On Thursday, I released Return and Restore, book 4 of my Ebb & Flow series. In keeping with my usual struggles to figure out how to promote my books, I haven’t seen the response I had hoped for from this release. But people are reading it, and it’s gotten some glowing reviews, which makes me very happy.
At one time, I had stated that Return and Restore would be the final book of the Ebb & Flow series. That was because of the amount of struggle I faced trying to write the first draft of the story. I kept starting in the wrong place, having to remove content, changing the plot just a bit resulting in having to rewrite a large chunk of the story… It was tiring, and I took it as a sign that Quinn and Malachi’s story should come to an end.
I started reconsidering that when I sat down to start the edits on Return and Restore and realized that somehow, even with all of the changes and rewrites and removals, I’d ended up with a pretty dang good story! And I do love Quinn and Malachi together. Their dynamic, with Malachi being over a hundred years older than Quinn and acting as Quinn’s Dominant while still allowing Quinn to have a voice; Quinn being 22 and traumatized but healing, and in some ways more mature than Malachi. I could write that dynamic forever if I just had enough plots.
I did sit down this past week, before releasing Return and Restore, and started planning a book 5 of the series. But after seeing a few reviews for Return and Restore that emphasized that that was the last book of the series, I’m reconsidering my reconsideration. Maybe it is time to give Quinn and Malachi a rest for a little while. They will, after all, make appearances in some other books, since all of my werewolf books are interconnected even if they aren’t part of the same series. Quinn and Malachi show up in book 10 of my Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat series, Figs till the End, which will release July 9; and in book 1 of my Virtual Haven Pack series, Virtually Guarded, which will release September 19 (and which takes place concurrently with Figs till the End). I’m tentatively planning a book now with Silas Creighton, the Anax (werewolf ruler) of Canada, as one of the main characters, and since Silas is Malachi’s best–and, honestly, only–friend aside from Quinn, Malachi and Quinn will almost definitely show up as secondary characters in Silas’s book.
Sometimes, making a decision as an author is harder than it needs to be. Particularly when it comes to characters like Quinn and Malachi, who have dug their claws into my mind and heart and who I really want to keep writing about. But I can have them as secondary characters in some books, and maybe satisfy myself–and them–with occasional scenes and short stories featuring them as main characters, while not exactly continuing their series. Eventually, maybe they will have a book 5, but now might not be the time.
Books 1-4 of Ebb & Flow are available on Amazon.
