And happy first blog post to me!
Well… not my first *ever* blog post. On the original Karenna Colcroft website, I had a blog where I posted regularly. That blog, along with the site itself, was taken down during my hiatus from writing. When I set the site back up in early 2022, I debated whether to include a blog and decided against it.
But now I’ve decided to give it a go. I’ll be posting weekly about what’s going on in my writing and my life. Books I’m working on, books I’m reading. What’s coming up, plans I’ve changed, and so on.
It’s a blog. It’s going to be kind of like my brain. A bunch of things.
Right now, I’m working (still) on getting Chance Met ready for a March release. This book was planned for March 9, but due to extenuating circumstances, I’ve moved it to March 23.
When I sat down with the book in December, the plan was just to edit and update it as I’d done with the Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat novels. Chance Met was originally published in 2013 as a tie-in Valentine’s novella; Trey Damone, one of the main characters, is (in the in-universe timeline) the newest member of the Boston North Pack to which my vegan werewolf Kyle Slidell and his mate, the Alpha Tobias Rogan, belong. The other main character, Jeremiah Crawford, was originally introduced in my novel Lost Soul, which was published in 2012. (Because I’ve reconfigured the series timelines a bit, and wanted to reintroduce Trey and Jeremiah first, I’ll be doing some rewrites on Lost Soul and plan to rerelease it in July of this year.)
In its original version, Chance Met was a short novella, a bit under 20,000 words. As part of the updating, I decided I wanted to expand it a bit. And the characters and storyline decided the expansion would be more than “a bit.” As of this post, I’ve more than doubled the length of the story. I’ve rearranged some of the plot points, added new ones, and strengthened the ties to the Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat series; although Chance Met is not part of that series, it is associated with it, and Trey and Jeremiah’s relationship is referenced in the rest of the RWDEM books. So that was extenuating circumstance #1: The book turned out to want/need more rewriting and more new content for the expansion than I’d initially thought.
Extenuating circumstance #2 actually happened before I started working on Chance. At the beginning of December, my mother passed away. I’ve been spending a fair bit of time trying to help my dad deal with the aftermath of that, as well as trying to help him clean out nearly 5 decades of STUFF from the house he and my mother shared so he can move into more beneficial housing. It’s been a process, and between the time it’s taking and the mental impact of grief and of worrying about my dad, my writing has been impacted.
And finally, extenuating circumstance #3 was a round with Covid in mid-January. This was my second bout with the thing; two years ago when I had it, I had no symptoms at all and was completely functional. But this time, it kinda knocked me on my ass for a few days. Thinking barely happened, never mind writing!
So with all of that, my planned March 9 release for Chance Met had to be moved. But the book is just about ready now, and I will be releasing it March 23. And here’s the cover!
