Category: Howls in the Moonlight

Happy Halloween! I love the idea of a supernatural world, as you can tell with my paranormal and fantasy stories! This is one of my favorite times of the year, and the kids and I had so much fun painting and carving pumpkins and decorating cookies over the weekend! It’s supposed to rain tonight, but I’m hoping we can still get some trick-or-treating in before we get totally soaked!

Alright, so on to my monthly writing update! Well, I’m still officially a full-time writer, and I still have no idea what I’m doing! I’m still working on trying to find a balance between being a writer, organizing the house, and being a stay-at-home mom to two elementary-aged kids. I’ve had to ease up some more on writing expectations for myself, since a birthday celebration vacation, kids’ extracurricular activities, and a bad cough/cold running through our household ate into my writing time. I still managed to make my average daily word count goal with 1075 words/day, so I’m happy with that!

I also had to update my writing goals for the rest of 2022. I’m torn whether to update my Howls in the Moonlight book or completely unpublish and rewrite it and follow up with a rapid release of the entire trilogy. I’m also stuck what to do with my Soul Keeper trilogy, since my muse is still being stubborn about writing book 1 and flittering about when it comes to figuring out an outline with book 3. Hopefully by the end of 2022, I can figure out which trilogy to focus on for a 2023 release. I still am hoping for paperbacks and updated covers for the first two books in my Andersen Grimm Academy of Elites series, but since that totally depends on my photoshop skills, it’s slow-going!

As for what I’ve been actively working on this month, I’ve got Soul Keeper with my Beta reader! I’m now ~70k words in Liz and Ryken’s duet with ~46k of those in the first book, Dud Discovered. Rose and Blue have ~3k words in their novella. Originally, I was going to have one of their scenes in Liz and Ryken’s duet, but since it might be too much of a cliff-hanger instead of a hook, I decided to shift it to their novella. Depending on where my muse wants to take me, I might actually have Liz and Ryken’s duet out next year instead of 2024, but we’ll see how it goes! I’ve found that I’m overly optimistic with my writing schedule and then have to adjust accordingly! Even though I want to believe I can write and publish four books a year, I think I should be more realistic and first work up to publishing two a year.

That’s it for my October wrap up! Happy Halloween and have a wonderful November!

It’s official: I’m a full-time writer now, and I have no idea what I’m doing!

But that’s okay, because I’m slowly figuring it out! September marks what I consider my first full month of being a full-time writer since my kids are back in school, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to manage my time with writing and trying to get our house in order after two plus years of being hidden away during the pandemic. Over the summer, I tried social media for promotion and writing a minimum of 1000 words per day. The result? I basically started September frustrated and burnt out!

So, I decided that September I’d set up more reasonable goals. Instead of getting frustrated when I couldn’t write 1000 words, I decided to keep track of my daily word count and aim for a monthly average of 1000 words! I decided to drop social media and maybe pick those up again once I have more books out. If you’re looking for updates, you can find them here on my blog or through my Facebook Page. I’m not planning on releasing any other books in 2022 and instead focus on polishing up the books I already have published before putting out new books.

My current main goal for 2022 is to polish up my Howls in the Moonlight book. This was the first book I ever published, and even though I absolutely love it, it’s almost a totally different writing style from what I have now. I’m working on removing head-hopping and adding a bit more steam, so we’ll see how that goes! Once I’m done reworking Howls, I’m going to rework my Prince of Shadows book so it’s more inline with my current writing style. I’m also working on redoing the covers for Jane and Gray’s duet so they look more like current YA Academy book covers and then hopefully get some paperbacks released for them.

I currently have ten books fighting for attention in my mind, so it’s been hard trying to figure out what to work on next! I’ve spent September focused on writing four books. I’m totally in love with my new PNR slow burn, spicy Soul Keeper book, which features demons, druids, and a feisty human. This was actually the second book in a series I had planned out, but I had lost the draft for the first book so this series went on the back burner. While I was anxiously awaiting the launch for Wolf Claimed, I worked on Soul Keeper as a totally different palate cleanser. I’m hoping to release Soul Keeper next year with the other two books in the trilogy, but first I have to convince my muse to rewrite the first book.

As for the other three books? Those would be the next three books in my YA slow burn, sweet Andersen Grimm Academy of Elites series! I’m having trouble with this one since Liz’s first book takes place during the same period as Jane and Gray’s duet as a companion novel. So, if you’ve read Jane and Gray’s book, you already know the main surprises for Liz. The tricky part: how do I still make this exciting for my readers? Liz’s second book picks up where Jane and Gray’s duet ends, so that will be totally new. I have about 40k words done for Liz and Ryken’s duet in total with a target of 160k words split between the two books. Rose and Blue’s novella follows next, and I have about 2k words to get that novella off the ground! My plan is to get those three books and Rage’s book (which will be written under Ellie Parin since that’ll be an adult PNR spinoff) in 2024.

Thanks for stopping by! Happy reading!