The Home for Mell Eight's Original Fiction

Mell Eight is an author of LBTQIA original fiction, primarily M/M. 
If that is not your thing, hit the back button, otherwise welcome and enjoy! 

Out Now:

Dragon's Hoard Reprint and
Gathering the Hoard
July 12, 2017

Coming Soon:

Justified
August 9, 2017
Dragon Spy
October 11, 2017

Cover Coming Soon

Current Projects:

  • If A Butterfly Don't Fly
        --Editing
  • Fairy Tales
  • The Case of the Hopping Hare
  • The Coup and the Prince

Submitted Projects:

  • Kelpie Blue -- Accepted
  • Hadash Aviv -- Accepted
  • Ground of Insurrection
    -- Submitted

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I have been working with Less Than Three Press since December 2011.
Supernatural Consultant Volume One received this award.
Hadash Aviv was Nominated!

News:
7/17/17
  • I completely closed the document for If A Butterfly Don't Fly and have refused to open it again.  If the document isn't available, I can't nitpick at it.  It's been a full week since I finished the story and I'm going to try to give it one more week before I give it a last edit and submit it.  I would like to wait until August, but I'm not certain whether I'll be able to last that long. 

  • I focused exclusively on The Coup and the Prince this past week and to my surprise I was finally able to finish it.  This story was stalled for a few months while I figured things out and I am happy with how it turned out.  Unlike Butterfly, I haven't been regularly editing the story as I went to help stave off writer's block.  I would instead switch to working on something else.  That means Coup will need a full month of rest before I can start editing.  I'll pick it up again at the end of August, clean it up, and get it submitted. 

  • Which leads me to another what's next dilemma.  I have so many books on my to-do list at the moment, but none of them are calling to me.  I'll try poking at a bunch of them to see if anything bites.  Unfortunately, if the muses aren't talking, I don't know how much actual writing I'll be able to get done.  I'll let you all know whenever I settle on something. 

  • The last bit of news isn't as exciting, but for those of you who love Lumie I know you'll be glad to hear it.  Dragon Spy, Lumie's first story in my Supernatural Consultant series, has begun moving forward.  LT3 has posted it on Goodreads, which is an indication that they think the story is still on schedule.  I expect to get the edits any day now as there's only three months until release day.  I'm hoping in conjunction with those edits I'll learn some potential release dates for the two other stories LT3 has accepted.  There's so much to look forward to and I'm excited to get started. 
7/12/17
7/9/17
  • I completed writing If A Butterfly Don't Fly.  I gave it a few days to rest and then read through it and formatted it for submission.  Normally I would let a story sit for a month before reading through it again, but this story is a bit different.  Because it's so old, I've read through it dozens of times at this point as I tried to keep writer's block at bay.  Aside from the ending I wrote a few days ago, this story has been edited to heck and back.  My worry is that if I let it sit, I'll start nitpicking, and then it'll get really messed up and might not ever be submitted.  On the other hand, letting a story rest for a good while (more than the bare week I've given this story right now) provides a level of distance that allows me to better evaluate the editing I'm doing.  I'm trying to decide what would be best for this story and right now I'm leaning towards a compromise by giving it another week of rest, rereading it again, and then submitting it.  What do you think? 

  • Nitpicking is exactly what happened with Ground of Insurrection.  I knew when I finished writing it that it wasn't quite right, so I sent it to a beta reader who very helpfully pointed out where those issues were stemming from.  I fixed it, but by that point the story had been stuck with a terrible label, a miasma of "something isn't right".  Despite knowing the problem was gone and the story was good, I couldn't quite make myself hit the submit button.  I kept poking at it, changing little things that only reinforced the false impression in my head that the story wasn't ready yet.  I needed some sort of emotional boost if I was ever going to get this story submitted, so while I was running on the excited high of having finished writing Butterfly, I gave Ground of Insurrection another read through.  As I thought, the story was good and the issues were fixed.  So I submitted it!  Finally, after two long years of the story languishing on my computer, I plucked up my courage.  Now it depends on whether LT3 also likes it. 

  • Now that Butterfly is completed, it's finally time to move on to another story on my to-do list.  The question is, which one?  I know many of you are yelling at your computer screens, trying to tell me "more Lumie!", but I'm not certain the next Supernatural Consultant book is ready to be written.  I still have some more planning to do first.  Others of you are demanding Part Two of Ge-Mi, but again I have the same answer: more planning first.  That leaves me with far too many other options.  I would like to finish The Coup and The Prince, which is short and sweet and whose writing time has dragged on a bit too long.  I would also like to return to my fairy tales.  I was making good progress with them before Butterfly reasserted itself. In fact, since I totally forgot to do goals for July, maybe I'll make both of those stories my goals list. 
     
  • Don't forget my Dragon's Hoard series is coming out this week on July 12th.  If you haven't read the first four books before, now is a great time to get a copy as they're all on pre-order discount at LT3.  Gathering the Hoard is completely new and fans of Tori will really enjoy it, so make sure you pick up your copy today. 
7/5/17
  • I got the second round of edits for Justified back to LT3 within plenty of time.  Hopefully this means the release date won't need to be pushed back again.  It's available for pre-order at LT3, so make sure you get your copy before it comes out on August 9th. 

  • If A Butterfly Don't Fly has been going amazingly well.  I am still on track to complete it this month.  I only have 3k words left to write to reach my goal of 40k and the epilogue (which is all that's left to write) should get me there.  I'm looking forward to finishing this story after three long years of writing it. 

  • Of course, I had firmly told myself that the two books in my Out of Underhill series would be it for the series.  Each book takes a huge amount of research and planning to put together, which, while an important aspect to every book I write, takes away a considerable amount of time and energy from my other stories.  I wanted to be done with Underhill so I could focus on the rest of my rather extensive current projects list.  Then I got an idea for a third book that will tie the entire series together.  It's a book that has to be written, so right now I'm very firmly looking at a trilogy.  It will be my second trilogy series--Magnified is my first--and I'm looking forward to writing it.  I'm not looking forward to all the research I have to do first, so I'm probably going to work on some of my other stories before starting to tackle this one. 
7/1/17
  • For those of you that follow me on Facebook, you probably saw that I added all six new covers for my Dragon's Hoard series.  They're absolutely amazing.  I loved the old covers, of course, but these are super special too.  Six covers is too much to share in a blog post, so if you want to check them out they're on Facebook and they're on my website. 

  • Finding the Wolf, the first book in my Dragon's Hoard series, is available for pre-order.  If you purchased it in the past, DO NOT bother buying it again (unless you want to for some reason).  There have been edits, but it is basically the same book.  What you can do, is when the series is re-released you can dig through LT3's rather difficult purchased page and find your original download.  As far as I'm aware, you should be able to download the new version from that page.  I don't know what to do if you purchased your copy from Amazon or another ebook site.  If you are a brand new reader of the series, then make sure you DO get a copy now while it's on a preorder discount.  The reprints of the entire Dragon's Hoard series as well as the new Gathering the Hoard short story set should all be available July 12th. 

  • I have been plugging away at the edits for Justified and I am almost finished.  All that's left is a final read through--which I've already started--and then I'll send it back to LT3.  Justified is available for preorder, and you can always go onto Goodreads and add it to your to-read list.  It comes out really soon too on August 9th, so get your preorder in now.  
     
  • I have also been able to get a lot of writing done this past week.  If A Butterfly Don't Fly has passed 30K words, which means I have less than 10k left to write.  The twist I added has turned out amazingly and I'm really happy with how this story is progressing.  The plan is to have it completed in July so that by the end of August I can start getting it ready for submission to LT3.  By then I'm hoping to have more news to share about Kelpie Blue, the first book in the series.  Kelpie Blue was accepted by LT3, but aside from that I don't know anything else about its progress.  Of course, the next set of edits I should be getting are for Dragon Spy, which I know my readers are excited about since Lumie is the main character.  After that is when I'm expecting to start getting word about Kelpie Blue.