I Faithfully Promise…

right bookstackI kinda screwed myself over this year. And indirectly, I didn’t do you any favours, either.

I had this big (huge!) book I wanted to write, one that took place over thirty years. It was epic in scale, and I just knew it would take up a big chunk of time to get done, as I’ve never written anything that sprawling before.

In 2013 I published a staggering nineteen books.   I put out another four books between January and March this year.

It was right about then, when I had temporarily saturated the marketplace, that I thought it would be a good time to get the epic fantasy written, and launched into it gung-ho, hoping only to take a few months to get it down. There were objections to starting it right then, but I also know that there’s never really a good time to tackle any overwhelming, scary project. Something will always pop up to derail you; it’s the universe testing you to see if you really do mean to get this done.

Yeah, I was tested. My son’s engagement, swiftly followed by the wedding in September. My mother came from Australia to visit for a whole month. And a whole-floor, down-to-the-studs renovation, which I’m pretty sure you’re all thoroughly sick of hearing about. Two week’s summer vacation were spent scraping ceilings and painting and every other type of grunt job that a renovating project generates. Not writing, in otherwords.

All of September was also spent not writing.

The book (which is the now – finally – released The Branded Rose Prophecy) took a lot longer to plot out than I expected. It’s set in a completely different world from any other series, featuring fantasy people I had to pretty much invent, that were also based on mythological people that also had to be researched carefully to stay within currently known myth. Plus the length of the book and the timeframe it covers meant different and lengthy plotting and planning than ever before. In between interruptions from a too-full life, and getting over a huge amount of fear about being so ambitious, I finally started writing the manuscript in June this year, four months after deciding I really was going to be foolish enough to tackle a project like this.

Then came the renovations, the wedding and more, when writing came to a screeching halt. Altogether, time out from writing was objectively only just over six weeks. But they were broken up into shorter, but still significant breaks. When you break like that, you have to spend time getting back into the story – which usually means reading it from the start, making notes, picking up all the story strings, etc. It all takes time.

Time I didn’t budget for.

As a consequence, the book took a total of ten months to produce, which is not at all my usual speed.

That makes 2014 my slowest year for number of books released as an indie author, excluding 2011, which is the year I started, and that was only a partial year. For the record, the totals are:

2011: 16 titles.

2012: 19 titles

2014: 6 titles.

Ugh. Not good!

I have far too many stories in my head, yammering at me, to let production slow down like that.

So I’ve made some plans and some resolutions. I’m early, I know, but I wanted to get up to full steam before January 1.

I’ve figured out a production schedule for 2015 that, if I can maintain the rate of writing I need, will see the release of 22 brand new, freshly written titles (no re-issues!)

This schedule has been built using a realistic writing rate that pushes me just a bit. Previous years included a few re-issued titles, but 2015 will be all new, and that takes a smidgen more time. (Actually, not a whole bunch more, really – there’s just as much production time for a reissue as there is for a new book, and the first draft of a book is just the tip of the iceberg).

Everything depends on me writing my ass off. Damn. That’s just too bad. 🙂

However, as 2014 proved, the universe is for sure and certain going to throw some sort of spanner. Perhaps more than one.

For that reason, I’m not going to publish my list of planned release dates. I don’t want to disappoint anyone if I miss a date. However, the schedule includes plenty of production time, so you’ll get lots of warning about upcoming dates.

I can tell you that 2015 will see the release (somewhere in the year) of:

  1. KISS ACROSS TIME 4
  2. DESTINY’S TRINITIES 4 The Next Trinities 1
  3. THE VISTARIA AFFAIR 4 White Dawn
  4. GO GET ‘EM WOMEN 5 Sian’s Run
  5. THE STONEBROOD SAGA 3 Sabrina’s Clan
  6. BLOOD STONE 4 Blood Revealed (p.s. This is the last book in the series!)
  7. SCANDALOUS SIRENS 3 Rhys Davies’s unnamed story
  8. DESTINY’S TRINITIES 5 The Next Trinities 2
  9. BELOVED BLOODY TIME 4

This is just the major installments in each series. There will also be a ton of novellas, collections, boxed sets, print editions and on and on.

I just have to roll my sleeves up and write.

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