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When I posted Diamond Rose, I told Lazeez I wanted to make it a Premier Exclusive as a way of showing how much I appreciate his hard work on StoriesOnline. I had no idea what would happen when I did it, but I certainly didn't expect Diamond Rose to become my biggest story here.
In the last two weeks it has surpassed all my other stories in downloads and votes. Some of those stories have been posted for more than a year, but have half the downloads and nowhere near the score.
I'm humbled by the 62 comments I got from readers who took the time to tell me how much they enjoyed the story. That feedback pays for the effort of writing the story entirely, You have no idea what it means to an author to hear you were touched by a character or story.
My stories are like my kids and everyone thinks their kids are special. Thank you for helping make this story even more special for me!
Cotton Nightie
It's been a few months since my last update but I'm still writing like mad. I've been working on too many new projects at once, but at least I've made good progress on some of them.
I've written a few chapters for the next Hilly and Ben story, which picks up immediately after The Choir Trip ends. Finishing the Visiting Austin story is still on my todo list, but I've not managed to get back to it yet. My next commercial Bella Chal novel, Letting Go, is in edits and I may actually submit this one to publishers instead of publishing it myself. But my biggest obstacle to getting caught up has been the new novel I just submitted here for Premier members called Diamond Rose.
We went on vacation to North Carolina this summer and visited all the tourist attractions while we were there. At a ruby mine far off the beaten path, I ran across an odd collections of kids working with one older woman. We spent a long afternoon looking for treasures with them and listening to the drama of their lives. Nothing they told me ended up in my story, but it fertilized my imagination until I couldn't work on anything else.
So six weeks and 50K words later, I had this novel. All thirty chapters have been submitted and I'm sure are working their way through the approval process. Big thanks to Lazeez for helping me get all the parts submitted correctly. It's the largest single story I've submitted here at one time.
I hope you like it! Please feel free to contact me and let me know what you think.
Cotton
I just posted the first story in a new series about two young people named Hilly and Ben. It's called The Choir Trip and weighs in at around 20K words.
I've been writing it slowly over the last month while I prepped my latest Amazon release called Running His Way Out under the new pseudonym Conor Coveo, which is free this weekend.
The Choir Trip was inspired by a friend who runs martial arts dojo. I imagined a tomboy named Hilly who finds herself drawn to a serious young man named Ben, a couple of years older than her.
When they get closer, she is pulled into the kind of relationship politics she'd hoped to avoid. We meet his former girlfriend who creates problems for them all. Hilly's best friend, Madison, begins acting strangely. And the guys she'd been great friends with begin to see her as a young woman instead of a little sister, causing rifts she didn't expect.
Hilly takes it all on with inner strength and determination, setting the stage for the next story in the series when she begins dating Ben after they return from their choir trip. Sex changes things, but its the changing relationships with her family and friends that will be the real test.
I love feedback, so please read, rate, and let me know what you think!
Cotton
A couple of months ago I asked the editor I use for my commercial stories to read The Ski Trip Surprise / Visiting Austin and give me her take on it. Her suggestion was that I needed to extend The Ski Trip Surprise to a full novel and publish it commercially.
So today Undeniable: A Bisexual Bromance is out under my commercial pen name, Bella Chal. I changed the character's names because I always seem to have stories with a John and Lily in them. The new story has been expanded to include some of the details from Visiting Austin to lay the groundwork for the sequel.
Now I'll be back to drafting new chapters for Visiting Austin in preparation for editing and publishing it as a standalone novel next month. More updates soon!
Cotton
I've just submitted chapter 4 of the Visiting Austin story. It introduces Frank's family and resolves some of the tension between John and Frank. I'm happy with how things are going so far and hope you like it.
This chapter took a bit longer to get out because of the holidays and the release of my third novel under my mainstream pen name, Bella Chal. It's free this weekend and early reviews have been positive, so I'm pretty excited.
Happy reading!
Cotton
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