Diving Back In

So last week I lamented my lack of motivation to write. It made me sound lazy (I am but that’s beside the point) and in need of validation with every chapter I wrote. Then I took a closer look and realized that it’s not exactly true.

One reason why I haven’t been into my Liz books is because I’ve been paying more attention to Naughty Pen’s books. Yup, she’s got three of them. Four, if you count the one I just unpublished because it’s only the first part and no sense in releasing that out there if I don’t have the second one ready to go.

I’d published the first of Naughty Pen’s books in July and then I went about my merry way not paying attention to it until I released the second and third parts in October and December respectively. Enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, they did poorly. So poorly, Naughty Pen’s total income for all three books for the 2017 was $56 and change.

This month, I decided I had to stop playing around with Naughty Pen’s fate. Secret pen or not, it’s still a business, right?

So the three books left Kindle Unlimited at the beginning of this month and went out to the world of wide distribution like eager eighteen-year-olds. Happy to say that Naughty Pen’s readers were never on Kindle Unlimited but in iBooks. In the last week and a half, the series has made way more money than it did during its first six months in KU. If I’d known… but then, hindsight has always been 20/20.

So that’s where my head’s been at all this time, and all the while my own characters suffered.

So now that Naughty Pen is kinda set with her three books for now, I’m finally ready to dive back into the world of my own characters. I did a poll on my Facebook Reader Group, asking them which character they’d like to see first. Hands down, the winner was Sawyer, Dax’s friend in Everything She Ever Wanted. Running second was Gareth of Loving Ashe, and third was Blythe from Collateral Attraction. Blythe doesn’t get a lot of love but that’s okay. She gets enough love from me and these three books are on the docket for 2018.

I just need to figure out which one to write first.

In my heart, I know whose book to write. I’ve only been agonizing his fate for the last two years, too afraid to go against what readers want versus what I’ve wanted from the very beginning. But this book had never been written to market and so the third book will be written the same way: not to market.

For those unfamiliar with the term written to market, it basically means writing what sells. If you’re an author with books in KU, it can be bad boy romance, urban fiction, fantasy, space marines or whatever else. It takes studying the Amazon algorithm to know what sells before you write the first word.

But the book I’m going to tackle is not to market and that’s a challenge to business me. Still, I can’t delay it any longer and so back into Gareth Roman’s world I go. It means diving into Barbed Wire, the short story from his POV of what happens in Chapter 24 of Loving Ashe and moving on from there. I wrote this short story two years ago and it’s my most polarizing story so far. You’ll need to have read Loving Ashe to get its context, and as I edit the story to fix a few things, it feels like I’m home again.

Guess my vacation has finally come to an end, and back to work I go.

And do you know one thing that gets me back to work mode? It’s this video, a tribute to the chase scene from Ronin, one of my favorite movies from the 90’s (or was it the 80’s?). The title of the music used is perfect, Inertia Creeps, and it’s exactly what was happening to me last week even if I was distracted by Naughty Pen’s business end.

This video features the best movie chase scene EVER. Hands down. You got to crank up the volume for this one…