A writing update, and a vaction planned

Yeah, I know, I haven’t been updating the blog much. I haven’t been doing much of anything except for writing this month. Today I finally completed the fourth Alice the Wolf book, Hungry Like the Wolf, and it’s a whopping 197K. Yes, that’s right, 197,000 words. It’s so big, I’ve decided to split the book and make this a five book series. When I first started plotting this series, my thinking was, there’s four werewolves as antagonists, so that’s four books. Well, that plan went to hell because one of the four wolves turned out to be a charismatic leader who built up an army of werewolves in a bid to overthrow the men in black. Then in the last book Alice came out by shifting during a press conference. Totally did not see that coming.

The last book will still be pretty huge after I’ve split off the first 46 chapters and expanded it to give more scene time to one of the four antagonists, although I have no idea what to call that fourth book just yet. But for the most part, I like how this series progressed. Alice is a kickass werewolf who can get downright scary as times, and as she builds her own pack, she proves that she’s also a capable alpha. Peter was more of a lone wolf character who preferred to handle his problems on his own, but he never had problems as big as Alice does toward the end of the series. His biggest case had him facing a coven of vampires. Pfft. Alice has to face an army of thousands. Now that’s a real challenge.

I say I like how the series progressed for the most part because there’s one thing that Alice handled differently than Peter that I’m not sure if it will work or not: the sex scenes. Despite Peter’s narration covering some of his darker sexual thoughts, when it came to sex with various characters, he was more inclined to keep the details to a bare minimum, even going with a “fade to black” in some cases. But Alice opted to go with more information during these senses, and as times it feels to me like it’s a bit much. I ran with it throughout the series because Alice is supposed to be a different narrator, and her style isn’t supposed to be the same as Peter’s. Also, in these scenes, there didn’t feel like a proper place to do the fade to black. So I let Alice tell her story, and I got out of her way.

Then we got to the ending, which was supposed to be ambiguous. The way the muse and me planned it was that you wouldn’t know if things worked out for Alice in her relationships or not, but there was always hope that things could get better. Kinda like how Peter’s series ended, really. Above all, the ending was going to be without a sex scene. Well, with ten chapters to the end, Alice announced, “OH YES THERE WILL BE A SEX SCENE.” I argued with her and said, “The muse has my back, right, muse?” And the muse said, “I don’t know, maybe this should end on a happier, sexier note.”

I’ve never won a fight with a character, and I’ve got no hope of winning one of these fights when even the muse agrees that the original ending isn’t the best way to go. But even a few hours after writing the ending, I’m worried that it’s going to piss people off, not turn them on.

I don’t know, I guess I’ll have to wait and see what the beta readers think once I’ve sent the series to them. If they don’t make a big deal about the extra details, I’ll just leave them in and ignore any bad reviews I get. It’s not like I have to worry about sales at this point, right? (/sarcasm)

Anywho, with the completion of this series, I’m going on a vacation, and I won’t be doing any new writing for September. I also won’t be doing any editing for at least a week. I’ve been writing almost non-stop since May, and I’ve written five books in four months. (Six if you consider that I’ll be splitting this last book into two full-sized novels) While this kind of productivity is great for my publishing queue, it’s been a huge strain on my brain and my body. I rarely have a day where I don’t crash from fatigue for several hours, and I’ve gotten so used to back and shoulder pains that at times, I almost forget what it’s like not to be in pain.

So I don’t care what great idea the muse comes up with in September. I’m not doing anything more involved than an occasional blog post. Even if I will be editing some books, I plan to do these in shifts of a couple hours at a time, not these all day cram sessions I’ve been doing to get this latest series done.

When October rolls around, I’ll let the muse decide whether she wants to tackle that final Zombie Era Novella, or see if she’s still itching to work on a two-novella sequel to The Life and Death of a Sex Doll, which is already tentatively titled Sex Doll Divorce and Family Planning.

And I swear, I really will try to read during this break. I know I haven’t posted a book review in forever, but I’ll give fair warning: the next couple of reviews are likely to be negative judging from my impression of the stories up to this point.

Oh wait, one last thing. August sales took a major dip. A lot of that is my fault because I didn’t do much promotions on Twitter, but I think another part of it has to do with the summer slump. My great sales in July came because one reviewer went on a shopping spree to buy a bunch of my books all at once, and without them, July would have been slow too. Still, in August, I got only 8 sales. Unless one of my fall releases does well, it’s not looking so good for me to get a new PC or a new PS4. Which is a bummer, but eh, them’s the breaks sometimes.

I do want to thank the folks who bought books this month, because without you, there’s no point in releasing new stuff. I’m hoping to release another book in September, so we’ll see what that does for the sales figures.

And thanks once again for reading my blog, and for all your support. Y’all are the inspiration to keep me clacking away at this keyboard day after day.