January was a difficult month.
I had a Covid scare at the very beginning of the month, and several people close to me actually did get it, but thankfully, they’re okay now and I somehow managed to dodge that bullet. I got a clear test last week and I don’t go out much as it is.
The past few months have been very emotionally unstable and tumultuous for me. Fuck, the past year basically was, but especially the past few months. I’ve obviously gone back and forth on a lot of things, and part of the reason for that was because I felt the need to make decisions that fell within certain boundaries. There were some things I wanted to do, but they felt too big, too difficult, or too intimidating.
January made me finally really sit down and rethink…just about everything.
I’ve made some decisions. Here is a shortlist of those decisions.
A WARM PLACE will continue unabated for now, although I’m no longer sure about this 1st of the month release dates. I will try for one a month though. Regardless, it remains my primary focus for the moment. In fact, you can read A Warm Place 2 right now!
LIKE A FINE WINE is going to end with the latest novel. If you haven’t already, please read this blog post explaining why. To be clear: With the release of Like A Fine Wine 4, and Like A Fine Wine - The Complete Series, the series is officially finished. However, at some point in the future, I do intend to do a sequel series.
The fantasy serial fiction I mentioned earlier is being put away for now. It isn’t the right time for it and based on the decisions I’ve made, it is no longer the right call to begin working on it anytime soon.
At some point in the future, ideally during 2021, but early 2022 for sure, I will be launching a new pen name, with two new series. I’ll elaborate on that below.
I’ve been considering the notion of starting a new pen name since before even Crystal Candy, probably sometime during 2018, or perhaps even late 2017. I had the idea that I needed something of a clean break from everything I’d done so far, to take everything I’d learned and apply it to a new name from the very beginning. And beginnings appeal to me, as well, like I imagine a blank canvas calls to artists.
Obviously, I gave it a shot with Crystal Candy, and ultimately canceled that side project, determining it made more sense to just write under Misty Vixen.
So what changed?
What truly got me started down the most recent path of this decision was A Warm Place. It…has not done as well as I’d hoped, and I’ll try to elaborate on how. It’ll take a moment to explain my thoughts on this particular subject.
In short, I feel as though there are, for lack of a better term, ‘levels’ to being an independent author. In the beginning, I was very lucky. Not long after I began publishing Hellcats and Wanderlust, I got to a decent level. I was actually selling. Nothing crazy, but definitely more than you would expect a brand new author with no advertising or social media presence to do. I worked very hard to keep at that level and although things got very dicey in 2016 and then EXTREMELY dicey in 2017 in terms of earnings, (looking back over my earnings for 2017, I’m shocked by how bad it got), I managed to stay at that level for 2015, 2016, & 2017.
In 2018, everything changed. I had been wanting to write novel-length stories almost from the beginning, but the urge certainly grew to intense proportions during 2017. In 2018, I managed to make the jump. As some of you may remember, while I saw an unprecedented leap in popularity, I also faced execution from Amazon’s firing squads, as they accused me of cheating and threatened me with account termination. Ultimately things settled down and although I lost a LOT of what I had gained during that brief surge in popularity, when the dust settled, I had just barely manage to rise to the next ‘level’. I was earning more comfortably, though still not quite as consistently. (One month could be great, and then the next the sales could drop by half for no obvious reason.)
Because I’m goal-oriented and because I have people in my life who need help and because I grew up in, shall we say, less than ideal financial circumstances, I’ve been really aiming for getting to the next level. I think I might actually be happy at that level of earning. I definitely wouldn’t be rich, but I would be more than comfortable and able to actually help people with big, unexpected bills or fill out entire GoFundMes of strangers or pay my mom’s house off or whatever the fuck. I know I’m very lucky to even be where I am right now, and I try not to take anything for granted, but it is very difficult to maintain gratitude when I see people who I am at least as good at in writing doing 50-100x better than me, out-earning me with fucking EASE, just shitting out novel after novel with no real effort.
But part of my ultimate goal isn’t just more money. I also want to be able to write less. It’s obvious to me that my work and my mental health suffers because I have to pump out a novel a month at minimum, and that’s very stressful. I’d love to be able to even ease that down to a novel every two months. Like, damn that’d be nice! That’d be a vacation. Although I’m sure because anxiety and depression are self-adjusting, I’d reach that, enjoy it for a bit, then start complaining that a novel every two months is too much! Being human fucking sucks.
Anyway. As I was saying in the beginning, when 2020 rolled around, I decided it was time to really get my shit together, get serious, and aim for that next level, in sales if not in output at least. A Warm Place was intended to be that. Although technically speaking A Warm Place might be my best launch ever, (barring the freak occurrence in mid-2018), it still did nowhere near as good as I had hoped. It didn’t catch fire, it didn’t take off, it’s just doing kind of well, and I’m sure that’s going to drop off at some point soon. And that just…crushed me. Like, I might have actually had a little bit of a mental breakdown there a few weeks ago.
It was a very, very emotionally dark time and given the fact that I already feel like a giant fucking failure half the time anyway, yeah, it was even worse than that.
I’m better now, and ultimately it led me to seriously reconsidering everything about my plans for the future.
Now, to address a few things.
The first is this: Why do I think a new name will work this time, when Crystal Candy did not? The answer is basically because I’ll be treating it in a fundamentally different way. Crystal Candy was intended, from the beginning, to be a quick, fun side project. This new name will become my new primary focus.
Which leads to the next obvious question: What will happen to Misty Vixen? I want to be clear on a few things about that. The first is that Misty Vixen will remain up and active. Nothing’s being taken down, nothing’s being abandoned or discontinued. Or, if something is discontinued, like Like A Fine Wine, it will be for its own reasons. I will continue writing for Misty Vixen once launching this new pen name, but at a slower pace. And because I’m hoping this new pen name will ultimately help take the pressure off, it means I can work on something even if it isn’t super financially viable. Like Demoness, for example. Or maybe I could expand The Pale Redhead into a complete novel, or trilogy, like I kind of have wanted to. Or other projects that I’ve considered and rejected or put aside because I simply don’t have the time.
I hope that puts everyone’s concerns to rest.
The next thing I want to address is: Why do I think this is a good idea? Here’s a few conclusions I came to, that were reconfirmed by stuff several of my readers have been telling me over the past year or so. (And some less than kind reviewers.)
My tone as Misty Vixen is all over the place. What I wrote in 2015 is very different in some ways from what I am writing in 2021.
My protagonists are almost anti-adventure/harem. This has been changing naturally as I’ve gotten the counterculture written out of my system and I’ve wanted to write more assertive and proactive protagonists, but I still have a good 40+ novels of awkward nerds, introverts, and indecisive young guys surrounded by older or much more confident women. While I don’t regret writing those stories or those characters, and I still like them, and even aspects of them, it’s obvious to me now that they’re working against me. If someone who might actually love A Warm Place or Haven discovers me through, say, Hellcats or Paranormal Passions, there’s a decent chance they’ll just decide they don’t like me and move on.
I think there’s too much extra shit going on in how I present my work. Between the shared universes, the bonus stories, the collections and compilations and anthologies, the free website-exclusive stuff, the repackaging…it’s all too much. It’s clutter. I thought people would like it, like blu-ray extras or DLC, and while I have no doubt that there are some people who enjoy it, it’s become clear to me that for the most part, people just don’t care, and I could do away with it without a problem. This is more a problem on my end, as it takes up a lot of time and effort to make this stuff happen, but also it might be intimidating/irritating to see a massive list like what I’ve got on my Chronological Order page and just say ‘fuck it’. With a brand new pen name, I can make it much more simple and streamlined.
Balance in telling my stories. Since the beginning, I’ve been experimenting in how I tell my stories, balancing sex, action, and character development on a sliding scale. Ultimately, I’ve leaned towards more action and characters, and less sex, and I’ve had more people telling me they like this. Honestly, I have found myself wanting more and more to write more plot-focused narratives. To put it in video game terms, I’ve been writing Minecraft stories, but I want to be writing Mass Effect stories. Open world, open-ended survival versus narrative-driven campaign. Open world is fun, but I think I like the campaigns better more often than not. I think Haven is the closest I’ve ever gotten to what I ultimately want to do, so imagine Haven, but with even more quality and focus.
I hope this explains it all. But the thing I want to emphasize the most is this: I AM NOT ABANDONING MY READERS. In short, if you like what I’m writing now, you’ll like what I write under this new pen name, and I will very clearly let anyone who cares to look know about this new material. It won’t be a secret or anything. I honestly believe that if you liked Haven, or the more narrative-focused aspects of my other stories, you will absolutely love the new ideas I have. (Hint: Remember that caveman story I’ve been hinting at for years? I’m finally going to do it and I think I have a really fun idea for it.)
What I truly want to get across is this: If you are already a fan of my work, I am positive you will continue to be a fan of the newer work. I’m not changing direction so much as refining my process, cutting out the bad and enhancing the good.
Another bottom line I want to get across is that I believe in hard work, but I also believe in effective hard work. I have spent years attempting to break down the barrier between this level and the next, but only recently have I truly come to realize that I’ve been using a spoon when I could have been using a pick-axe. This new pen-name is the pick-axe.
I’m hoping this doesn’t come across like some corporate damage control bullshit, because I hate that soulless, boilerplate BS. That whole ‘we hear you and we will do better going forward and we value your feedback’ fucking corporate spiel that sounds so fake.
I hope this does something to set your mind at ease. I know it’s helping me a lot. Ever since I began seriously considering it over the past few weeks, it was kind of like a weight was lifted, one that’s been there for probably over a year now, maybe longer. It was like: This is it. This is the thing that makes sense. This is the way forward.
I haven’t felt like that for a long time.
If you have any questions or comments or concerns, seriously let me know. Either in a comment down below, on Twitter, or an e-mail. I can always be reached at mistyvixen@outlook.com, and I will answer.
To all my readers, genuinely thank you for your support. It pretty much means the world.