#starfall sleuth

So 14/58 chapters done, that leaves 44 chapters to go.

This is the first of my many faerie designs. None of them quite represent the intricacies in my head yet, but hopefully the final book itself will remedy that.

For now, let’s meet Solasta, formerly known as the Queen of Golden Dreams. Once a powerful faerie queen with a dazzling realm, she was known as a wish-granter, similar to legends of djinn in Celecerres. Some believe she may have been the origin of those legends. . . But Solasta's generosity opened her to the endless greed of humanity, leading to her downfall and the destruction of her original realm.

In other words--I finally did it!

Clocking in at 80,606 words and 48 chapters, I now have a completed draft of Starfall Sleuth.

So what happens now?

I'm taking a week off from this project and next weekend I will resume by doing a read-through for continuity, spelling and grammar, and any major characterization'/plothole issues, fixing as I go.

And then it will be time to embark on my greatest quest yet--querying for publication.

To @annlillyjose and @despoinacoco and everyone who has been following Starfall Sleuth--thank you. Without your interest and faith in me, I never would have been motivated to continue working on it to this extent. I would never have kept reshaping the story and reinventing it.

So thank you. This story would not have happened without you.

Seelie Gardner is the main protagonist of my fantasy wip, Starfall Sleuth, and there's been a long road from here to her current iteration!

Starting in my short story, Alternate Universe, Slow Burn, Seele, as she was called at the time, was a fake fictional character made up for the fake fictional fandom. She had a design based on Sophie Hatter from the film adaptation of Howl's Moving Castle and her personality was meant to be a take on characters like Rey, Wonder Woman, and Captain Marvel as they were represented in their major films during the late 2010s as female characters who were badasses. One of the sticking points of the short story being that Seele was celibate, all romances doomed out of a sense of trying to seem empowered.

When I decided I wanted to make this story real, that was the first element to go. Still, I played with the old design and personality concept, in which Seelie (I'd changed the name for pronunciation) would be a stoic, rational, and very proper lady.

I found I did not care for writing her that way.

Her next iteration paired with a redesign. I realized it would be a plothole if her celestial heritage really was so obvious as shining silver hair, and so I changed her to a brunette and played with some alternate backgrounds for her, with her mother being Altalunese originally, which was one of the countries at war with Astraeria. I also changed her sleuthing style to be more intuitive, with a more passionate and intense personality that the design came to reflect.

The project still didn't gain momentum until I decided to include the character of Aster Aelian, my Cinderella protagonist from the now-cancelled Feywood Tales story project.

For a while, I posted on here about this version where Aster would have been the protagonist and Seelie an important deuteroganist. As I worked on the draft, however, it became obvious that Aster was written as a better detective and that integrating the two characters together would make a tighter, stronger story.

Cast of Starfall Sleuth: Caelus de Solasta