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 All of them became a very similar page count (250-280 pages) and suddenly all the little random "stories" had been replaced by streamlined books.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. 

I won't deny that Bellevere House hasn't always been the most fun to write for me as an author. I took it on as a challenge, not for fun, and I was surprised myself at the direction some arcs of the story took. If this book surprised me at first, it continues to do so. The initial reaction to Bellevere left me in little doubt that it had no future and no audience. It had fallen flat on readers and was to be discounted as an ignominious member of the Jane Austen collection. Since I had written it exclusively for this collection, I will say I was more than a little ticked-off by this because it seemed to me all my effort was being wasted. 

I planned to keep it only as long as was necessary, since no one would ever want to read it again after the collection's first run. By this time I was already involved in other projects and more than happy enough to do this. In fact, I didn't have time to devote to Bellevere anymore and I had even written a contemporary version to give the story a chance since one of the biggest sources of concern was how I handled the vintage era. It's dialogue, slang, pop culture, and cliches. However, Bellevere-vintage-version (annoyingly, I now felt) just got consistent reads on Amazon. The pageviews on my website were steady tending towards high and often jumped by 1000% if I mentioned Bellevere or even if I did not. If I talked about another of my books, the Bellevere page soared. 

I really felt like tearing out my hair. 

I'm not sure why people look so much at a "rejected" book.  I've often tried to send sunken books afloat again and it doesn't usually work. It's an uphill task at the best of times if you try. While I'd like to think this is just an after-thought as people come from another VJA book and sort of try Bellevere out of a sense of duty, I'm not sure. If I didn't want to read a book I'd skip it whether it was in a series or not. 
​
And there will be more updates. 

For now, I've decided to divide my books into two categories--some will be wide on various platforms even if I can't promote them much on Amazon; and others will be Amazon exclusive. "Keeping" something on Amazon is a relative term, inasmuch as the wide titles aren't unpublished or eliminated. I'm just marketing them more quietly, whereas ones I would like more reviews or downloads for, right now, I will keep in the Amazon promotion mill. 

The ones on Amazon are recently published, or I otherwise want to give them a bit of a push forward. The others have had lukewarm reactions, have had trouble taking off, or in some other way need a quiet, patient approach to their marketing. For instance, Ryan and Essie--in spite of its imaginative ideas--is the only book of mine to have never sold even one paid copy. That baffles me, but it's true. Facets of Fantasy is a bit harder to gauge because there was a lot of interest in it at first, but I wasn't sure what the interest consisted of and it might have worn off for a book that's a decade old. I also got so much vagueness in reactions to The Amulet of Renari that I'm not done dealing with it, because I don't know how it fell on readers. So I have two versions of Facets out, one on Amazon and one wide, and The Amulet of Renari published individually as well as in the collections. 

And there will be more updates. 

This book was begun several years ago, as part of a group project. My sister started the project and I knew most of the other members personally, some for years. So I agreed to join. There was much defensiveness last year because I portrayed some of the characters in my book as immoral, something that wasn’t done in any of the other VJA books I’ve read so far. Even my mother, who was editing it, spent literally 75% of the editing time, on a deadline, going over and over and over and over and over and over and over a few chapters early on which showed parties, a scene between Myrtle and Horace, and some slangy 30s dialogue. I had to really push her to move on and I could not see why all the concern was necessary. All of this material was light and unimportant because the characters were the same without it—cavalier, often selfish, and immoral.

But that IS the interest in Mansfield Park. I didn’t take Mansfield Park because I related to these characters. It was because MP is a story that’s rarely told right. Rarely told truthfully. Every movie, every retelling seems to get something wrong. And since finding the story that’s really in the story is what I do, I felt the task was mine since I had to join the collection. This was the story that I found inside Mansfield Park. It's a book about virtue, that’s true. Everyone praises virtuous Fanny Price or has obvious motives for bashing her. But it’s also a book about vice and most of the people interested in the book do want to discuss that side of behavior. I looked into the mirror of the story and this is what I saw. It’s not a personal reflection on me or my writing. In fact, this is my only story ever to show such characters. I don’t usually take on books with that as their hidden “true story.”

I didn’t feel the book ultimately had a lot to say in the vintage era. That’s why I switched it this year. MP was contemporary in Austen’s time and unlike some of the others it really, really needs that setting. And since telling the true story is what I do, I want Bellevere to do the best possible job of that while it’s still being marketed.

And there will be more updates.