I’ve been working on a few things this past week, trying to get some stuff done and some stuff started as I prepare to go back to work. I start a new job on the 18th! Which I’m honestly a bit nervous about; it’s been a long time since I worked a full-time job, and part of me worries that my physical and mental health won’t be up to it. But I’ve made my employer aware that I have health issues, and I’m looking at this as a good stepping stone. We’ll see how it goes.
Meanwhile:
- I’ve still been working on A Fighting Chance. And fighting *with* it. I had ideas of where the story was going to go, but the story doesn’t seem to want to go there. Even so, I think I’m hitting a good stride with it and hope to have the first draft finished before I start my job. Assuming all goes as planned, A Fighting Chance is slated for release in March.
- I finished editing Tempeh for Two (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 5, the last book of the originally-published series). This involved scrapping a few plot points that I’d added the last time I edited, which were no longer relevant to the series as a whole; they’d come from a heterosexual romance novel I’d written that was intended to be part of the companion series to this one. Since I scrapped the hetero series, I decided the plot points I’d added to Tempeh not only didn’t work anymore but weren’t really needed, so I removed them. Which, fortunately, streamlined the story and re-increased the action. Tempeh for Two is slated for release in January.
- I did final(ish) proofreading of Fill the Empty Spaces and created the cover for it! I wasn’t sure I liked the cover at first, especially since one of the features I needed in the GIMP program to make the cover I wanted doesn’t seem to be working on the newest version of the program so I had to find a workaround. But the cover has grown on me, and I’m particularly happy to have been permitted to include Charlie the Sweater Cat on it. Charlie was a resident at the cat cafe where I volunteer; due to a cluster of health issues, he unfortunately had to be put down at the beginning of July. He became a character of sorts in Fill the Empty Spaces, though, and the owner of the cafe approved that and granted me permission to use one of the photos I took of Charlie as part of the cover art. Fill the Empty Spaces will be available for preorder on the 28th of this month, and will be released in Kindle and paperback formats on Oct. 12! (Stay tuned for whether I put this one in KU; based on some issues other authors have been experiencing lately with KU, I’m considering not going that route with this book, but I haven’t completely decided yet.) I’ll share the cover here soon, but I’ve promised to reveal it in my newsletter first.
- I started plotting the rewrite I’ve decided I need to do on Take Some Tahini (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 6, the first *new* RWDEM book since 2014!) I love this book as I’ve written it, but it’s kind of a “breather episode” of the series, and I have the feeling the lower-stakes, lower-action nature of it won’t meet reader wants or expectations. So I’m revamping it to match the stakes and action level to the previous books of the series, and I will probably be pulling the “breather” aspects of the story to release as a freebie or a newsletter subscriber perk. Take Some Tahini is slated for release in July 2024.
