I try to plan in advance what books I’ll be working on and when.
If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed that those plans often get changed.
This is partly on me. Sometimes I bite off more than I can chew, so to speak, and plan too many projects in too short an amount of time. That was the case this year, when originally I’d planned to release 6 books. Accidentally deleting my Amazon account back in May and having to republish everything slowed me down. So did struggling to write the first draft of Bring On the Broccoli (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 7), since having to scrap most of the original draft and start the whole book over ate into the time I’d set aside for a different project. Which is why Ebb and Flow, originally intended as a September release, ended up being released in October instead.
Another thing that contributed to the change in plans was that two of the books I’d originally intended to release this year weren’t actually paranormal romance. I wanted to rerelease my Can’t Drag Me Down series, three contemporary romance books originally published between 2013-2016. The series was another example of changes in plan; I’d spoken with my editor at the publisher where these books were being published (Loose Id) and discussed at least two additional books in the series, but right about the time I started working on book 4, I started having panic attacks when I sat down to write anything romancey. Then Loose Id closed its doors, so Can’t Drag Me Down wound up being only three books, each of which follows a different drag queen from a club in Boston.
Book 2 of that series, Last Chance Tattoo, takes place in Ludington, Michigan, but the drag queen main character came from Boston. If I’d rereleased the books as planned, I intended to rewrite Last Chance Tattoo to take place in western Massachusetts instead. I also would have ended up doing some rewrites to the other two books to accommodate Remington Real, the drag queen character introduced in Fill the Empty Spaces. The main characters of Can’t Drag Me Down make walk-on appearances in Spaces, and I’d justified rereleasing CDMD by the fact that the series is now directly tied to Fill the Empty Spaces, which *is* paranormal.
But I ultimately decided against doing those rereleases, at least this year. There were several factors in that decision: First, as noted, Bring On the Broccoli took much longer for a workable first draft than I’d anticipated, which took away time I’d budgeted for doing the CDMD rewrites. Second, CDMD is not a paranormal series, despite the tie-in with Fill the Empty Spaces. When I was writing for publishers, a decade-ish ago, I wrote both paranormal and contemporary romance, though even some of the contemporaries had minor paranormal elements. But when I relaunched as Karenna Colcroft in 2022, I planned to focus only on paranormal.
Also… werewolves.
Fill the Empty Spaces is the only book I’ve released since 2022 that *doesn’t* have werewolves, and even that actually does. (Suzannah Daigle, the Boston North Pack healer who appears in some of the Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat books, makes a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo appearance in Spaces, in the scene where Del breaks down in Piers Park. In the original draft of Spaces, there was even more of a tie-in with RWDEM characters, but I cut that out in the final draft because it was bogging down the story.) Of the other books, 6 are directly part of Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat; the Chance Met duology is connected to RWDEM since one of the main characters of Chance Met is a secondary character in RWDEM; and Ebb and Flow is an intentional spin-off from RWDEM. Hooch and Howls is now also connected (loosely) to RWDEM because the main character of Hooch is also one of the main characters of Ebb and Flow.
Because I am apparently completely incapable of not creating connections and threads between books, whether I intend to or not.
But the point is that of the 11 male/male romance books I’ve released since 2022, 10 of them have werewolves and are either part of or connected to the Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat series. Fill the Empty Spaces is the outlier, despite Suzannah’s cameo appearance, and its sales seem to reflect that. (A Fighting Chance, book 2 of the Chance Met duology, has sold more poorly than Spaces, but that in large part is due to it only being out for 10 days before I deleted my Amazon account, so it didn’t have as much time to gain an audience. And I’ve slacked on promoting it since I republished it.) So I’m kind of thinking that I need to embrace the werewolfery of it all and keep my books focused on those characters, either through continuations of RWDEM or books that are somehow connected to that series.
Which rules out Can’t Drag Me Down, at least for the time being. It also rules out Dawn Over Dayfield, my suspense-with-romantic-elements novel, which I’d slated for rerelease in April 2025. Dayfield is also not paranormal, but because of the historical aspects of the story, it *feels* paranormal to me. It’s also one of only two of my books to have won an award, first place in the Mystery category of the 2016 Florida Authors and Publishers Association President’s Book Awards. (The other book to have won an award is, somewhat ironically, Fill the Empty Spaces…) But if I’m focusing on werewolves, Dayfield doesn’t have a place. And also, after I released Ebb and Flow, the main characters Quinn and Malachi started whispering in my mind’s ear about a sequel… which I’m currently working on.
I don’t know if all the changes in plans I’ve made over the past couple of years means I need to try harder to stick to the plans I make… or means that I need to stop planning more than a couple-few months in advance. But either way, werewolves.