February 15, 2023
Emotional State: Feeling Fancy Free
Writing & Life
I expected this week to be stressful, but it wasn’t. Why? Because while my preorder went live today, I was already well set-up to get the book up on the platforms. Not the actual text or cover, but all the other things like book categories, keywords, and the blurb. The other stuff I’ve been sweating over for the past month or two.
Am I satisfied with all of it? No, but I have a few weeks to sort out what isn’t working – formatting, in particular. While I love the ease of the formatting program I’m using, there’s still not enough control over footnotes, how excerpts look, backmatter and other pieces. I’m hoping to fix it all before the launch date of March 15th.
I’m half-tempted to format it myself in Scribus, but that is a time suck of untold dimensions. Every chapter needs to be uploaded separately and then there is a lot of manual fidgeting to get the orphans and widows right. Not to mention reformatting italics. If you’ve looked at any of my books, you’ll know there are a LOT of italics.
When I’m not tweaking or waiting for my fixes to show up on the preview screen, I’ve been working on an idea for another book series. I have another idea as well, but my original idea—the one that I’ve plotted and started the writing magnet for—has a younger protagonist than I want to showcase right now. So, I’m chewing on a new idea to fall into paranormal women’s fiction.
It’s early days, though. I don’t even know how the magic works or what the world looks like (urban fantasy, but there are so many options with that). But I have a 40+ protagonist who owns a bookstore. A mysterious rich guy who hires her to find a book for him. And… I think a shop assistant. I want to incorporate a pet of some kind, but I’ve not settled yet on what. (Did I mention it’s early days?)
I have two weeks to flesh that idea out so that I can write the book in March, but we’ll see if I’m good to get it going. I’m also toying with just working on my cozy paranormal series and not introducing yet another set of books to write, edit, create covers for, market, etc. In other words, I’m all over the place.
And yet I feel good about that right now.