Looking Ahead
Whenever I finish a book, I try to spend some time doing all the things I put off while I was caught up in the throes of writing. I clean my office, work in my garden, tackle some of the house repair projects I'm always putting off, etc. In the process of reorganizing my files this past week, I found some notes I'd written back in 2003, outlining my vision for the future of the Sebastian St. Cyr series. I was stunned to realize that I am now starting book #12 and I STILL haven't done some of the things I'd envisioned happening by the end of book #5! Which made me laugh--and also caused me to give some thought to what lies ahead.
Someone suggested recently that I add to my website a peek at what lies ahead, so I thought I'd do that here. As you know, I've just finished #11, and it now has a title: WHEN FALCONS FALL. Not my first choice (I wanted When Doves Fall), but I'm getting used to it. And the nice thing is that I already have approval for the title of #12, which is still only in the beginnings of the outline stage: Where the Dead Lie. How many more books will there be? I honestly don't know. But sales are still growing, my publisher is more strongly behind me than ever, and I have a lot of Sebastian and Hero stories I still want to tell.
In addition to dealing with my ever-growing To Do list, I'll be spending the next month plotting out #12, writing guest blogs for a number of sites that will be featuring Who Buries the Dead next month, and getting ready for my book tour the first week in March. I'm really looking forward to meeting my readers in Houston, Phoenix, Portland, and Seattle, and wish I could be going to even more cities.
I'm also planning a redo of my website, although that won't happen until April. My webmistress recently reminded me that it's been eight years now since she first did my site and pointed out that sites are much wider now than when my current one was made. So I'm going to be giving lots of thought to that and welcome any ideas for improvements.
There's a bunch of other stuff going on--I should be able to show you the cover for the audio book of Who Buries the Dead soon. And I may finally be officially getting the rights back for my first seven historical romances so that I can do something with them. But today I'm dealing with a swarm of bees that seems to have decided to make my home their home. I have a bee keeper coming this morning, so wish me luck!
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I'm glad people like the title. They were pushing for When Hawks Fall, which is just wrong from so many angles. I plan to leave the content of my website in place and just redo the design to give it a new look. And I can't tell you how impressed I am that you used to deal with bees! I'm afraid these are in the wall, which means it is going to be just awful to get at them. Or rather, repairing things after they're gone is going to be the awful part.
And when it comes to websites, please don't follow the appalling new fashion for extreme minimalism at the expense of usability. People visit websites to acquire information (even if that's relatively simple information like New book! Tell! Tell! Tell!), not to be messed about by some avant garde web-designer. Uncluttered is lovely, provided there are still usable menus/links to allow browsing for information.
Don't worry about the bees. If they're anything like English honey bees, the beekeeper will smoke them to make them docile (plain cardboard smoke, not marijuana!), tip them into a cardboard box, and take them far enough away that your house will be beyond the limits of their roaming so they won't come back. You might have a few wanderers who missed the transport buzzing around for a few days, but not many and not for long. When I used to do it, the most complicated part of the whole business was getting to where the swarm had established itself. Low-hanging branches were fine. Anything involving scaffolding was not.
Looking forward to Who Buries the Dead - Hero is one of my all-time favourite characters. She won't let Sebastian get away with anything, and she'll keep his feet firmly on the ground, which he definitely needs.