Month: January 2019

Due to release on February 17th.

Half Russian ballet dancer meets sound engineer.

Where was I? Ah, that’s right, I’d talked about the two books I’d released in the first half of the year, and then realized how long the post had already become, so I’ll talk about the other three in this part.

July 9th – I released Taking Love’s Lead. This was my first purely humorous book since A Temporary Situation. In contrast to Kept in the Dark, I promo-ed this one to death and ran my first AMS ad for it, but something about it just wasn’t that popular. Maybe it was the cover? Maybe it was the blurb? Maybe it was a little too British? A little too zany? Not enough angst? I don’t know. But this was the first book that I released that I was disappointed with. It got good reviews so it wasn’t that, it just didn’t seem to make people want to pick it up and read it. Even when I release a new book and get renewed interest in my back list, it doesn’t get a lot of attention. On the positive side, I’m going to use this book as a bit of an experiment in 2019. I’m going to change the cover and possibly the blurb and see if it makes a difference. It will be a good learning curve.

October 28th I released Edge of Living. I still find it a bit strange that I felt compelled to write a book dealing with the subject matter it did. I mean…it was probably really bad marketing, given that it really doesn’t fit with the rest of my books (although neither did Refuge). I apparently suck at the forward planning and sticking to the same audience – my brain doesn’t work like that. But… this one did well, which was a huge relief after Taking Love’s lead as you start thinking that perhaps the success of other books was the fluke. Will I ever write a book this dark again? Or will it be a one-off? I’ve no idea, because you know that would take the forward planning that I’m not very good at.

November 20th – I released A Christmas Situation. While I was still struggling to write the end of Edge of Living, I realised that the Christmas story that I’d been planning to finish and release wasn’t a very happy story. I really didn’t want to release two not very happy stories in quick succession. So then I had a stupid idea. Why not revisit two characters that I hadn’t written for almost two years with only a month to write it to be sure of getting it edited in time. I wasn’t even sure I could write those characters again and have them be consistent. I should have read back through A Temporary Situation, but then I only had the month and I’m a slow writer, so confession time, I winged it. I was so relieved when I got good feedback from betas that had read the original story. So A Temporary Situation ended up with a story continuation that I’d never planned. (Damn it! The planning thing again) with another promised story to round it off. When? Shrugs. Your guess is as good as mine.

What’s coming up in 2019?

Quite possibly less books than this year because I’m going to have to teach more to pay the bills. But, I am working on trying to write faster, so you never know. Time will tell.

Here’s what I know so far. There will be a 70k (estimate) standalone story out soon-ish. Possibly early to mid February.

Rebellion will definitely get finished even if it kills me.

I have a novella series that wants to get written as a chance to use up all the ideas that I’ve had over the last couple of years but dismissed as not being long enough for a complete novel. I’m even toying with the idea of re-writing my very first unfinished and unpublished novel as one of these stories.

I’d like to think I’ll write Paul’s story, but who knows, I’ve been saying that since I released A Temporary Situation. Although, I can’t finish Tristan and Dom’s story until I have so that might just give me the kick up the bum I need.

And this is all assuming that some new idea won’t suddenly float into my head. I guess we’ll see. Maybe I’ll re-read this post before I write the end of 2019 one and probably laugh.