Finishing the Damned Book

Silly me – I don’t think I’ve even shared the cover yet. Tada!

It was a race down to the wire, but thanks to a crazy weekend of sprints and an intrepid team of beta readers who are comma warriors, QUEEN TAKES QUEEN is done and dropped off to the formatter.  She’s usually very fast, so I may have ARCs going out as soon as this evening, and I’m set to meet my KDP pre-order deadline.

Now you may be wondering why I’d put myself under so much stress. I had to grind some huge numbers the last week or so to finish the book. I got about 4 hours of sleep two nights in a row. My hands are killing me.

But there’s nothing like the high of finishing the book and meeting that deadline.

And here’s the thing about my personality. I need deadlines. If I’m left to my own devices, I’ll putter around on five files at once and never finish anything. Then I’ll wallow in misery because I *know* I’m not making any real progress, and it’s pretty hard to write well when you’re wallowing in misery. (Note: see my lack of progress in 2016)

So yeah. Deadlines matter. I’ll continue to set hard dates for myself and keep the pedal pushed to the floor as often as I can, because it’s just me setting these dates now. I know what I’m capable of. I know I can write 70K in a month (The Billionaire Submissive) when I need to and the story is flowing.

I *am* letting up on the pedal a day or two to recuperate.  Though I have committed a novella for a St. Patrick’s Day anthology and I need to have it written and edited by 2/18.  So yeah, another crazy few weeks are just ahead!

I’ve also had some back and forth in my mind about which Queen book to write next. I was tempted to write a book in Mayte’s POV next, and then maybe even Leonie’s, rather than another book in Shara’s POV. I thought if I got into their backstories and really dug into them, that I’d be able to get the final showdown plot easier. Which is probably true – but doesn’t serve THE story well, which is Shara’s story.

However, I dithered long enough that I don’t have an excerpt ready to put into the end of QUEEN TAKES QUEEN like I’d hoped.  So if you’d like some sneak peeks, be sure to join my Facebook group, Joely’s Triune, to get the earliest tidbits of what’s coming next for Shara in QUEEN TAKES ROOK.