Here we are at the end of another year. Although it feels like the end of a decade after all the shit that’s happened.
So, what happened in November?
It was close, but I publish Raw!
I also managed to get Our Own Way 5 out!
I managed to get most of Pink 3 written. I also took down all five of the freebie stories, which were no longer freebies, and also their sequels. I will be republishing them as Complete Trilogies as I write each third short. I’m hoping to get those done over the next month or two, but A Warm Place 9 and Our Own Way takes priority. That being said, I’m setting Our Own Way aside for a moment. I need a break from it and to just let it settle for a bit. I honestly am still surprised people like it so much. It’s definitely made me reconsider taking a bigger stab at slice-of-life stuff.
As for what’s up in the coming month, I’m very much hoping to get A Warm Place 9 out. I also think now is the time to talk about A Warm Place as a whole.
When I started rewriting it last year, I had a lot of plans. Those plans changed again and again over the course of 2021. Like, this series has gone through more plan changes than literally anything I have ever written for a number of reasons. Some of it is my own personal taste, some of it was logic, some of it was emotional. At one point I was pretty seriously considering hitting 15 novels, and then I trimmed that down to 12. After the difficulties of the last few months, combined with my growing knowledge of what makes sense to do and what doesn’t make sense to do, I’ve finally realized that A Warm Place 9 will be a perfect place to end it.
I was looking over my plans and this just makes the most sense. I’m getting tired of writing it, and I think people are getting tired of reading it. I’m definitely seeing diminishing returns with each book released now. It hit its peak somewhere around Book 6. Writing about Chris and the others has been a lot of fun, but I think it’s time for them all to settle down after one last adventure.
That being said, I don’t know if new content set in the A Warm Place universe is out of the question. I’ve got a couple of ideas for series. I really liked the whole down-to-earth characters and situations and the more realistic gritty survival. Honestly, this has gotten me more into the idea of writing about disaster survival, because there’s a lot of ways that can go and it’s fun to engage with. So yeah, maybe another series or two might not be out of the question in the A Warm Place universe, but it’ll be awhile, because I am going to need a long break from it after writing this next one.
If all goes according to plan, I’ll get A Warm Place 9 published by the end of the month, and then sometime after that I’ll get The Complete Series out. (I am SO not looking forward to formatting that. It’s going to be a nightmare.) Once it’s done, I’ll get to work on RAW II, and somewhere in the background I’ll be working on getting the freebies trilogies out so I can finally call them done and close out a few universes, and I’ll work on Our Own Way 6 once I feel saner.
Also, in case you missed it, I have a SubReddit.
That’s about it. Wish me luck, I have Seasonal Affective Disorder and it has been shaping up to be a really, really bad winter this year.