The Gremlins Den Vol.1
23rd July 2026
Welcome to my debut of ‘The Gremlins Den’!
This blog acts as the expanded companion to the monthly newsletter, featuring all the additional information on project & query updates, character profiles, world-building notes and extra content that didn’t quite fit in short-form for an inbox.
During my research for developing the newsletter, I learnt that my grand ideas for all the sections I wanted to include could not be contained within the confines of a traditional length newsletter, around 300-600 words (and I’ve still managed to go well above those numbers). As such, I did my best to summarise what I could and leave out the rest.
Take a seat on the blue velvet lounge (I don’t actually own one so we’re just pretending I’m fancy) and I’ll go get the drinks while you ready yourself for the tangent I’m about to take you on.
PROJECT MILESTONES & UPDATES
I may not write at the speed of sound – but I DO write at the momentum of chaotic zigzagging! Get insight on just how fast AND SLOW my progress can be, including key dates for milestones, story development etc.
The Ember Code: 2484
My current focal project.
I've been working on this standalone dystopian fantasy while querying ASSEMBLY OF THE ELEMENTS from my ISLE OF FAWE series, and it has now reached 17,026 words as of the 21st July, surpassing the 10k milestone in chapter 3 approx. March-April.
Fun fact: this story was first mentioned in the prologue of my initial debut novel, ASSEMBLY OF THE ELEMENTS, and one day when I was trying to figure out a big plot device for that book (and the entirety of the series) I went on a MASSIVE deep dive into my OG story from my teen years for inspiration, then somehow this story popped into my head to become involved in that big plot device, and from there I decided I needed to do more with it and actually write a novel for it.
PS: the number 2484 actually comes from the postcode of Uki NSW, where my mother, sister and I lived for 6 years, so it's not at all in relation to 1984 in that capacity. I also created a hidden meaning behind the numbers – even the chapter numbers have specific themes!
This story takes a deep dive into real world issues past, present and future through a bleak, unsettling lens of what-ifs, akin to 1984 & The Handmaid's Tale; although this was completely unintentional, I only realised once I had really established the world in a compendium that I sat back and saw the similarities (and who knows what other works I’ve yet to research that could also be similar!). But to give it that R.M.Wheatley flair, I’ve added some enchanted elements, since it’s positioned within the Solstia-Seartra storyverse I developed for all my fantasy works.
The dark tone was, at first, quite difficult for me to get into writing since I'm used to incorporating humour as a way of balancing things out, but it's been a great challenge, and now I feel much more comfortable (well, as comfortable as one can be!) writing this story, which has in turn made it flow easier. Though, juggling a full-time job and on a fitness journey does make it more difficult to get words on the page these days.
Key dates
8th September 2025: created the first ‘trailer’ for the story (though it never reached social media). I am considering revising it with updated info, but since the trailer included an AI-generated cover at the end of it I'd like to remove that and do a commission piece OR go blank background with just the title.
20th January 2026: began writing chapter 1. Oh boy was this hard to start. Writing in first-person POV when I'm used to third was a damn nightmare to navigate, especially after I decided I'd make it present tense instead of past tense. I'm still mixing them up!
3rd May 2026: hit 10k milestone in chapter 3
25th May 2026: discovered the perfect ending. Even I was not prepared for what I came up with! I listen to Spotify, and at the time it had suggested one particular song while I was driving either to or from work, I can't quite remember, but the visuals just hit me like a brick and I KNEW that was it, that's the ending for this story, no questions!
8th June 2026: midpoint twist developed. Now this took some serious brainstorming because I had one particular idea I knew was going to occur at the midpoint, but I had not yet considered anything surrounding that one idea. After listening to some music which, god what would I do without it, helped me develop more of the lead-up and aftermath around it.
18th July 2026: brainstormed plot holes for midpoint twist and tweaked ideas to better fit the twist. Like city and state councils, I pretend the plot holes don't exist and don't need fixing until I run over one myself.
20th and 21st July: began working on a (very simplistic) map of Nether City ‘Deadmans Basin’, featuring in chapter 5. I am no longer even semi-talented in the drawing department so I decided I'd just use Canva and some shapes. Yep. Plain old shapes. I need simplicity when I'm scratching my head over spatial planning!
Elements Evolution
This is Book 2 from my ISLE OF FAWE series, a contemporary low fantasy set in Australia and the UK. While Book 1 is primarily focused on the overarching personal story of Morgana Owens, Book 2 aims its sights on Freya Hartley - and all the skeletons from her past. The primary theme for book 2 is how the characters evolve personally and magically.
‘Elements Evolution’ reached its first milestone of 50k words on 12/12/25, with the last word count of 61,086 on 31/12/25. Due to specific personal matters I faced at the end of 2025, I have found it a struggle to return to this story, though I'm hoping in due time I'll find my mojo for it once again - like I have in the past - and come in with flaming fingers smashing out some ridiculous amount of words in a short period of time. Writing is funny like that!
Project EOM
Because I like to switch things up to best utilise my creative writing flow, I sometimes jump between projects if I get the right spark of inspiration for it. As such, on the 4th June I came up with the beginning of chapter 1 for a contemporary romance. I'd had a vague concept in my head for a little while but never explored it beyond some dot points, until recent circumstances brought on inspiration to start it. We'll see how I go with the development on this one since I have the other two projects competing for my extremely limited free time.
LETTERS FROM THE QUERY TRENCHES
As us writers hand iron rations to one another while awaiting our fates until we’re in the pink, this section provides insight into the most gruelling part of the journey to trad publishing.
Entering the query trenches brings with it both tremendous excitement of being one step closer to publication and unbridled fear of rejection: imagine fireworks, but you’re vomiting, and each batch of queries you send out to prospective agents starts the cycle all over again.
This was THE biggest thing I had been procrastinating over. Putting ASSEMBLY OF THE ELEMENTS out in an official, ‘this is no longer a faraway dream’ was, quite frankly, too terrifying to handle, so I put it off and off until I couldn’t edit my manuscript any more (turns out I COULD, actually, but only once I was already in the thick of querying because, you know, timing's a bitch lol) and had to face the fact that it was time to let my baby be SEEN – which felt like total exposure of my soul: the good, the bad and the ugly.
But I fear I'm paying the price for waiting so long to delve into what it takes to query that I well and truly fumbled my first two batches. Mind you, expecting exceptional results first go would've been even more foolish - and thankfully I had emotionally prepared myself not to take it to heart - but I do wish I'd planned a true standalone sooner so I had better odds than whatever dismal percentile I now have as a debut author, querying a series, that simply cannot be pitched as such. Trust me, I thought about it, and I thought about what it would take to revise book 1 to make it work ... too much work, let's put it that way!
I also didn't anticipate the amount of time it could potentially take to BE QUERYING, let alone what happens after, and I'm not sure if that will work for me considering how long it already took for me to get book 1 done (5 and a half friggen years). So uhh, we'll see what happens, and if I decide to PIVOT into self-publishing (which is already being prepped for; ya girl is trying to plan better now) I'll definitely let you lovely folks know.
CHARACTER SPOTLIGHT
Part of what makes a story are the characters we meet along the way – here, you will get a glimpse of those characters and see how the worlds they live in shape them.
Mim the 28th from THE EMBER CODE: 2484
Role: protagonist
When I first started this project, I didn’t have a concrete idea of who my main character was or what she looked like. It wasn’t until I decided to generate a few group images via chatGPT (I'll give commentary on the AI issue later - but transparency in my use of it for inspo images is important) that I was able to settle on the vision for Mim as a character in both her physical appearance and personality.
Identifier: 96WA2W
Age: 27
Class: Commoner/Worker
Occupation: sustenance steward
Place of residence: Nether City - South District - The Crossroads
Trainline: Gore Hill
Strengths: resilient, perceptive, compassionate, loyal
Weaknesses: fear of conflict, cowardly, apathetic, dull
Hair: medium blonde, shoulder-length, slightly wavy
Face: heart-shaped, defined cheekbones, straight nose, medium lips, slender tapering jawline, small chin
Eyes: deep-set, almond-shaped, murky dark hazel
Complexion: warm-tone, pale
Due to her inability to breed, Mim was forced to become a Worker. Like all other commoners, Mim lives life within the confines of the regime’s tightly controlled system of routine and compliance, but she is one of few who is perceptive of the world around her, leading to develop a rebellious crack in the mind. A fellow Worker commoner, Zizu, teaches Mim about a secret resistance that is strategically planning to overthrow the regime, utilising coded written messages to communicate meet ups. Mim has to learn how to overcome her cowardice and fear of conflict to become the protagonist she needs to be: branded Defiant.
Quote: "They don’t want you to SEE. Open your eyes, look at the skies - the end is coming, and they’re only interested in saving themselves. Escape before it’s too late: your compliance WILL COST YOU your life!"
BEHIND THE VEIL
Every story begins with a world. Take a peek behind-the-scenes at the things that shaped the story.
One of the first things I developed for the world of Dyloquar was, funnily enough, the calendar. I wanted to create something specifically developed by the regime that made it feel like time was relentless while giving the illusion of a short year. The final calendar has changed with both length and naming, however. To make it easy on myself and readers, I utilised the current naming system of ours and mixed it up a bit until I was happy with the results.
My second world-building idea was a commoner colour chart. To really set the tone of oppression in my dystopian, I decided to create this chart to reflect a lack of colour – as has become normalised in real life aspects such as house design and cars. While the focus is mainly for greys and browns, I did include muted tones of other colours for some diversity, which is just another illusion in this world, being one of choice. The names of each shade also needed to further reflect the bleak tone, so it took a little while to come up with a shade naming system that best suited what I was going for.
Another key part of this world was developing The Burrows – which is the name for my train network in Dyloquar. These were actually based off a specific dream I had some years back that really stuck in my mind. In that dream, I was in an underground train network where the platforms and trainlines were almost completely level to each other and the platforms were also scarily narrow – I’m talking 2 metres wide at max. The crowd was also quite chaotic in the dream. So when I started developing this story, I immediately thought back to that dream and decided to incorporate some of that chaos into the core of the world’s transport functionality. Building on that, I developed a tiered network and had to consider the kind of numbers that would be using the trains – this is where I broke my brain (me and math don’t go together) trying to figure out how many people per train, platform etc - thank goodness for the internet!
While there are many other facets of worldbuilding for Dyloquar, one of the most randomly developed ones is the name list I created specific for commoners. On the 23rd August 2025, I had been on my way home from work, and I’m not quite sure what exactly prompted me to start, but I began sounding names out loud while driving. Mim, Ipp, and Nolog were from the first handful I came up with. When I got home I went over my dashcam footage (for the ones I couldn’t remember) and compiled them into my notes app, before eventually transferring them into a compendium for the story and building on the list from there. The concept? Simplicity. I wanted my commoner names to be either 1-2 syllables and as different as I could make them from any names currently circulating – although I’m sure many would likely exist in other languages. Recurring name endings of 'og' seemed to pop up along with 'oz' and either a vowel of 'a' 'i' or 'u' paired with another vowel for the first syllable of a name.
WRITING SOUNDTRACK
Writers need a few key things to get themselves through projects: determination, dedication, some sort of caffeine addiction, shower thoughts, and some friends or family hyping them up in the background – but we must always have inspiration to spur the ideas. And for me, inspiration hits hardest when the right song plays at the right time!
Nothing gets me more excited than those random, perfect scenes to fill a part of the story I either hadn’t quite worked out or not even considered yet. For my current project, THE EMBER CODE: 2484, I had some ideas for the mid-point but not all of it had been thought through, and certainly not the plot twists that ended up developing. I already knew the core ending I wanted from the get go, but recently I came up with an idea that elevates it beyond what I anticipated – and I absolutely love it!
To give you a feel of the tone, I’ll list some of the most integral songs from these ideas.
“Empire Now” Hozier (inspired original trailer)
“Omega Pulse” Kings & Creatures, Sergey Azbel, Bohdan Yeremenko (1st released trailer for social media)
“Occult” Kings & Creatures (inspired major plot twist scene in the mid-point)
“Solace” Txmy (inspired a deeply emotional scene for the mid-point)
“Leap of Faith” Hunting Good (inspired another scene for the mid-point)
“Apocalypse at the Disco” Tomas Herudek (inspired action scene in third act)
“Burning Nebula” Kings & Creatures, Sergey Azbel (inspired another pivotal scene in the third act)
“Rata Novus” Maclaine Diemer (inspired the ending of the story)
BOOK WISHLIST, TBR, RECS & WRITERS IN MOTION
Though I’m not an avid reader, I am looking to build up my library from authors of varying backgrounds. I’ll also include some unpublished writers that I’ve been following who have caught my interest – that way they can get more visibility as they, too, are building towards publication.
Wishlist:
Liz Shipton’s THALASSIC series & DOT SLASH MAGIC
CG Drews’ DON’T LET THE FOREST IN
Marc Avery’s DISCIPLINE
E.C.Glynn’s HERETIC BEHAVIOUR (Australian author represent!)
A.R.Schilling’s NOT ANOTHER HAPPILY EVER AFTER
Benjamin Patterson’s MARKULIAN PROPHECIES series (Australian author represent!)
Marc R Micciola’s IMRYLL’S LEGACY series & TALES OF THE BEAUTIFULLY DARK short stories collection
Gretchen Powell Fox’s SHATTERED CROWN series
Fred Wiehe’s BLOODSHOT series, STRANGE DAYS & FRIGHT HOUSE
Writers In Motion:
Rain Sullivan
If you took the time to read the extended blog post, thank you so much and I hope to see you again soon!
~ Rochelle
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