Book News May 2025

What‘s going on in Cadet Chronicles land this month?

For some twisted reason, May is always my lowest month. It used to be a month that almost crippled me due to me not being aware of my introversion/highly sensitive nature and running on fumes for a few years, but I gradually worked myself to a place where it’s just the “slow month”. But that doesn’t kept me from doing things - mainly not so fun real life things though.

Despite the fact that May happens every year like clockwork, I’m always surprised by it. It sneaks up on me, and then I go: Oh, it’s May. That’s why I feel so low. On top of that, this May also had a lot of personal stuff going on, which required me to be very careful with my energy reserves. I hate that as a highly sensitive person, I have to constantly be mindful of what affects me. Loved ones struggling with health issues naturally are Kryptonite. I can push a lot away, but that, that will get under my skin, affect my sleep and mess with everything.

So, a lot got pushed to the backburner while I took care of real life. Good thing that I finished Greenvale Park a month earlier, but that doesn’t mean it left me alone this month. Frankly, I struggled quite a lot with the urge to just escape to that fantasy place and ignore everything else.

Designing fantasy places

To distract myself, I fired up my old interior design software that I got for a home improvement project, and worked out a Greenvale Park that makes sense - space and proportion wise. The last thing I want the Klaibers to live in would be a home that doesn’t fit their creed. It’s big, it’s elegant, it’s exquisite, but it should not be a huge just for the sake of being huge. The space needs to be used, and I have my doubts that Amalia Klaiber would spent her hard earned money on ball rooms that aren’t used most of the time.

This was a very interesting project, because I discovered that designing houses is soothing and addictive and a lot of fun. I also learned that antique furniture is not part of design programs. I now have to rewrite a few passages to adapt them to the new layout, but I also have a lot more opportunities to show the Klaiber history through the house, because I know the house better now. I also thought way too much about logistics, security measurements, how much staff a house and a family like the Klaibers would require and where would they actually work. Where do they store all the bed linen and table ware? What happens with the dirty laundry? Where are the toilets? I confess, I’m probably overthinking this to the n-th degree, and 95% of this probably won’t feature in the book, but as Greenvale Park most likely will return as a setting in later stories, it never hurts to set up the world properly.

The best part of this was the unexpected joy that a dear friend joined me in my interior design efforts, and she started building her very own version of Greenvale Park. It escalated so far that we used the Sunday morning stream to look at wallpaper patterns and discussed at length which should go into which room. On a sidenote, it’s always a relief to meet somebody who has the same ability to immediately like the most expensive thing in a store. Be it wallpaper or furniture, we had very expensive taste. Luckily, we weren’t furnishing a real home, because with Greenvale Park’s room sizes, we’d be bankrupt after Adelie’s apartment, I guess.

Book News

I do have a few exciting announcements. Wettstreit der Herzen will be published as an ebook in June. Not that I have my hopes up on any sales, looking at my current numbers, but I will put another foot forward, be brave and publish it anyway.

I’ve also finally made the decision that there will be printed books this year. I really need to wrap my head around how to do this, but I had a fun idea and that idea would make a lot more sense with printed books, so step one is figuring out how to make that happen without breaking the bank - mine and that of my readers.

I also decided that I maybe should make some merch. Just because I don’t use pretty bookmarks doesn’t mean that others won’t. And I want stickers. And postcards with the covers, for promo reasons. And suddenly I have my hands full with things to organise until September, because I promised myself that Greenvale Park will get a bigger launch than the other books. It’s a brand new story after all, it deserves a lot more fanfare.