they’re possessed by demons.


Readers will notice E’steem’s character has gone through a lot of changes, changes I started in The Temptation of John Haynes and continued in the Isis books. The reason I gave E’steem a new vivacious devil-may-care personality is because she’s found freedom in Jesus Christ and is enjoying life. After four thousand years of misery in Hell, I felt it’s time E’steem had a little fun.


This summer I kicked off the launch of the E’steem series with E’steem: No Good Deed, (a short TEST Book to see how people would react to the character and to establish the story model for the character) E’steem: Deadly D’lilah (a book to establish her post Temptation of John Haynes continuity) and a tie-in with Isis: My Sister, My Frenemy.


To date E’steem: No Good Deed has over 2,5000 downloads on Kindle and Smashwords and their affiliates’.  And Deadly D’lilah was downloaded over 2,000 times on Kindle and Smashwords affiliates.


And while some readers don’t “get” where I’m presenting in E’steem stories,  (some have called them weird, others have issues with them being too short,) most of the feedback has been mostly positive to E’steem’s spin off books. It’s clear to me people like these stories based on how many downloads I’ve been getting on the free samples. I haven’t had this kind of response to a book since All About Nikki’s sneak preview two years ago.


I have plans to continue E’steem’s series alongside Isis’, and I plan on using the same story model for those books that I used for Isis.  Each story will lightly reference events in previous stories, but will be it’s own self-contained entity with its own beginning, middle and end.


One of these days I’ll get to that Temptation of John Haynes sequel. But until then, readers can check out the third story in the E’steem series, Demons Anonymous on Kindle.

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