Three Things About My Writing I Now Know

Well, my writing process is my writing process and we all know I'm quite superstitious about the whole thing. HOWEVER, having said that, I do know three more things about the writing now than I did in January.

No, I won't be switching to Scrivener or keeping spreadsheets LOL.

1. Much as I love my ancient Egyptian paranormal romances and enjoy the heck out of researching and writing them, they are a nice little niche. I have loyal readers who love them - thank you from the bottom of my heart! - and I'll keep writing them BUT the science fiction romances seem to be more of a sweet spot for me, at least for now. I have been alternating between SFR and ancient Egypt but I think in 2015 I'll probably do a run of SFR. I do have my next ancient Egyptian nearly ready to send off to the editor so you'll see GHOST OF THE NILE fairly early in 2015.

2. Whichever scene is the one I'm avoiding writing, that's the one the book probably needs desperately and I might as well just WRITE IT. I call it my "crossing the river" syndrome, because in the first SFR I ever wrote, I had a fairly major chase scene, concluding with a dramatic last stand on the banks of a raging river...and I kind of cheated by saying, "And after they crossed the river...." Uh, no. My beta readers and editor weren't standing for that and they were right of course. In one of my ancient Egyptians, there was a two week river voyage I tried to wiggle out of writing....no dice, So since then, I've learned that whatever scene I'm shying away from tackling is probably an important one and I'd better just dive in (yes, it nearly always seems to involve water! Sex scenes - no problem. Major bodies of water - problem!) And hey, it turns out ok.

3. I used to believe I could never write a series, that my Muse didn't work that way. But this past year I've been taking my own self-directed master class from Nalini Singh and our own Jeffe Kennedy, which consists of reading and rereading and loving their books and taking mental notes of how they've created the ongoing arcs and plot threads....plus asking Jeffe questions, which she's always very generous about answering. (I'm sure Nalini is generous as well but I don't  know her that well LOL. I pepper her with book-related questions for my USAT column from time to time...) I really feel that writing an actual series is my next challenge as a writer and I hope to develop one in 2015. Yes, my existing novels are connected series - the same Pharaoh for the Egyptians and the same Universe for the SFR's, but I want to write a classic series with continuing characters and an arc beyond the events of each books. It's going to require flexing some new writerly muscles and as I'm a total pantster we'll see how that goes, but at least I've reached a place after publishing seven books where I feel I can attempt it.

Happy New Year to one and all!!!

(Here's the book trailer for ESCAPE FROM ZULAIRE, in which I wrote the darn river scene as soon as I knew I needed it!)