Sometimes life is just a lot. I live with depression and Complex PTSD, which can make even a little feel like a lot sometimes, but then there are stretches like the one I’m currently in, when I have a bunch of different things I need to do and can’t seem to organize my time and my mental bandwidth to do them all. (Please… no advice on time management or on “just doing it” or any of that other stuff. I know how my brain works; I’ve lived with this brain for over 55 years. And I have licensed professionals who help.)
I was hoping to have finished Virtually Guarded, book 1 of my new Virtual Haven Pack series, two weeks ago. Instead I’m still wrestling with it, and feeling incredibly discouraged. I thought I had a good concept with solid characters and a decent plot…and then I kept finding issues. Mostly with the plot and the story’s timeline, but also to some extent with the characters. They’re brand new characters (one, Xavier Pelly, has appeared in a couple of Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat books, but very, very briefly), and I don’t feel like I got to know them well enough before I started writing about them.
I’ve started Virtually Guarded three times now, gotten a maximum of two-thirds into it, and realized it was completely not working…so I started over. This third go-round, I might actually have managed to create a story I can get all the way through and then smooth out. This rewrite also addressed a complaint a reader had about Ebb and Flow (Ebb & Flow book 1), which was that in that book, we meet Quinn and Malachi as they have already gotten to know each other to some extent, because their first meeting occurred in Real Werewolves 6. Which *I* didn’t see as a problem, but apparently it was? At least for this reader, and I could see their point.
With Virtually Guarded, I’d done the same thing; Xavier and his mate Jesse Torres meet in Real Werewolves 10 (which will be released in July), and initially, Virtually Guarded took place about a month after that meeting. After seeing the reader’s review, I chose to go back and actually show their meeting in *their* book as well as in RW10… and then realized there was a lot more that would have to happen, and I couldn’t work with the original in-story timeline for Virtually Guarded. So I’ve spent the past couple of weeks rewriting and having to bounce back and forth between VG and RW10 to make sure all the events match up and there are no continuity errors. I think I’m there now. I sincerely hope I am. And I hope readers like Xavier, the demisexual “boulder” of a werewolf, and Jesse, the transgender male werewolf whose wolf form is entirely male. Honestly, worrying about how readers will react to Xavier and Jesse is adding to the overwhelm…
Working on that book isn’t the only thing I’m supposed to be doing, but it’s taking time from some other things. Though I did manage to complete the second round of edits on Return and Restore (Ebb & Flow book 4, coming out in May), and I’ve nearly got the final-final version of my novella A Wolf-Changing Incident ready to upload for its release March 12.
On the positive side, winter is halfway-ish over, daylight hours are getting longer, and I have been accomplishing some things. Living with depression and the other stuff does make it hard to focus on the positive side of things sometimes, but there is a positive.
