Eden Ashe

I took the summer off. It was mostly involuntary, and it seemed like the more stressed my life became, the more quiet the characters in my head went, even when I was nearly desperate for a distraction.  Emma was concerned enough that at various points over the summer, she threatened to do something drastic to make sure they were all still there.  Again, I know my relationship with my characters is unusual and might seem odd, but I am not used to quiet in my head. There is always someone plotting something, or planning, or just jabbering at me until I pay attention to them. Stories are always there, on the backburner, working out plot points or untangling threads until it’s clear and focused enough for me to see fully. There is always something going on in my head, and when it suddenly went silent, I didn’t know if I should be grateful…or alarmed.

I miss writing. I miss being creative and building a world and watching it, and the characters I love so much, come alive. I miss the frustrating joy of letting a story slowly come to life. I miss arguing with my stubborn, larger-than-life males, and I miss watching my heroines twist the brains of their heroes. There is so much fun for me in character and story development. Even when I feel like beating my head against the keyboard to knock something loose, or those times when I’m sure all my creativity has simply dried up and stopped existing, there is not a lot that I love more than writing. My daughters, my husband, my family…my writing.

So why, other than my abnormally silent characters, did I take the summer off? I think because I needed to. It has been a stressful summer for my family. I lost a cousin in a three-week ordeal that devastated all of those that I love most in the world, and I worried about the health of my grandparents through it all. Death is never easy, and it leaves a hole somewhere thinking about him not always being there in the background. But I guess that is how it should be. There have been other dramas, and there were definite times I was sure over the last two and a half months that I was sure I was headed for a nice, quiet, comfy padded cell. In fact, if I could have taken my laptop, and been assured of an internet connection, I might have volunteered, just for a small, mini vacation.

Luckily, things have seemed to have settled out over the last week or so, and my lovely, wonderful characters have taken to driving me nuts once again with all their demands and needs. I still have not settled on a story to work on, but there are ones that are already finished that need to be edited for submission, and I might focus my energy on that for awhile. My Undying characters are the loudest in my head for the moment, but they are the ones I have focused on the most for the last year, and did the most development on. I have other ideas for other stories, other series, other worlds that will eventually need attention, too, so who knows where I will go when I settle into the new school year’s schedule. 6AM comes very early when you don’t go to bed until 4:00, but I will find my rhythm soon.

In the mean time, I will start posting excerpts of my writing soon, and here is the link to the online publication of my very first short story. It’s called At Last. Hope you enjoy it, and check back again soon.

Eden

I am still working on my Undying novels. It is a wonderful feeling to have found a world for my characters to play in that fits them and lets them be the characters and heroes that I’ve always imagined them to be. There was always a significant age gap between the heroes and heroines that I couldn’t figure out, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t imagine these men going to school and doing homework and having fun on a playground. That world just seemed foreign to them.

I guess I should explain my relationship with my characters before I go any further. While I admit that I have no idea what is normal and what is not, my characters are living, breathing people in my head. It wasn’t always like that and I fought for control and to make the stories I wrote come out the way that I wanted them to, but with my first romantic-suspense novel, Here With Me, my characters took over and because I had no choice about the matter, I let them.

It was magic.

It also opened up an entire world to me, and it came with characters that I have come to know and love beyond words.  I’ve even started giving life to my bad guys with the belief that the good guys, my Heroes, are only as good and bad-ass as my bad guys are bad. I’ve learned that by not wanting to hurt my characters, I was robbing them of their chance to fight and wage war and move the earth for the one they love. And I firmly believe that it is the heroine’s right to fight just as much as it is the heroes. They may fight for each other in different ways, but it’s her battle as much as it is his. They have to save each other.

By opening up my imagination this way, I have come across several characters that I know I will never be able to fully let go of, so I will continue finding other worlds, other stories, other lives for them, and I will have fun watching them fall in love all over again in different ways.

So as of right now, I am working on Chad and Rachel, one of my favorite Undying couples, though I admit their lack of internal conflict if worrying me a little. Shouldn’t there be something internal to keep them apart, as much as the external plot? I thought so, and it makes my head hurt a little that there’s not, but I am having fun with the story so I am just going to go with it for now, and worry about it if I have to later.

Welcome.  Did you like the title of my first post? Let me explain. I have a character whose answer for all his irritating, over-bearing, and stubborn behavior is “I am Dragan.” As if that explains it all–which, sadly it usually does. He’s just that arrogant, and apparently, I’m starting to sound like him.

Anyway, welcome. I am Eden Ashe. Mother, wife, author. Up until last night, I was Eden Stone, but the web domain was taken, and just like my heroes, I don’t like to share. Though I have to admit, I am a little more flexible than they are. Thank God, or I’d be locked up somewhere by now.

So what do I write? Romance, of course, though recently my mostly-calm, normal, well-behaved characters decided they didn’t want to play nice anymore, and decided they needed a fantasy world to play in. With the help of my friend and co-author, Emma Weylin, we were able to make them the true, dark, bad asses we always imagined them to be.  You can read more about them, and our journey to make their world come to life, here.  It’s not always fun, it’s an awful lot of work, but it will be worth it in the end.

Welcome to my world, and I hope you’ll love it as much as I do.

Take care,

Eden