Cover Reveal and Lessons Learned from Writing a Series on a Schedule

We clearly have a theme going this week of cover reveals with James and Jeffe, so  I'm happy to continue it with the cover for the second book in my Immortal Spy Urban Fantasy Series. The amazing team at Gene Mollica Studios did the cover.

THE PLAGUED SPY
The Immortal Spy: Book 2

It’s all fun and games until someone breaks out the needles.

It was supposed to be a simple retrieval mission. Go in, grab the bespelled package of evidence against some very corrupt superpowers, and get out. The mission turns sideways when a vengeful spy Bix blackballed during her time in Dark Ops crashes the job and injects Bix’s teammates with an unknown toxin. Succumbing to a horrific mutation, the dying spook whispers the Mayday protocol for a compromised covert operation involving a biological weapon.

With her friends infected and sequestered in quarantine, a mole inside the spy guild exposing its undercover agents, and the brightest minds in the Mid Worlds unable to identify the biologic, Bix picks up the mission to find the creators and the cure. She’ll square off against Fates, dragons, angels, and even the god of plagues to save her friends; yet the greatest threat might well be the darkness growing within Bix and the evil on which it feeds.

Beware the plagued spy, for wrath and ruin are sure to follow…

The book drops on April 24, in print and eBook.

Pre-Order the eBook:

Amazon Kindle  |  iBooks  |  B&N Nook  |  Kobo

Now, as for this week's topic of scheduling the writing and the business, I'm going to take a moment to laugh hysterically then sob a little. I am a girl who must plan All The Things. For those of you who've followed this blog for a while, you know I'm a slow writer. I'm still one of those writers who can't accurately estimate how long it'll take me to write a book. I took a year of publishing nothing to write the first three books in this series so I could drop them at regular intervals while I wrote the remaining four books. The plan is to release quarterly. I'll be able to do that with the first four...but there might be a six-month gap between four and five. Then hopefully back to quarterly for six and seven.

What happened to my beautiful plan?

In a nutshell, I learned more about me as a writer and a publisher trying to hold myself to a schedule. From a personal-development angle, I hadn't done that before. In my high-fantasy series, the books take as long to write as they take. That's what my creative process demands. However, I wanted to grow as a career author, so I committed to writing and publishing a series on a tight schedule.
A third of the way into this business experiment,  I've learned that some books will be easy to write. Some books won't require heavy dev edits. Some books will flip the bird and be the most recalcitrant little bastards. I am blessed in that my editors, artists, and formatters are top-notch and make their dates without issue. When there's lag, it's all me. I need to keep building my skills both on the page and off (pretty sure that'll always be the case).

So far, my biggest takeaway is that I can write two books a year, reasonably. Three is pushing it. Four is unrealistic for me. (I know, I know, many of my fellow SFF Seven bloggers are power writers, and that is awesome. Enviable in many ways. Hat tips to them!) Also, during the winter holidays, I should expect no creative progress and schedule no deliverables to or from. Yes, businesses still function and other contributors to my end products absolutely make their dates. It is my life that does not allow for much more than analytical work. That's good to know. I can adjust my schedules and expectations accordingly...once I finish this series.

The Artful Juggle: Planning Future Books While Keeping up with Current Deadlines

Our topic this week at the SFF Seven - the challenge of maintaining a writing schedule and trying to prepare for future business - is an apropos one for me right now.

Because, boy howdy, have I been wrestling this particular challenge lately.

I'm what we're calling a "hybrid" author these days, which means I publish both traditionally - with a publishing house - and I self-publish. I make my living this way and my income is roughly split between the two. In 2016 my income was 62% from self-publishing and 38% from traditional publishers. In 2017 it was 43%/57%. Pretty even at this point.

Obviously it's important to me to balance both sides of my writing career.

On the traditional side, that means meeting my deadlines. And not just the ones for drafting, though those are the big ones. Those are also the ones I know about from the time I see the contract. There are other deadlines - sometimes quite abrupt - for completing content revisions, line edits, copy edits and proofing. Sometimes those come in with a "We need it by the end of next week." That kind of thing can really impact the rest of my schedule, so I try to pad a bit, to allow for those things.

The traditional side also impacts my self-publishing schedule because many traditional contracts now include exclusionary clauses where I can't publish a novel in the same genre within a certain window on either side of a traditional book release.

On the self-publishing side, I have reader expectations to take into account. Because I don't have a legal contract with my readers - although I do take the author/reader contract very seriously - the self-publishing schedule tends to give way to the traditional schedule. Also, because I can't control the traditional publishing release schedule, I have to fit books in the same world into that timeline.

For example, people keep asking me if/when I'm going to finish the Sorcerous Moons series. That one has gotten seriously derailed. The main reason it has is because something had to give and that series isn't connected to anything else. But I WILL finish it! I'm planning to have books 5 and 6 out this fall, in quick succession. I had to keep up with the books in The Uncharted Realms series, to sync with the upcoming Chronicles of Dasnaria books.

(That's part of why I included the newly revealed cover of THE ARROWS OF THE HEART here. The cover is all ready, but the book is not. I ended up having to push it back some, to meet a traditional publishing deadline, alas. That's another part of the juggling act, getting all the pieces to come together at the same time, more or less.)

BUT, the trickiest part of this whole juggling act is the precise point of this week's topic: preparing for future business.

Because traditional publishing has such long lead times, I have to plan now for books that will come out two to three years from now. Another example: I began writing THE ORCHID THRONE last March. (March 15, 2017, to be exact.) By June 15, I'd written and polished just over a hundred pages of the book, plus proposal, working with Agent Sarah all that time to position the book in the market. By July we'd sold the book to St. Martins Press.

All that time, I was also writing on other projects. There's a lot of stopping and starting while working up a new series, waiting while Sarah read it, fitting it in around other deadlines, etc. Once we sold it, I could set it aside, because the completed book isn't due until July 15, 2018. A WHOLE YEAR after we sold it. And it won't come out until August of 2019, with Books 2 and 3 in 2020 and 2021.

All of this means that, to maintain the traditional publishing side of my career, I have to start thinking NOW about books and series I can sell that will start coming out in 2020 or so.

Talk about planning!

So, that's been my other thing - I've been working on a very exciting collaboration. A new series - new genre, even - and we're close to going on submission with it. It's a slower process, working with someone else, learning to write as part of a team, and also stretching me in good ways. That means, too, that it's taken creative energy away from my other writing projects, so that's part of the challenge.

And all good, too. Challenges make us grow, yes?

Predator: Hunters and Hunted

So this is happening. 

I just finished the first draft of THE PREDATOR: HUNTERS AND HUNTED.

I am horrifically late in this, because I ruined my shoulder in a fall a couple of months ago and despite my every effort to ignore the pain, it slowed me down a LOT.  If the book is late, that's entirely my fault. I am delighted with the end result, I think it's a riot, but the getting there had been a bear. 

You can learn more right HERE. 

The Fantasy Writing Retreat

 My fantasy workplace, you ask? Why, I've given it no thought. No thought at all!

Yeah, okay. I'm lying. Hawaii. There would be a compound of several tiny houses near the beach. I'd live in one and the others would be dedicated to other writers on retreat. Authors who'd come in would agree to offer one class to the other writers some time during the week. Could be on anything. Craft. Marketing. Social Media. Why Vampires are Hotter than Werewolves or vice versa.  

 There'd be hikes. Sailing. Scuba. Snorkeling. Surfing. Zip lining. Yoga. Spa services. You know. Whether you wanted to relax or whether you wanted to get out and try something so you could write about it - we'd find a way. Put up a climbing wall so you can learn to rappel? Totally. Shush. I'm building a fantasy here. I'll worry about insurance premiums later. 

It would be intended to get you closer to your muse and your own internal knowing. Because how can you not be happy and content when you're inside a stand of bamboo towering over your head, listening to the ocean breeze clatter the grove like living wind chimes?

I have the spot all picked out and most of the tiny houses (with desks and wifi) built in my head. Now all I need is a mega lotto win.

The Design of a Workspace

I do not have an idealized writing space.  At all.  I mean, I don't have a space-- I have two rolling bags that serve as my rolling-office.  Now, I do have mobility, and that can be great.  I can work anywhere.  Coffee shop.  Book store.  Back of the car.  Right now I'm on the walking desk in the bedroom, which is the most "permanent" workspace I have.  But I share the walking desk with my wife-- because we both need it and enjoy it.  And it's less than ideal.

For one, it's in the bedroom, which isn't great working energy if you can avoid it.  I mean, like I said, I can work anywhere and do, but if you are going to craft an ideal space, it's a space that is explicitly for working.  The space serves that purpose alone. 

So, what would that look like?

First is the desk.  It needs to be large enough to have the laptop and a couple notebooks spread out.  I need to be able to work on the computer and work by hand on it, sometimes back and forth at the same time.  Also, good legroom underneath.  I've learned the hard way that that is critical. 

Next, the chair needs to be right.  I've had a lot of bad chairs.  Good back support for long hours sitting in it.

Third, a separate chair for reading.  That's a comfy, lounging chair.  Or maybe a small couch.

One wall is windows with good natural light.  One wall is bookshelves.  One wall is white boards, corkboards, maps- a space to plan out the work in a large format. 

Enough floor space to pace around, lay out notecards on the floor.

And a door that stays shut when I'm working. 

That's what would be ideal for me.

For now-- work wherever.  Work however.  The work is what matters, not the space. 

But the space would be nice.

Life goals: writing retreat in a castle

Last year at the RWA national convention in Orlando, I overheard some writers talking -- was it in a speech? Or was I just that creepy lurker in the lobby unintentionally overhearing everyone else’s conversations?! I really don’t recall -- about a retreat they’d been on together. They pooled funds from, like, ten writers and rented a castle in Ireland for three weeks.

A castle.

In Ireland.

For three weeks.

Also? It was haunted.

So whether I heard it legit, spied it, or made it up, none of that really matters because...

A castle.

In Ireland.

For three weeks.

With a ghost.

(And also he was probably a hot, angsty, Victorian ghost. Hush, you, this is my happy place!)

This is now filed in my brain under Life Goals. Who’s in?

Dreaming of Islands for A Reclusive Writer

A dream is a wish your heart makes when you're supposed to be writing...

Oh, wait, that's not how the song goes. But since today's topic is "dream environment for writing," that song is totally my earworm. I give it you, dear readers, because I'm generous like that.

So, you all know writers find all sorts of wonderful, weird, and wholly impractical websites as we're researching our scenes. Some of them we keep pinned in case we ever become as rich as those writer-characters on TV (I'm lookin' at you, Rick Castle).

Behold the glory and wonder that is Private Islands, Inc--Real Estate Listings of Islands for Sale.

My default search is the Islands of Ireland. This week, there's a place called Mermaid Isle. Mermaid Isle. Oh, come on, if that doesn't scream, "Fantasy Writers, come hither," I don't know what does.

See, while most people are looking for sun, warmth, beaches, and cabana boys, I'm after stormy days, surging seas, and total isolation.

I R a Recluse.

With grocery places delivering by drone and empty guest rooms to lay in the booze, the necessities are addressed. As long as the house stays warm and dry, I...I could be there tomorrow. Heck, judging the photos, it even comes with its own pet seal.

Or maybe it's a selkie.   

Where better to write?

Jeffe wants the Mediterranean.

Me? A nice big house on a cliffside, overlooking the sea.

New England is fine for that. Ireland or old England would work pretty darned well.

Mostly I just love the ocean and the roar of the waves, the rhythmic crash of water against rocks.

I feel at peace there.