This week has not been a good week. First it took me a while to get back into the swing of things after my trip to Istanbul, Turkey. The muse went AWOL, which isn’t like him, and when I eventually dragged him back, he just wasn’t interested in writing Masquerade.
Or maybe that was me not interested in writing it.
It’s not so much that I’m not interested, just that I feel there are problems with the story and some things just weren’t clicking for me. I felt it wasn’t going to be a success as it was. I did get up to around 30,000 words of the story written this week, and with them came a few revelations that have led me to re-think the plot and the story, and the characters involved. Not a bad thing. Better I put it on the back burner now so I have time to think about it and get it perfect rather than having to rewrite huge tracts of it at a later date when a deadline is tight.
The trouble is, I had planned to get this story written and released on September 10th this year. See the problem there. Very short deadline in which to write something to fill the gap. Not sure yet what I’ll do but I do have another story in mind for release this year as my second Vampires Realm story. I’ll think of something to release in September, but it might be a short story or novella rather than a novel. I’m going to crunch the figures in my schedule and see what comes out. It might be that I shift the release of Heart of Darkness to September 10th from October 22nd, and then write something new in time for the October 22nd release date.
You’d think being an indie author it would matter what date I release stuff, but I have a whole year’s worth of guest blog dates in place and I refuse to disappoint the people who have kindly offered me a slot on their blog. I also have advertising in place too.
If I can’t get anything written in time, then I will probably use those dates to promote my first two releases this year, because I didn’t have the tour in place then and they could do with some promotion.
It wasn’t just Masquerade not quite feeling right that has put me behind. It’s my main computer too. It upped and died on me recently during a Windows Vista Service Pack 1 upgrade and I’ve had to reinstall everything. Thankfully, I had backed up all my files to my external hard drive before upgrading to the piece of poop that is the Service Pack 1. Why Windows allow this SP to still be used when they know it has faults is beyond my comprehension, but I think it just goes to show how crap Microsoft is.
Needless to say, I’m mightily miffed at Windows and it’s eaten up my whole day fixing the cursed computer in question. There goes my writing time. Got to reinstall lots of drivers, programs, devices, and put all my files back on my computer now. Bleh.
I had really hoped to get Masquerade written but perhaps it’s a good thing that my release order has changed. Heart of Darkness features a guard as the heroine, and hunters as the enemy. Masquerade has the hero and heroine as guards, and vampires / vampire hunters as the enemy too. Might be too similar, even though the stories are quite different.
I think that I will probably keep Heart of Darkness as my October 22nd release, and then have When Darkness Falls, which is a Vampires Realm novel, as my December release. Masquerade will have to wait until next year before it’s released.
My other option is to write Descent, the second story in my Shadow & Light Trilogy for release in December.
Choices, choices. It’s difficult really. I guess it will all come down to if I have enough time. I picture When Darkness Falls as a novel of around 65,000 words, while Descent will likely reach 90,000-100,000 words. Obviously it takes me longer to write, edit, polish and proof a novel that length.
Maybe this is all just fate telling me that I’m a crazy lady to want to release 8 full novels in the space of just a year. It’s saying “slow down, chillax, follow the flow” which I could happily listen to!
Back to work for me. For a change it isn’t writing that’s beckoning me rather it’s the techy stuff of reinstalling and rebuilding a computer. It’s been a while. I’ve had this one for two years or so without it giving me hell. My previous one required a fresh Windows install everything few months!
I’ll keep you guys posted on what I decide to write for when.
🙂
