Emerald Hills Elite Behind the Scenes

The Emerald Hills Elite series has been on my mind for a looong time. I don’t know if reverse harem academy books are still popular or not, but they’re a trope I love to read (and have loved to read for a while now). I’ve really itched to write my own story, put my own spin on the subgenre and so that’s where the idea for this series came from.

The name “Emerald Hills Elite” is a mix of a few things. “Emerald Hills” was a neighborhood in the city I grew up in (Edmonds, Washington). It was the fancy place that sat up on a hill and overlooked the grey-blue waters of Puget Sound. It was also the place where at Halloween, it was rumored the residents handed out full-sized candy bars (FULL-SIZED, PEOPLE) and so everyone would pile in their cars and head there for trick-or-treating festivities.

I’ve always loved the name, so I thought it really fit for this series. In this series, the city is called “Emerald Hills” and it’s a fictional place that I image is somewhere on what we called the “eastside,” which is east of Seattle. It includes places like Bellevue and Issaquah, if you’re curious. The city itself is up in the foothills of the Cascade Mountain Range so it’s got all sorts of pine trees and rocky lake shores that get all spooky when it’s foggy and the clouds hang low with rain.

That’s the setting I envision with this book.

There’s also another city literally on the other side of the tracks called “Mulberry.” It sounds like a nice place with a name like that—wholesome and sort of 50s-ish, but it’s not. Not at all.

(Side note: The name comes from the song “Mulberry Street” by Twenty One Pilots, one of my favorites from their new album and I wanted to give it a nod in the story. The song is falsely happy sounding, but when you listen to the lyrics, there’s a much darker undertone about mental health).

In order to keep track of where everything is in relation to each other, I drew a map (and yes, my art skills are trash but you get the point).

My original dry erase board rough sketch of Emerald Hills and Mulberry.

The prettier (but still not very good) one I made in Canva.

This story was originally going to involve all sorts of weird stuff (I was going back and forth about making it PNR, but decided against it… because there was a whole fountain of youth storyline thing that was just strange. Sometimes brainstorming goes in an odd direction), but in the end, I think I’ve got all the parts that will make this awesome fleshed out.

So, there are two rival gangs, a badass heroine, four guys in her harem (we’ll meet them later), two cities on complete opposites of each other, and a school that’s creepy and has its own issues.

Now, I just have to figure out how much (if any) bullying I want to put into the story. Originally, I planned to make this a bully romance but now I’m not so sure that’s what it wants to be. Thoughts?