As the process goes from completing books to zoning in on a readership for each one, I'm straightening out all sorts of tiny details. I'm not going to make the mistake of not knowing who each book is for before I start marketing them. In short, I've learned this interesting lesson--when presenting books to the world, it is best to have a plan. (Who knew, right? haha)

So I'm getting the books labeled genre and age-wise (except for Bellevere, still working on that.) Victoria is going through a pretty big rewrite to pull some of melodrama down and make Victoria's personality blend more with Alyce--or what used to be Alyce's, now the two are combined that's no longer a useful way to put it. The Prince's Ball is retitled to Temmark Osteraith.

I'm going to do a different print of Birthday Present. Old Facets (containing Jurant) and Ryan and Essie still on Amazon, but taking a back seat. Blue Facets has three stories and I like their vibe together.

Now that my active phase with all the books I’ve published is over, they’re a thing of the past and I look at them mostly to see if there’s still something that isn’t explained. Why did I write it that way? What does this character mean? Things I didn’t think about when I was actually writing.

For Facets of Fantasy Collector’s Edition, there were a lot of character dynamics that are noticeable.  Brynea and Ferdinand’s relationship and why it’s in the story; why Violet is unusually solitary and doesn’t mind having almost no friends, which is strange for a teenage girl; and the whole odd social setup of Milland, its outdated, shady politics and a charmless king with unexplainedly poor manners. 

The truth is that Brynea is trying to alert Karl to something, but she's not a very good communicator and she can't get anyone to understand her. She's also a scaredy-cat about revealing things that might jeopardize her job at the court and so she often reverts to talking about her boyfriend instead. 

Violet isn't a typical girl. That's the reason for her behavior. She likes to drift into places with an intention of supervising them, especially if people are up to mischief. Probably a useful person to have as a daughter if you own a huge old house with huge gardens that are hard to watch over. Of course she won't admit she's that bossy and prefers to describe herself as shy and having little social ability. 

And Alyce . . . well, I still don't have an explanation for Milland. A lot of it is very fishy, you know. :)

​And there will be more updates. 

The five published books on my website are all the same length, about 52K, except for Consuela. It's a little bit shorter. At first I presented many books as novellas, individual longer short stories, long collections of stories, or even the occasional novel. But as I worked with the books, stories took a more mainstream shape. Novels got cut. Novellas merged with each other. Extra stories that padded out books disappeared. All of them became a very similar page count (250-280 pages) and suddenly all the little random "stories" had been replaced by streamlined books. 

I didn't start out with this in mind, because although my stories were often an awkward length, I've read and enjoyed books of any length and I didn't plan to add or crop words just to fulfill someone's idea of a book. But I'm glad it happened. Nowhere is this new streamlined kind of book more visible than in "Victoria." It started as a novella of 30K words, then it shrank to a much shorter story. Then it blended with "Alyce," an even shorter story (about 18K) that had been once released as part of the same series. After I went back to the old, longer version of Victoria--keeping the merge with Alyce--I had to rewire my mind to realize this is a novel now. I'd become programmed to automatically think of Victoria and Alyce as short. But together, they became a full novel. 

How nice! 

A Year with the Harrisons shrank to become a similar length and when two of the Facets stories were removed, Facets of Fantasy was also comparable. And so is Bellevere House, which started longer, but after a special rewrite just about Ed and Faye's relationship, became exactly the same length as the others. 

Yes! My books, like tangled hair, got themselves straightened out. 

And there will be more updates. 

Whew! It has been one busy year. I've gone from having a handful of scattered ebooks and paperbacks, mostly out of print, to a nice trim set of 6 books on the website and all the others properly disposed of. I feel much less like writing than I ever have in my life. Maybe a bit of burnout, but I don't think so. It just isn't meaningful to me in the way it used to be. It's just . . . a job and a lot of the time a really boring one. Not that I'm not good at it, but a lot of people are good at their work. It doesn't mean they care about it. 

I'll be systematically promoting the books I'm currently pushing (fortunately, book promotion on Kindle can easily be almost on automatic pilot these days) and I do have a couple of ideas after The Prince's Ball. But I look at the books on the website and I'm like, "6 is enough." Maybe it will stretch to 8 or 10, although probably I'll just drop a couple of the ones on here to make room for new ones. My books have never had a correct marketing push and now they're ready to have one I feel a bit flat, as if all the personal aspect has gone out like air in a tire. 

The books are ready to move on to readers in a way they haven't been before and are no longer my property. I don't care about them as I used to and it's really weird feeling. They're truly somebody else's concern now, someone else's interest, and after almost fifteen years spent fighting to get them out there, it's odd to realize they're no longer central to my life. Or even much part of it. 

But I will, of course, not forget about them completely.  

And there will be more updates.