I know it seems I only put out a new book a week or so ago, but the next one is already available to pre-order. You can order Lucky Lexie book 4 now from the major online stores, and it will be released on August 20. The paperback will be available around the release date. I’m adding links as I get them to the page on my site.

This is a twisty little tale that was fun to write. I took a familiar old plot and added the wrinkle of my heroine’s ability to see ghosts. Earlier this year, I found a recent BBC production of The Lady Vanishes on a streaming service. This is a mystery/thriller about a young woman traveling by train across Europe. She strikes up a conversation with a woman seated in her compartment, has tea with her in the dining car, then falls asleep upon returning to their compartment. When she wakes, the woman isn’t there, and when she asks about her, nobody else in the compartment remembers ever seeing her. No one in the dining car seems to have seen her. But the young woman is sure she was talking to someone, and now she’s worried that something happened to her. While watching that movie, I couldn’t help but think about how much more complicated it would be if the heroine could see and talk to ghosts. How would she know if she’d imagined the whole thing, if she’d been talking to a ghost, or if everyone was lying to her?

And that kicked off the story idea. I couldn’t resist doing something like that, with Lexie meeting someone whom no one else recalls seeing. Add some of the interesting local talents and the world’s most observant (and nosy) neighborhood watch, as well as another twist or two, and I had a story.

Meanwhile, I started writing the next Lexie book this morning. This is a story idea that’s been in my head for a long time, but I didn’t have the right characters or situation to use it. It’s absolutely perfect for this series, so I’m going to have fun writing it. This one gets the characters out of their usual setting, so I got to create a new cast of supporting characters. Don’t worry, some of the regulars will be there, but there are also some new guest stars. My goal is to have this one out in time for Halloween, since it’s a nice spooky story.

In the virtual conference I’ve been attending, there were some sessions where that “find your lane and stay in it” concept came up, and then there was a Zoom roundtable discussion for the authors who, like me, completely freaked out at the very idea.

One idea that came out of the discussion was that there are different ways to find a lane. There is the narrow subgenre idea, where you’re known for something like writing sweet contemporary western romances with wounded cowboy heroes, but then there’s also more of a personal brand concept, where an author is known for delivering a particular mood or feeling that carries over through multiple subgenres.

When you look at it that way, that’s more or less what I’ve been doing all along. I made a decision when Enchanted, Inc. got a lot of YA crossover readership and was recommended as an adult book for teen readers that everything I wrote would fit into that category. Even if I’m not writing about teen characters and am not writing books that would be shelved in YA, I want my books to be teen-safe (which means they’re things parents of teens would be okay with teens reading — I know teens certainly don’t limit their reading to things their parents would want them to read). That’s within reason, since my adult books are adult books. I once got an e-mail from a reader angry that she couldn’t read one of my books with her 8-year-old daughter because the language was so bad (I think the word “bitch” came up), and I replied that I was sorry she felt that way, but the book was published for adults and wasn’t meant for 8-year-olds. Still, what I aim for is something that a teen, her cool aunt, her mom, and her grandmother could all read together in a family book club. It’s something you could put on broadcast TV with no editing.

The other thing I think is part of my brand is that my books are mostly fun. Some are more humorous than others, but even the books I don’t write as comedy should make you smile sometimes. I’m not going to drag my characters through horrible torture and lots of angst. You’ll feel good when you’re done reading one of my books.

Those two things are mostly just me being me. But to narrow it down further, I’ve decided to stick with things that have some kind of fantasy element to them. I occasionally come up with ideas that aren’t fantasy, but I think that would risk going too far afield. The people who would read, say, a non-fantasy romantic comedy are much less likely to want to read the rest of my work, while a lot of the fantasy readers wouldn’t cross over to read a non-fantasy book. I’m trying to write things I could imagine most of my readers being interested. There may be some series that some readers are less interested in, since you can’t please everyone all the time, but the idea is to keep things so that the bulk of my readers would at least be willing to give everything I write a try.

So, basically, my lane is fun fantasy books you wouldn’t mind sharing with your daughter or your mom. (I do have male readers, but my readership is so predominantly female that this is where I’m focusing.) I could narrow it further to adorkable wizards and spunky heroines, but that might be limiting myself too much. I may not be narrowed to a subgenre, but that just means people can find me from multiple angles, and if they like what they read, they’ll start searching for me rather than looking in genre categories.

How does this ring to you, my readers? Does this fit with why you look for books like mine, or were you drawn by something more specific?

I’ve mentioned that I was working on this, but it’s finally here — the e-book and paperback versions of the audiobook Make Mine Magic will be coming next week, released on July 29. You can pre-order at the major retailers.

Amazon

Apple

Barnes & Noble

Kobo

And for all others, here’s the Universal Book Link

This is a contemporary fantasy similar in style to Enchanted, Inc., but probably less funny, since I wasn’t aiming for outright comedy, and in a different fictional universe. I’ve been asked if this will be a series, but I really have no idea. I wrote it for Audible as an Audible Original, but they changed that program, so they aren’t doing more original novels. It’s mostly shorter pieces or tie-ins to existing series. So, they haven’t asked for more books. Whether I write more will depend on how well the print book sells. I left it open for a possibility of more books, but I don’t actually have a story idea for another book right now. It’s a fun little magical romp, and I wanted to release this version because I know there are people (like me) who don’t do audiobooks.

There’s more info on the book’s page on my website.

Then the next Lucky Lexie mystery will be coming in late August. I’m editing it right now, and I already have a cover done. More details later as we get closer to that time.

I figure it’s time for another Frequently Asked Questions post (and I probably need up update that page on my website) because I’ve been getting some similar questions lately.

When is the next Rebels book coming?
That’s a complicated situation. I do have plans to write another one and I’ve even done some of the research. I’ve got a general idea of what the plot will be (the second and third books went far from my original series outline, so my original plans for this book were blown up and I’m having to figure out something new). The problem with this series is that the original publisher still controls the first book. They’re doing nothing at all to promote it and have it priced outside the range that might make people try it, and since they don’t get anything out of the other books in the series, they have no reason to want to promote this book to encourage people to get into the series. Although that book was loved by teachers and librarians and made it onto several states’ lists of recommended reading, it didn’t sell well enough for the publisher to continue the series (there was also the weird thing that the editor apparently bought it with the idea that it was a standalone book, even though I submitted a series outline with it). I published the next two books myself, but they haven’t sold all that well, and since I don’t control the first book, there’s little I can do to promote the series and get new people hooked on it. Foreign markets aren’t interested in steampunk, so I haven’t managed to sell it elsewhere, and in audio, I’ve got that same problem of the original audio publisher not wanting more books, and no one else will take on the rest. That means I’m not making any additional money from these books. I calculated the time it takes me to write them, the cost of publishing them, and how much money I’ve made, and it came to less than minimum wage. So, I can’t really afford to write another book right now when there are other things that earn more for me.

However, sales of the first book are getting close to the threshold where the rights will revert to me. Then I could publish my own edition and do things to promote it to hook new readers, and then it would be worthwhile to write more books. This is yet another reason I’m not doing another book right now. If I put out a new book in the series, that would raise awareness of the series and it tends to raise the sales of all the books, which would then delay me getting the rights back.

So, the short answer is that I’ll do another book either when the sales of that series get to a point where doing more books would be worth my time or when I get the rights to the first book back.

Will there be a sequel to Make Mine Magic?
This is yet another case of a publisher buying a book from me and then not wanting to continue the series. This book was an Audible Original, so it came out exclusively in audio. But they’re discontinuing that program, not doing new novels anymore (mostly they’re doing novellas that are in conjunction with other major series, from bestselling authors, which I am not). I’m getting ready to put out a “print” (e-book and paperback) version, and we’ll see how that sells. If it sells really well, then it may be worthwhile for me to write another book and then see if Audible will buy the audio rights to it while I also put out the e-book and paperback. I wouldn’t be writing the second book under a contract where I know I’ll be paid, so I’d need to feel confident that I’ll earn something from writing it.

Will there be another Fairy Tale book?
I do want to do more books in this series because I love it, but I’m going to have to repackage it. I absolutely love the art I commissioned for this series, but that artist became a big deal in the meantime, so I can’t get her to do more covers, and that means to keep them consistent, I’d need to rebrand the series with all new covers. It would be expensive to do all new covers, and I haven’t been making a lot of money lately, so that’s a lower priority right now. I need to earn more before I have the money to spend.

What about the Enchanted, Inc. books?
I think that series is concluded. I haven’t come up with more ideas. But I have been playing with some shorter side stories, either focusing on backstory or secondary characters. We’ll see what happens with those.

I know, I sound terribly mercenary here, but I’m running a business, and I need to make a living. I don’t want to spend the hundred or so hours it takes to write and publish a book (at least), only to realize I could have made more money by spending that time working at McDonald’s. I have a bit more flexibility as a publisher than one of the major publishers might, since I don’t have full-time staff (other than myself) to pay and am not maintaining office space in New York. On the other hand, I just have the one author and can only do a few books a year, at most, so I can’t count on other authors or books to pick up the slack if one book or series fails to perform. I may not be as quick as a publisher to pull the plug on a series that isn’t selling well, but I can’t afford to devote a lot of time to a series that isn’t picking up readers. When I decide what to write, it’s a mix of how much fun it is, how much work it is/how much time that kind of book takes, how well it sells, and how likely it is to get subsidiary deals, like foreign sales or audio rights. If I could get a series to take off so that I was making decent money on it, that would give me a little freedom to work on some of these other projects that are fun, though maybe a little less profitable, but right now, I don’t have that luxury.

I’m working on the fourth Lucky Lexie book and have the fifth one planned. So far, that series is selling so-so. With more books, I can afford to maybe do a bit of promotion to try to get new readers. I’ll re-evaluate the future of that series after book 5 and some promo.

I’ve joked that I’m some kind of weird Time Lord because I have a bit of an obsession with time, even though I don’t really feel its passing. I need to wear a watch or have a clock in view to have any idea what time it is, but I’m also obsessively punctual. I hate being late, and I like having at least a general schedule. I like to observe anniversaries of even small things, noting how long ago it was when things happened, but I think that’s mostly so I’ll be aware of the passage of time. If I don’t pay attention to that sort of thing, I can lose years in my head.

I tend to apply this to my writing, as well. I keep calendars so I’ll know what’s happening when within a book, but then timelines can get complicated because it takes a lot longer to write and publish a book than it usually takes for the events in the book to happen, and that means a series will end up taking place further and further into the past, even if it started in the present.

Take the Enchanted, Inc. books. I wrote the first one in the fall of 2003, with the idea that if it sold it was likely to be published in 2005 (and I was right), so I plotted it with that in mind. I wrote book 2 in 2004, and its events immediately followed those of the first book, so it was still set in 2005, but it came out in 2006, so we were starting to fall behind, and it got worse from there. For the most part, it doesn’t make a huge difference when the books were set, since I don’t put in any obvious timestamps, until I got to where I was about 10 years ahead of the books and people started asking why Katie didn’t have a cell phone and why people didn’t just look things up on their iPhones. In 2005, it wouldn’t have been so odd for someone not to have a cell phone. At that time, I just had a tiny flip phone, and I seldom used it. It was mostly for travel, in case I had car trouble. With Katie’s life, I might not have bothered with one. They didn’t introduce iPhones until 2007. You could get some Internet on phones before then, but it wasn’t nearly as common. Cameras on phones were available, but they weren’t very good and most of them didn’t do video. The shift toward readily available digital cameras and video cameras you could put in your pocket did end up becoming part of the plot for the last book, and by that time we were well over a decade past the events of the book.

The only real way to avoid the books getting so far behind reality is to skip the events ahead to when the book is getting published, but that means missing a year or so in the life of the characters, unless you publish a lot of books a year. And then there’s the fact that people don’t necessarily read them when they’re being published. There are still people just discovering the Enchanted, Inc. books, so they’re reading about 2005 in 2021, but since I don’t put any date stamps in the books, it’s not clear that it’s meant to be 2005. The copyright date might be a hint, but that only works for the first book. You’d have to be obsessive enough to try to work out a timeline based on the copyright of the first book and hints given about when events are taking place to know when the books are set.

I started writing the Lucky Lexie books in the fall of 2019, with the idea of them being set in 2020. Then 2020 happened, and setting the books then would have totally changed everything. Since I didn’t want to deal with the pandemic, I decided to keep them in a vague, eternal quasi-present. I’m still treating them like they’re happening around now when it comes to technology levels and gauging what would have been going on for the characters in their backstories. It makes me feel kind of old to realize that most of the main characters in those books would have been in high school with the early Enchanted, Inc. books were first being published. Everything would have been online for them already and cell phones were pretty common, but they probably wouldn’t have had smart phones while they were in high school and would have been in high school in the age of blogs, before social media got big.

Because of the time lag, if I were to look at when the Enchanted, Inc. characters were in high school or college, it would be in the early 90s. Rod is about four years older than Owen, but Owen skipped some grades in school, so they were in college together for a couple of years. The way I’ve calculated it, Rod is in the college class of 1994, and that means he’s not much younger than I am, so his and Owen’s college experience wouldn’t have been too different from mine. Cell phones wouldn’t have been common, and the Internet was still in its infancy. They might have been able to get e-mail on the school network and would have subscribed to mailing lists, maybe been on Usenet, but the Web as we know it wouldn’t have been there. They might have had desktop computers in their dorm rooms, but laptops were still rare and were pretty clunky. Katie’s a few years younger than Owen, so things would have been a bit different for her by the time she got to college.

There was a huge shift around 1995 so that the world before was very different from the world after, and there was another big shift around 2007-2008. As a writer, if you’re writing contemporary (ish) fiction set in the “real” world, you need to keep in mind when your characters came of age and how their lives fit around these shifts, especially if the backstory is part of the plot or if you’re doing a backstory story. A story about Rod and Owen in college wouldn’t take cell phones into consideration. It would be a lot easier to have someone be totally out of touch. I couldn’t do that for a story about Lexie’s friends in high school or college (or for events in those characters’ pasts that affect the current storylines).

That’s what makes secondary world fantasy so much fun to write. There’s less worry about how the passage of time between books affects the story. Readers aren’t going to wonder why your characters don’t have smart phones in a book you wrote in 2003 that they’re reading in 2021.

Maybe I should put a timeline for the Enchanted, Inc. books on my website. Some authors revise books to update them when they get the rights back, but I don’t have the rights to those early books since they’re still selling, and I don’t think I want to rewrite them, anyway, since the technological shifts end up tying into the plots. If I give everyone in the early books iPhones, the “everyone has cameras now and can record magic” issue can’t just come up in the last book.

Tomorrow is new book day! This month kind of got away from me. I had planned all kinds of promo stuff, and then suddenly Mystery of the Drowned Driver is coming out tomorrow and I haven’t done anything.

At any rate, you can pre-order now and get it first thing tomorrow, and the paperback is available to order from Amazon. It will eventually be available in other places, but it takes a while to propagate through those systems. You can find the various links to order here on the book’s page.

I had a lot of fun writing this one. It includes one of my favorite ghosts, someone I kind of wish I’d used as a character before I killed her and made her a ghost, but then I’m afraid I wouldn’t have been able to kill her. I’m learning that’s one of the tricky things about mysteries. If you make the victims sympathetic and interesting enough for readers to want their murders solved, then you feel sad for having killed them. I still get weepy about the valedictorian who was killed in the backstory of the first book in this series. I’ll actually tear up thinking about her wasted potential, and then I remember that she never existed. I made her up, and she was already dead when I made her up.

I wonder if I really have the temperament to write mysteries. Until these books, I hadn’t killed a character in a novel. I generally don’t even kill villains in my fantasies. They got punished, but they lived. I’d actually planned for Mimi to get eaten by a dragon in No Quest for the Wicked, but when I got there, I couldn’t do it to her. Not so much because I liked her too much to kill her, but because I felt it would change the tone of the book too much. It was funnier for her to come out alive with no idea what had really happened.

I think having victims for murder mysteries is a little different, since their purpose in the story is to be dead. It’s not like killing off an existing character who’s been in multiple books. I don’t think I’ll be drawing upon my ongoing cast of characters to come up with new victims. I might set up future villains that way, and maybe victims for lesser crimes, but I don’t think that any of the gang of regulars is going to get murdered.

And now I really need to come up with a crime for the next book. I’ve got the character story stuff figured out. I just don’t know what the main plot will be.

In case you were wondering what would happen next with Lexie and the gang, the wait is almost over. Mystery of the Drowned Driver, book 3, is coming January 28, and you can pre-order it now. This is the fastest I’ve ever released books, but I doubt the next one will come quite so quickly. I’d already written the first draft of this book before the second book was published, and I don’t yet have a firm plot idea for book 4. The tricky thing is that I know what books 5 and 6 will be about, but going straight to the plot for book 5 would mean skipping a lot more time than I’d like, so I need to figure out something that will come in between.

I’m afraid I’ve been distracted by a number of other story ideas that have popped up and begun demanding attention. Not to mention all the events going on in the world outside my head that have been distressing and upsetting. This is a difficult time to work in a field that requires focus and creativity and that means we have to tap into our emotions to do it well. When your emotions are like “AAAAAGGGHHHHHH!” it’s hard to write, but if you shut the emotions down, you end up with something that reads like a user manual.

I’m in brainstorming mode for all the projects I’ve been working on, just thinking and jotting down ideas as they come to me. Right now, I’m letting myself play with that fantasy journey idea and seeing if it’s something I want to pursue. Next week I may go back to trying to think of mystery plots. I would like to have a new book in that series by May or so, which means I’ll have to get to work on it soon.

I used to have a button that said “so many books, so little time.” It was supposedly about reading, but it’s become true about writing, too. There are so many stories in my head, dying to get out, but I can only write one at a time, and there’s a limited amount of time I can spend writing in a day before my head explodes.

I’m putting order links on my website as I find them, and you can find the scoop on the new book on its page here. I’ll add an excerpt soon.

I finished dealing with edits on Lucky Lexie book 3, Mystery of the Drowned Driver, and that means I get to take the rest of the year more or less off. I still have some business stuff to deal with and will be doing research and brainstorming, but I’m letting that book rest before I do formatting and a round of proofreading, so there won’t be any actual writing work unless inspiration strikes me and I suddenly find myself writing a Christmas book.

Today it’s a nice rainy day, so perfect for curling up with a book and drinking tea. Though I’ve already had a whole pot of tea with a leisurely breakfast, so maybe I’ll switch to herbal tea for the afternoon or it will be caffeine overload.

In other news, I finally got my act together and made a paperback version of Spindled, the YA fantasy I posted in installments on the blog earlier this year. If you order now, you should be able to get it delivered in time for it to be a Christmas gift, especially if you’re a Prime member. The paperback will eventually be available at non-Amazon retailers, but it takes time to get through all the systems to be available there. And I make a lot more from each sale when people order from Amazon. I know they’re evil, but they are the bulk of my income. You can order the book here.

I’m really going into Christmas mode tonight with my first real viewing of a Christmas movie. I did watch one that I’d recorded earlier this week, but it was really bad and I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it. But tonight the plan is to put on the Christmas lights, make some popcorn, and settle in for a proper viewing. And probably some snarking because so many of these movies are so very bad. I know the budgets are low, but it shouldn’t cost that much more to get decent scripts. A good script could make up for the fake snow and bland acting.

This is why I might end up suddenly writing a Christmas book, in spite of my plans to relax.