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Posted on by karennacolcroft

It’s hard to believe it will be 2025 in just a few days! While I don’t know exactly what the year holds for me–and, after the past few years, don’t want to speculate–I have made some writing and publishing plans.

On January 9, I’ll release Bring on the Broccoli (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 7). This book is the first one since book 3 that’s narrated by Kyle Slidell, the vegan werewolf who gives the series its name. I anticipate unhappy readers due to something that happens in the story, but I don’t want to give spoilers. Bring on the Broccoli is available for Amazon preorder and will be available in Kindle and paperback formats.

On April 10, I’ll release Future and Past (Ebb and Flow 2). This is, obviously, the sequel to Ebb and Flow, continuing Quinn and Malachi’s story because the two of them won’t stop “talking” to me. Quinn is sent back to Nova Scotia to be with his mate after a PTSD flashback causes him to lash out at Kyle.  Quinn worries that it’s punishment–that Tobias sent him away and won’t let him go back to the States–but it is just so he can rest and get help for his PTSD with Malachi there to support him. Future and Past is also available for Amazon preorder, because for a change I got my act together early. To lead up to this release, I also redid the Ebb and Flow cover.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And on July 10, I’ll release Sorry about the Seitan (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 8). This one takes place around Christmas, so of course I’m releasing it in July… Tobias is already struggling, and his stress and PTSD worsen when the Alpha who took him in after he was changed at age 15 declines into severe dementia and is no longer capable of ruling his pack–which, in the werewolf world, means he can’t be allowed to live. Sorry About the Seitan also is available for Kindle preorder.

I’ll also have a release in October 2025, and at this point I’m planning on that being book 3 of Ebb and Flow, but I won’t know that for sure for a few more months.

I hope your 2024 comes to a peaceful end and your 2025 brings you all good things. And books. Lots of books.

There’s Something In My Eye…

Posted on by karennacolcroft

I’m currently working on the first draft of Sorry About the Seitan (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 8), and yesterday I wrote a scene that almost made me cry. I guess it’s good if I can elicit that kind of reaction in myself; it might mean my readers will like the scene too.

I can’t say what the scene is, because it would be a spoiler. Even though the book won’t be out until July, by which time most people who read this will probably have forgotten, I want to avoid spoiling it as much as I possibly can.

What I will say: The book takes place at Christmas time, and the scene takes place at the Christmas get-together Tobias and Kyle throw in their new home. The tears are happy ones.

I’ll also say that Quinn is still working for Tobias and Kyle at this point in the series timeline, and Malachi makes a guest appearance.

(If you have no idea who I’m talking about, read any of the Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat books, especially Take Some Tahini, along with Ebb and Flow.)

I might not get a lot of writing done over the next couple of weeks, because it actually is Christmas time and I have to do family stuff. But I’ve made a lot of progress in this book (I started it two weeks ago, and I’m on page 66), so I’m hoping to keep the momentum going.

If my darn characters would stop making me have something in my eye.

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It Was a Long Week…

Posted on by karennacolcroft

When I’m not writing books, I work at a daycare center. I’m usually only there about 15 hours a week; my job is to cover the lunch breaks of the full-time staff. But this past week, due to staff members being on vacation or out for other reasons, I worked 26 hours. Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was more than I’m used to. (I have chronic health issues that impede my ability to work; I can’t manage full-time at all, which is why I took a part-time job.) And I haven’t been sleeping well the past several days, so today, I’m completely exhausted.

On the plus side, though, I got through December 1. Two awful things happened on that date, in 2022 and 2023 respectively, so I was a little worried about how things would go. But I got through the day, and this year nothing awful happened. (Though arguably, the U.S. presidential election was an early horrible thing for this year…)

And despite having to work more this week, and spending a lot of my time at home trying to sleep, I managed to get a solid start on writing Sorry About the Seitan (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 8)! I’m very happy about that. So far, a lot of what I’ve written is backstory, which I’ll wind up removing when I edit the book.

A very short excerpt (unedited):

Some time later, I realized the room was a lot brighter than it had been. I’d slept so deeply I didn’t remember any dreams, which was probably a good thing. My nightmares didn’t affect me as much as Kyle’s and Quinn’s affected them; I’d had decades to get used to them and to work through some of the trauma that spawned them. But that didn’t mean I enjoyed having them, and a night without any that I recalled was a good night.

Beside me, Kyle still breathed evenly. Either he was still asleep or he’d chosen to pretend he was. I didn’t need to know which. During the night, we’d rolled away from each other. I debated waking him for some cuddling—and possibly the enactment of his promise—before we went downstairs for breakfast, but a glance at my phone showed that we didn’t have time. The fact that the sun was up on a December morning when sunrise was after 7 a.m. should have clued me in to the fact that I should have already been downstairs.

I rushed through cleaning up in the bathroom that adjoined our bedroom and pulled on slacks and a sweater. Ordinarily, what I wore in the morning didn’t matter much. I kept things as informal as I could, especially at mealtimes. But with Justin scheduled to arrive within a couple of hours, I had to look more official.

I wasn’t a fan of “official.” But it was part of the cost of being the Anax.

Planning and Plotting

Posted on by karennacolcroft

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks dealing with some personal life stuff connected with this time of year. It still hasn’t completely died down (tomorrow, December 1, is the anniversary of two very difficult events in my life), but I’m hoping things will even out and I’ll get through the end of November/beginning of December this year with no additional issues.

Meanwhile, I have gotten some things done.

Last weekend, I finished proofing Bring on the Broccoli (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 7). Next step is to get that book formatted, and then it will be ready for its January 9 release date. Meanwhile, it’s available for preorder on Amazon.

I spent this past week planning book 8 of Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat, Sorry About the Seitan. This is setting up to be a really difficult book to write and read because of the emotional content, and I’m hoping I’m up to the task of authentically showing what Tobias Rogan, Anax of the United States, is dealing with at this point. I’ll be starting to write the first draft within the next day or two, and Sorry About the Seitan is tentatively scheduled for release in July 2025.

I hope everyone’s November is coming to a positive, or at least neutral, close.

First Draft Done!

Posted on by karennacolcroft

In October, a week or so after I released Ebb and Flow, I started writing the sequel to it, which is tentatively titled Life and Time.

Yesterday, I finished writing that sequel!

I think that’s one of the fastest first drafts I’ve ever done. And I’m pretty happy with the story, though there are a couple of dangling plot threads I’ll need to remove when I edit the book. That’s the result of thinking I knew where the story was going and then having the characters completely take over.

I’m going to be pushing myself with this book, because it’s planned for release in April 2025, so I want to make sure I get all of the editing and so forth done. But given how fast I wrote it, I’m hopeful the editing will go smoothly as well.

I loved being back in Quinn and Malachi’s world, and finishing the first draft was rough because I didn’t want to leave them. So there’s more than likely going to be another book in the series, but I haven’t planned that yet….

It’s Been a Bit…

Posted on by karennacolcroft

I didn’t blog the past couple of weeks because I’ve been going my second round of fighting pneumonia, and that’s made it a bit hard to think and function. I’m still not well, and it’s going to take a while before I am.

But I wanted to blog in response to what happened in the U.S. on November 5. For many, if not most, of those of us who are LGBTQIA+ (I’m nonbinary),  who have a uterus, or who are not white, Christian Americans, the results of the election were not what we’d hoped. I’m not here to engage in political debate, and I’ll remove any comments in favor of the incoming President and the policies that have been proposed. (Yes, I can do that. This is my blog, not a public forum, and I am not a government entity. Your first amendment rights are not being violated if I remove your comment.) I’m not actually here to talk about politics directly at all.

I know people who are flat out terrified right now about what this will mean for them and/or people they love. I’m one of those people. My white, cisgender husband doesn’t get it; when I said my kids and I were upset about the election results, he said, “I don’t think there’s anything to be upset about.” Um, yeah… because you’re a white, cisgender man. You will not be affected by whatever comes next. But people you love–your wife, your stepchildren, your grandchildren–will be.

I don’t have solutions to offer. I’m definitely not going to resort to platitudes like “We’re all in this together” or “We got through it once, we’ll get through it again.” As nice as it would be to believe those platitudes, I don’t. I’m already aware of people (no one I know personally, but I’m bracing myself for that) who have ended their lives rather than waiting to have their lives destroyed.

Being queer is an act of defiance. Writing queer literature–which includes male/male romance–is an act of defiance. Those things, I will continue. I wish I knew how else to defy.

On Facebook the day after election day, I posted:

“For those who are struggling, terrified, and in pain as a result of the election, there are two things you can do: Curl up in a corner and cry, or start finding ways and allies to make things better in any small way possible.
It is entirely acceptable to do both.”

Right now, I’m doing both. And that is okay.

The Best-Laid Plans…

Posted on by karennacolcroft

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.

5 Stars!!

Posted on by karennacolcroft

I don’t automatically expect my books to get great reviews. Some of that is me being realistic; all books have issues of one kind or another, and not every story is every reader or reviewer’s cup of tea. But some of my lack of expectation of good reviews is due to imposter syndrome: “I suck, my books suck, I screwed up this part, I must have missed something in the edits,” and so on and so forth.

Being an author is hard enough. When anxiety starts telling you you’re a piece of crap and so are your books, it’s even harder.

I released Ebb and Flow on Thursday the 10th. I felt good about the book. When I did the multiple rounds of editing, every time I reached the end of the story, I felt sad that I’d reached the end. I love the main characters, Quinn Boucher and Malachi Powers. But that didn’t mean I completely believed that readers and reviewers would also love it.

As it turned out… they did. Or at least one reviewer did. Linda Tonis of Paranormal Romance Guild gave Ebb and Flow 5 stars! What made me even happier about the review was that the reviewer clearly understood the characters, saying that it’s a “beautiful story” about crafting a new life after trauma and loss, and that Quinn believes he isn’t brave and apologizes for everything, while Malachi recognizes Quinn’s strength and tries to help Quinn see it.

Ebb and Flow isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea. There’s an extreme age gap; Quinn is 22, while Malachi is 130. They’re werewolves; werewolves live longer than humans. They’re also fated mates, and whatever “fate” puts mates together apparently doesn’t care about age as long as everyone’s an adult. (In my universe, nearly all werewolves are adults; changing someone who’s under 18 is against werewolf law–with a death penalty imposed on those who violate the restriction. Only two were known to have been changed while they were still under 18; both were changed by a sexual predator, and one of them, Tobias Rogan, killed said predator to keep him from victimizing anyone else.) In addition to the age gap between Quinn and Malachi, they pretty quickly develop a Dominant/submissive dynamic, with Malachi being the dominant partner; that dynamic will appeal to some readers, but others will find it against their tastes, particularly on top of the age gap.

But I know at least one reviewer loved the book, and that feels really good.

With Bated Breath…

Posted on by karennacolcroft

(And yes, I did spell “bated” correctly.)

On Thursday, Oct. 10, I’ll be releasing Ebb and Flow. I am so excited about this book. When I did the edits, I was sad about finishing; I wanted to keep reading about Quinn and Malachi. Of course, to keep reading about them, I have to keep *writing* about them…

I do plan to write more about Quinn and Malachi. There are other things going on in their world to follow up on, and then of course there’s the continuing building of their relationship. As fated mates, Quinn and Malachi didn’t choose each other. But they do get to choose whether to be *together*, and what that looks like for them. As of the end of Ebb and Flow, they’re still figuring it out.

I’ve submitted Ebb and Flow to reviewers, at least two of whom are planning to actually review it, and I’m waiting with bated breath to see what they think. And to see what readers think. My joy and love of Quinn and Malachi’s story might not be shared by people who read the book. And in just a few more days, I’ll start finding out.

Ebb and Flow is available for Kindle preorder, and will release in Kindle and paperback on October. 10.

Editing and such

Posted on by karennacolcroft

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to work on editing Bring On the Broccoli (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 7). Working on it has been a bit complicated by the fact that I’ve been sick for the past two or three weeks.

At the end of August, I started a new job at a local daycare, which has been absolutely wonderful. I love the job, the kids are incredible, and my coworkers are amazing. But… it’s a daycare. With kids ages 5 months to 5 years. Kids who get sick and don’t know how to, or forget to, cover their mouths when they cough or sneeze. Which means I caught a cold. And then another one. And the second one morphed into full-blown pneumonia. Which is making it really hard to concentrate on things like editing.

Recognizing that I was getting worse, I was smart enough to go to urgent care yesterday after work, and my boss let me leave early so I could go. I’m on antibiotics now, out of work until Tuesday at the earliest, and last night I slept for about 11 hours. Hopefully I’ll kick this to the curb… and hopefully this will be the worst illness I deal with from this job. (I’d love it if it was the LAST illness I had to deal with, but I’m well aware of how unrealistic that is when I’m working at a daycare.)

Meanwhile, I’m making slow but steady progress on the Bring On the Broccoli edits, I’ve got Ebb and Flow ready for its October 10 release, and I’m taking it easy. And my “nurse cat” is taking good care of me.