It’s been a long, strange, stressful, enlightening month.
A lot has changed.
I know I keep saying that but I swear to God it’s like attempting to assemble a puzzle while the shape of the pieces, and the puzzle itself, changes.
So, first all, shit I actually got done in August.
Paranormal Passions, Desire, & Wanderlust are no longer free. In short: the data revealed it didn’t help.
I removed the Collections for A Warm Place because I don’t like doing them and they don’t really help much. I’ll be releasing a Complete Edition when A Warm Place is finished. If you missed out on the shorts and want to read them, e-mail me.
I published all the sequels to each of my 5 free shorts. They are all 99 cents and in the KU.
I got new cover art for A Warm Place, as well as that new banner up there, courtesy Kirk Mason.
I made a shitload of little changes that can be viewed here.
I removed my Dragon Age fan fiction for reasons I’ll get into below but basically: I don’t have time for it.
That’s about it. Those background changes are actually ongoing because I learned YET MORE after completing all the changes I wanted to make, but it shouldn’t be anything the readers actually notice. It’s all back-end stuff.
So what’s happening in the immediate future?
I’m writing A Warm Place 8. That’s mainly what’s happening in September. I am writing A Warm Place 8 as fast as I can. I have it planned and I feel good about it. I’m also going to try and get an Our Own Way or two out before October. Maybe even three, we’ll see how it goes.
How about the less immediate future?
Well let’s talk about that.
I’ve been learning so many things. Technical behind-the-scenes stuff and stuff about cover art and how I should be structuring my stories and more. Most of it I’ll incorporate into my writing career, some of it I won’t as it doesn’t gel with how I do things or what I personally feel about some subjects. The short of it is: I’ve learned how to do what I’ve been doing before, but better. So it’s not like I’m switching over to angsty vampire romance or whatever is popular today. (I’m showing my age by saying that, I’m sure.)
While a lot of things are in a state of flux right now as I let the dust settle, which is taking longer and longer because I keep learning new things and then it all gets shaken up again, I at least know what the way ahead looks like for now. Kind of. Here’s some pertinent facts.
I’m going to finish A Warm Place and it’s almost certainly going to cap off at 12 novels. I have a very decent conclusion in mind and I think it will feel like a good stopping point. That’s as close to set-in-stone as it gets with me. I’ll try to have A Warm Place finished before mid-2022.
I’m going to continue with Our Own Way. I’ve got a vague idea of where it will end, but basically I’m going to just write it until it feels done.
My next big series is still going to be the fantasy caveman one.
I’ve set aside any ideas of fan fiction and also I’ve put aside the incest erotica for now (as much as I loathe to do that, I really wanna write it.) But the good news about the incest erotica is that I’ve got a lot of ideas, and at this point I’m doing well enough that when I do get around to writing it, I can just host it all for free on its own website. Yay! Tons of free incest erotica!
I have decided I’m almost certainly going to reboot Demoness, however, it’ll be awhile. Like a year or two. Maybe longer. Not sure. If you want to know why, please refer to this post where I explain the problem in detail. In short, I am extremely excited about this reboot…when I can get to it.
One of the biggest changes I think is that it was pointed out to me that I need to have more potentially shorter series. Like more trilogies. They’re less risky. On the one hand, that sounds like stupid corporate bullshit and yeah, I get that. On the other hand: it makes sense. Imagine if A Warm Place 1 had flopped. I’d be stuck writing 12 novels that don’t sell jack shit. That would tank my writing career. Now I don’t want to give up my big epic long series, but I also need to have a few more things going that are more, I guess you could sane mentally sound. Now again, I would like to note, this doesn’t mean I’m going to just jump onto whatever bandwagon is popular and pump out something I don’t give a shit about. What this means is that basically I’ll be augmenting my serial fiction idea. I’m still toying around with precisely what I want to do next, it’s up in the air between monster girls and more winter survival, this time in a sci-fi setting. (Shockingly, I haven’t had my fill of winter survival.) So basically, instead of it being a serial, it’s going to be a trilogy that has a natural conclusion point at the end of the third book, BUT it could also continue if people like it enough. This is really more of an experiment than anything else and I don’t want to wander into the territory of holding sequels hostage or just abandoning series because they don’t sell. Basically, as always, I’m looking to strike a balance between my bank account and my readership (and my own sanity). Personally, I’m looking forward to it, because it will let me write a new thing, and writing a new thing just about always makes me happy!
So what all this means is that I’m going to keep on writing A Warm Place, and Our Own Way, I’ll also be working on this new harem trilogy idea in the background.
I may also use this method to gauge reception to some of the other series that I want to write in my shared universes because at this point, I do have to admit that I feel like there’s been a shift in what I can do. Ironically, before when I was scraping by, I could kind of just write whatever and selling well wasn’t all that much different than selling poorly. I could afford to commit to finishing something, like Parasexual for example, even if it wasn’t all that popular. I really can’t do that now. I can’t go off and write a 10 novel series that’s only going to sell 1/10 as well as A Warm Place for example, I just can’t. And some of these series are quite old, ideas I came up with years ago. I’ve been finding that there are some ideas I outgrow. I’ll actually sit down and try to plan them and realize I don’t care anymore. I don’t want to do that to the fans, but I also know what happens when I make myself write something I don’t care about: it’s torture and it slows down everything.
Anyway, that’s about the size of it. Although it keeps growing.