One of my goals for 2021 is to get better about documenting my past accomplishments and successes, as I am historically AWFUL about doing so.
This really hit home when I was taking a look back at 2020 in order to align my publishing goals for 2021. I was in a planning workshop for authors, and in this workshop, they asked how many books we’d sold in 2020, and how much revenue we’d made from those books.
And I realized… I HAD NO IDEA. I published my first book in 2015.
And yet I have never really taken the time to track just how well any of those books are doing. Yes, it is true that money is not the why of why I write (if it was, I would have quit a long time ago)… but it’d still be nice to know where I stand in some regard, ya know?
Not to mention it’s hard to improve or move forward if you don’t even know where you are currently.
And so, I have taken extensive measures to set up a plan in 2021 that will help me get organized in this area of my author career. We’ll see how it all pans out!
But another part of that plan is to ATTEMPT one of these summary posts at the end of each month. Again, we’ll see how this pans out. I’m also historically bad at being consistent with this kind of thing. Mostly because if I have time to be typing up this blog post, I have time to be working on the novel, which is infinitely more important.
But alas… documenting progress each month is not entirely a waste, either, as I’ve quite suddenly realized when trying to look back at my 2020. 😛 But the full reflection post for the entire year of 2020 will come later. So for now, I’m only focusing on December…
Novels
I released Bastard of Blessing, book 2 of the The Legacy of Lucky Logan series, on December 26th, thus accomplishing the one big goal I had for 2020: publish two solo-written novels in one year.
I’ve never done that before, and the me of a few years ago would have fallen over dead if you would have told her I actually accomplished this. Especially in 2020, with covid and my husband and son home with me 24/7, and still working a full-time job.
Granted, it was supposed to be released in September, so covid did throw a wrench into things, but I was bound and determined to still get it out in 2020… and I did! Hooray!!
The book barely made a blip on the radar upon it’s release, but the series has a handful of wonderful fans who are excited about it, so that’s enough for me right now. 🙂 The weird western genre as a whole is a hard sell, I’m finding out, which is kind of bizarre to me.
Westerns in general are almost entirely ignored by everyone, actually, even though the category on Amazon is HUGE. (Although dominated by about 3 authors, true.) It’s bizarre to me because I’ve also come to find out that everyone loves westerns… only most people don’t know they love westerns.
I don’t blame them though. I only realized how much I love westerns about two years ago. But since coming that realization, I don’t know how I didn’t know. All the signs were there. I just ignored them. And I feel it’s the same with most of the population of Earth, as well. LOL. Oh well.
One of these days I’ll just have to try and figure out how to convince people to give these books a try! 😛
Shorts
While I was VERY busy in December gearing up for and then launching Bastard of Blessing, I didn’t work at all on the draft of book 3, which I had started for National Novel Writing Month in November. (And I wrote 31,000 words on it for NaNo. The other part of the 50k words needed to win NaNo were counted in editing time. So I also edited for a total of about 20 hours in November.)
But just because I wasn’t drafting book 3 didn’t mean I didn’t write at all. I worked on two shorts, matter of fact!
The first was Beneath the Christmas Star, a flash fiction Christmas story set in the Lucky Logan universe, and revolving around Logan Delano himself, Van’s father. The story is sweet fluff, which is something I always feel like writing around Christmas time! Usually I don’t ever get it done, though. So I was very excited this year to finally have something to offer!
If you like romantic redemption stories, this little story is perfect for you! And it fits in nicely to my plans for the full-length novel revolving around Logan and Annabelle, and how they met and fell in love. <3 Can’t wait to get to that one too!
The second short I worked on in December and ALMOST finished that month was Bathtime, which is a deleted scene from Bastard of Blessing, actually. It is a detailed depiction of an intimate evening Van has with two women named Nora and Nettie.
Yes, it is an explicit sex scene. 🙂 I’d always had it in my head, but glossed over it in the actual novel as putting the whole thing in there would have disrupted the pacing too much. Not only that, but my narrator can’t read explicit scenes due his still outstanding contract with Rockstar Games. And so, the thing was cut.
And yet, a majority of my beta readers said they would have liked to have read it. They wanted more of the sexy times. Well, who am I to argue? And so I began this scene, and finished it up just last week. So it will be posted shortly!
Now, in order to read that one, since it is explicit, you’ll need a password. If you’d like the password, you can drop your email here and I’ll be sure to send it to you! 🙂
Lastly, I wrote a poem in December!!! Which is crazy, because I haven’t written any poetry in AGES!! But I most definitely felt inspired that day, so I ran with it. It felt pretty good. I wouldn’t complain if that happened more in 2021…
Future planning
And because this is how being an author works, while doing all of the above, I was also processing a lot of future ideas in the back of my brain so that by the time I’m ready to write them, they are pretty much fully formed.
A few of the things I brainstormed in December were:
- a spin-off from the Lucky Logan books, a serialized story revolving around the character Morgan Grace, which explores her backstory. Inspired by my escapades in Red Dead Online, lol.
- Morgan’s full present story, a spin-off series from the Lucky Logan books as well, and a reverse harem series. One badass lady con-artist and her collection of hot lovers. Some outlaws, some not.
- Yet another spin-off series from the Lucky Logan books, one that follows Ethelyn Delano’s journey. What has she been up to for the past 9 years? Where is she now? What will become of her in the future? I would like this to be a graphic novel, but those are uber expensive to produce. We’ll see what happens, but the series will need a lot more monetary support before that becomes a reality, I think, lol.
- More Lucky Logan shorts! I have ideas for a few more small bonus scenes I plan to write out and post here for your reading pleasure! 🙂
- Logan and Annabelle’s story. Yes, dear God, another spin-off. Lol. Probably this would only be one book. A standalone. But you never know at this rate! In any event, I have this one almost entirely outlined already. And it’s going to be a fantastically angsty romantic redemption story! I can’t wait!
- The romantic fantasy series The Crowns of Ellathar. Whoooaa it’s finally something not Lucky Logan related! Hah! This is the series I was working on before the Lucky Logan series came and swept me off my feet. But there is a HUGE readership for romantic fantasy (unlike weird westerns), so I’d like to try and get this series off the ground sooner rather than later. Still, I’m having a hard time figuring out what exactly I want this series to be. So I’ve been mulling that over lately. Once I figure that out, I’ll start real work on it again!
And I think that’s about it.
So, yes, there’s a lot in the works. Too many books and not enough time, as always!
the discord
Last but certainly not least, I’ve decided to start my own Discord server. What the hell is Discord, you might ask? Good question!
It’s a platform originally designed for gamers to get together and chat while they game… but it’s proven to be much more than that now. It’s a massively better alternative to Facebook or Instagram if you actually want to talk and interact with someone without having to worry about whether or not some random bot will show your post to that person or not.
Not only that, but it’s an invite-only place. So no random spammers or crazy people.
It works in form and function much like a forum. But you can also have voice or video chats if you want, or even share your screen.
Generally though, I just use it for talking to my friends and fabulous readers about all kinds of fun stuff. If you’d like to check it out, I am personally inviting you to come aboard and join the fun!
You can do that here.
And now my time is up, and I must get back to the actual drafting of book 3, Bones in Blackbird!
Now that book 2 is out in the wild, I can finally devote attention to that again. I am sooo excited!
Until next time…
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