“I need to break this off. I don’t regret any of the time we spent together – this was fun. I’m glad we could share this together. I love you, but… I don’t want to be in love with you. And you make that really hard."

My debut novel A Taste of Something Else has been out for some 2 years now, and the original draft of the story has been done for like 6 years longer! A lot has happened in the time since; my writing style and quality have both changed & improved; I've gone through so many experiences of my own, and as we all know, a little bit of ~you~ always ends up making its way into each and every little thing you create.

If you've ever read Taste back to back with Unexpected, Undeserved, then you probably noticed that the main themes of these two stories are pretty darn similar. The reason for that is that I wrote Taste while I was going through the shitty-boyfriend situation myself, without realizing it at the time - something we see in both Daniel and Eli - and then UU came after, once I'd had time to escape & process what all had happened to me. (With Heart of the Forest out now, I'm actually thinking of getting UU pushed for publication next...)

And then, along with that, y'all've probably ~also~ noticed a distinctive emergence of poly-relationship themes in my personal projects over these past few years, as another personal exploration in myself: Ghost of a Rose deals directly with the idea in its main plot, then the main character of Heart of the Forest is also poly, even if it doesn't really factor into the story until the end, and even then only in a minor way; and then when you think about it, it's reasonable to believe that that's the underlying issue to Eli's indecision in UU; and then when I was first doing edits for Taste, the realization hit me like a good ol' ton of bricks-

holy fucking God these boys are poly as hell & they just don't know it yet. Funny how that works, huh?

So anyway! I've actually been thinking about a sequel to Taste for quite a while now, but it's an idea that's been backburnered for a couple of reasons. I've touched on the subject & built out some characters for it through my Weekly Worldbuilding supporter tier, but nothing concrete - and I wanna highlight that this upload is also not me starting down that road! I just had some time for personal work last week, & really wanted to get some initial ideas down.

I've waffled back and forth on what I want the actual story itself to be, & where to go and what to do with these boys, and maybe this isn't the "proper" way to go about it, but I've been fascinated with the idea of a story about a relationship told after the fact, after that relationship has dissolved. But no matter what format or framing, the core thought has been the same: the sequel to Taste will be a story about how sometimes a relationship just isn't meant to be, and that that's OK.

So again, no promises that this is going to be my next project! It might be. But it might not. But also it might. But here's a quick lil story sketch on some of those thoughts.