I’m excited to be participating in two special projects this summer.
First up, we have Hot Winter Nights, a PNR Advent box. I’m offering a book that hasn’t been in print before, along with 29 other authors. If you love spicy paranormal romances, unwrap either 15 or 30 presents for yourself this holiday season.
Second, I’m working on a special edition Their Vampire Queen collection that will be available late July.
An Advent Box – for Paranormal Romance Lovers!
I’ll be contributing a new-to-print book from the Their Vampire Queen world.
30 authors. 30 days. Special editions or New/ new in print.
Some authors you will know and love.
Some authors will become your new favorites.
View on Kickstarter.
It’s been a long time coming. Longer than I intended. But Shara Isador is finally back. On May 3rd, grab Queen’s Crusade to continue her story!
Now for the long-winded post…
I’ve talked a little about the divorce and how ugly things were in 2019. Before that too, but once the divorce paperwork was filed, it got even nastier. Shara went into hiding and I locked her down. Hard. I had to keep her safe.
(I had to keep myself safe.)
Slowly, things got mostly better but he continued to take me back to court over. And over. And over. Finally I got a final resolution – so I thought – and then he filed a new motion. It was crazy. I couldn’t do anything. My life was in limbo. Which put Shara in limbo too. I still wrote, but I couldn’t get her to talk at all. Everything was “temporary.” Even the rental where we lived. I couldn’t afford to move until I knew what was going to happen.
Last year was better. I finally got the all clear to start my life. I moved forward with building my little red house on the Burkhart farm. But of course that took longer than I expected too, and while a dream come true, it was stressful making so many decisions. Then I ended up living with my dad for five months rather than a few weeks. All my clothes and books and shipping supplies went into storage. I had to go buy winter clothes because it was summer when I moved in with him. I had one suitcase and whatever I brought home from Literary Love Savannah in July.
I love my Dad and I’m so grateful he let me stay with him. But it wasn’t MY space, you know? It was hard to establish any kind of writing routine. I worked and slept in the same bedroom. I was a guest, and I didn’t want to lock myself away to write all night after working all day. I was also going through Evil Day Job interviewing for a new position (since Retirement had been sold) and that skyrocketed my stress levels off the charts. Not knowing if I’d still have a job after 29 years. Not knowing which team I might end up with. My mind was consumed with what ifs and contingency plans.
At 53, I was basically homeless and starting over with my professional career. It sucked. Big time.
However, Shara finally started to whisper to me again. I had enough to write the first chapter, and I read it at the House Isador party at LLS in July. Temporary housing made it extremely difficult for me to get into any kind of regular writing routine, so I really couldn’t work on her story much until I moved into my house just after Christmas.
On Jan 2nd, I started Chapter Two of Queen’s Crusade. I only missed 9 days of writing until I finished the first draft on March 31. (Considering I only managed to write 2k TOTAL in July of 2023, I was pretty pleased with that!) I did things a little different this time. I made myself SIT on the draft rather than race to publish. I took my time. I wrote another 12k of extra scenes for the second draft, and then I started the bonus Queen Takes Blood scenes immediately (coming soon). I wanted all of it done and ready before I finally hit publish.
No last-minute deadline scrambling. For one, I’m too old for that shit. And second, Shara–and you–deserve my best. Especially after waiting so long. It was hard to sit on my hands. I felt like the kid who’d saved up all her allowance to buy the best Christmas present ever, and I CAN’T WAIT for you to open it!
But this time, I’ll have the print version ready immediately. Patreon copies already went out. The newsletter bonus will be finished and ready to go. And best/most important of all, I think you’ll be way happier with the book and especially the ending.
Endings aren’t my strong suit. Probably because I’m so excited to FINISH. I don’t like to add “superfluous” scenes once the plot scenes are resolved. However, those extra details add richness and depth to the story, and I think you’ll be really pleased with those extra details.
I can say that I really think it’s one of the best books I’ve ever written. It’s definitely one of the longest at 118K (not including the Blood prequels).
Now the nerves begin to set in. I hope you love Queen’s Crusade as much as I love it.
Long live House Isador!
I’m not posting about resolutions or goals – but rather a state of mind.
One of the things that got me through 2023’s ups and downs (and honestly several years of the ugly divorce) was daydreaming about what my ideal life would look like. Especially once I got to my house.
Newsflash: I’m in my house! Finally!
My ideal life is so close…
What do I want every single day to look like? How do I want to feel? What do I want to spend my time doing? That’s what I’m focusing on this year. I’m almost there already. Getting my house next to Dad’s and Molly’s was Phase I. If all goes according to plan, Phase II will wrap up by the end of 2025. Though I can’t say more about that yet.
So now that I’m here, living my ideal life as closely as possible, what do I want my days to look like? What can I control? What can I do to get closer every single day to Phase II?
While assessing where I am and what I accomplished in 2023, I realized that I’d fallen into some temporary thinking and habits. The house we lived in was temporary. Staying with Dad–temporary. Even before we moved out of Nixa, I was just waiting for the divorce to finalize so I could move on with my life. So those years of court limbo were also temporary.
Honestly, even many years of marriage were temporary. I was in survival mode. I shut down a lot of the things I wanted to do, even to the point of stifling who I was as a person. Just to survive another year.
Goddess willing, I’m not moving from this house until they bury me. This is permanent. NO MORE TEMPORARY THINKING ALLOWED. I’m not in survival mode now. I’m in THRIVE mode.
It’s time to get back to my permanent routines that maximize my time and health so I can do this writing gig for a very long time.
Way back about a million years–it seems–I used to write dark & early. I’d be up before anyone in the house and get at least one writing session done before anyone else was up. That way, no matter how shitty the day ended up being, at least I’d already written something.
I’m going to do my best to re-establish this kind of routine, though I must admit mornings are hard for me. This is going to take some time to adjust. One thing I learned from last year was that sometimes very simple rewards are enough to start a new routine. Thanks to the sticker reward, I stuck with my planner all of 2023 – except July/August got a little away from me while I was deep in the move.
My reward for getting up at the butt-crack of dawn is going to be tarot and this cute little stamp set I got. In addition to my Agendio that I reordered with some minor modifications, I added the Writual planner and acrylic stamp set to my morning routine.
I fell in love with the round tarot cards at the beginning of the divorce nightmare. I told this story in the Triune group, so I won’t get into the details here. But I had a memorable reading and immediately bought my own set of Motherpeace cards. I have many (several) other tarot sets I may use occasionally but I tend to come back to Motherpeace. They just fit too well into Shara’s mythos to NOT use.
My 2024 plan is to focus primarily on Shara, though inevitably I’m going to end up crossing over into Karmen and Helayna’s stories at some point. I really wanted to have those trilogies finished before I tackled Shara, but I’m just too far behind to keep waiting. At one point last week while I was prepping everything I had all three projects open at the same time. I may do that several times over the next few months!
The other project I’d really like to get back to is continuing The Vicious with Dig the Graves. But Shara will be my priority indefinitely. Of course I’d love to make progress (finally) with Blizzard Bound as well. We’ll see how that goes!
I don’t usually post word count goals either, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say this is going to be one of my biggest years yet. I’m shooting for 90k a quarter, 360k words for the year. We’ll see if I can do it.
What a crazy year!
I never imagined that it would take most of 2023 to build my modest house. Getting contractors to show up in the country was a constant challenge. Luckily, Dad seemed to enjoy hounding people until they finally came out to finish their work, and I was able to move in.
Since my kids were setting up house for the first time, I let them take whatever they wanted between the two of them. They cleaned me out pretty well, which is a good thing. That means I’m off to a brand new start in my home – where I’m now living alone for the FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE. I don’t have any furniture other than my bed and office equipment. I don’t have any kitchen items other than a few cast-iron skillets and stuff the kids didn’t want. So it’s “girl dinner” for me unless I go up the hill to Dad’s and eat with him (which I’ve been doing 98% of the time anyway).
Living with Dad for 5 months was an experience. I’ll never forget watching all the seasons of Alone with him, let alone countless hours of old black-and-white Westerns and the news (not Fox News thankfully). We took turns cooking and doing up dishes and for the most part had a great time–like an extended vacation. Molly often came up for dinner and we’d steal the TV to watch episodes of The Dead Files while Dad snored.
But living in someone else’s home isn’t the same as your home, you know? I tried to minimize MY disruptions to his life, especially the middle of the night work calls that had me up with the lights on trying to work. Or my dog wanting to go outside at O-dark-thirty. I struggled with carving out time to write, because I didn’t want to feel rude, locking myself up in the guest room rather than hanging out with him when I was the guest in his house.
And of course, I wasn’t prepared for how long I was without all my stuff. I took a single suitcase in July. I didn’t have any long-sleeved shirts. No coat. I didn’t take any of the birthday card stock, labels, etc. I didn’t have any of my shipping material or book stock. So that put a long hold on the business side. Bonus: I bought some new clothes until I could get my old stuff back.
All of this to say… my word count went down another 15% compared to last year (and if you go back and look at last year, you’ll see me whining about how little I wrote then too). I’m not whining this year because it was an incredibly stressful year of instability – and also a transition into my new life. A period of tightness and constraint in the chrysalis. A communal time of family that was much needed after the long miserable divorce and decades of marriage with a man who hated the rest of my family and never wanted me to see them.
Words for the year: 182,024. The lowest since I’ve been tracking in my spreadsheet (2021) but I’m sure you could find previous years here on the blog.
I still managed to republish a book, publish 4 new books, and participate in 3 anthologies with short stories.
I’ll do another post tomorrow with my plans for 2024.
