Monday, November 28, 2011

I am writing, writing, writing.


I am quickly discovering that with ebooks, the more titles, the better. At least that’s what I’m being told by a variety of authors who publish ebooks, and this has been somewhat proven to me by the rather brisk sale of the Blackroot novel I put on Smashwords sometime back. At 99¢, it is the best-selling ebook I have, outselling both Tinna’s Promise and even the free short-story collection, The Belletrist. It’s sort of shocking because Blackroot is such a departure from what I usually write, it’s gory and graphic, and a little weird. But the readers seem to like it. iBooks users especially, and lots of Sony Reader users. The desire to offer more titles has given me a creative kick in the pants, but on the flip side, it has also presented me with way too much distraction.

I am currently about 60% on Tinna’s Reign, editing for Tinna’s Might has slowed to a crawl, but it is still moving. I’d say we’ve moved up to about 84% completed, and I have two other books I’ve been pecking at, one called the Wizard King and another The Blue Journal. The Blue Journal is sort of out of my comfort zone, being written in journal form in first-person, which is challenging to someone who almost always writes as a narrator. The Wizard King is a strange hybrid of a Regency romance novel and a fantasy. I started it about four years ago, but it fell into my ‘false start’ pile, and then I was browsing my old starts and rediscovered it, and found some fresh ideas popping into my head as I started reading it.

So this means I’m working on four books concurrently. Probably not a good plan—most people will tell you to pick a project and stick to it until you’re finished, but it’s a bit hard to do when you are having a hard time finding inspiration on one, and have come to a complete halt while another has found a little pocket of inspiration to feed it. I guess, as I always do, I will go where my instincts point me, and let the organic, creative process work itself out.

The point of it all is to offer a broad range of titles for readers. I have the bones for a few good, meaty novels, and I’m working on finishing up the Tinna Trilogy. I may revisit Oromoii later on, but for now, I’m going to concentrate on these other titles and keep out of my false start folder for a few months—just in case something else catches my creative eye.

Argh.