So, waaay back in June I took a look at my goals for the rest of the year. I was pretty happy with the way things were turning out. I had a solid plan for the rest of the year, books to write, a release schedule, things were working out. It was nice.
Then July happened and all of that went out the window. For a while there it looked like the only thing I'd be dealing with for the rest of the year were health issues and multiple surgeries. Which led to my backing out of a couple of projects, and seriously considering calling it quits on everything publishing related.
Thanks to second opinions and non-knife-happy surgeons, that phase didn't last very long, but it did make me stop and think about what's really important to me and what kind of writing career (if any) I wanted going forward.
I figured out a few things about myself this month. The first was that, no matter how hard I tried, I probably wasn't ever going to train myself to write short. I mean, yes, I have a few novellas that I'm not unhappy with, but most of them would probably have been better books if they'd been longer. And for books and short stories that have a maximum word count, I'm always bumping up against that upper limit. I always end up going over the story multiple times, cutting out every non-essential word, and looking back, I'm not sure how non-essential they really were.
So that's gonna stop. I have a couple of short stories I'm still hoping to release this year, but after that, if I can't write the long version, I'm probably going to release the stories as serials only.
And, yeah, not putting out short books every few weeks means rapid releases are probably also not in my future. But, hey, it is what it is.
The final thing I realized is that I'm probably not going to write every book on my WIP list. There are too many and they're too diverse. I've always been a big fan of diversity and I have fallen in love with every story idea I've come up with, but realistically, I don't have the time or the energy to continue spreading myself that thin. So, for now, I'm going to consolidate. I'm'm going to concentrate on the books and series that are most on-brand for me. Which, at the moment are contemporary romances with a paranormal twist and straight up paranormal stories with strong romantic elements; all of which share a core focus on family, friends, and feels.
Maybe it won't look all that different from the outside, but from my perspective, it's a pretty radical shift. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.
But that's my plan going forward--at least until the next crisis.
