Happy new year! After taking a couple of weeks off for the holidays for the first time in years (usually I have a deadline early in the new year, since editors and agents love to clear their desks before they go on holiday, and they expect the revisions they requested soon after they get back to work), I’m ready to get back into the swing of things and charge into the new year.

I’ve got a book launching this week, my first Audible Original. That means it’s an audiobook only for the first year. If you’ve been thinking about giving Audible a try, now would be the time. There may be a print edition coming after that, but that will depend on a lot of things.

I’ve also heard from the narrator for the audiobooks of the Enchanted, Inc. series, and book 9 will be coming soon. She was getting to work on it last month.

I’m developing a new series that I hope to launch later this year. I’m trying to get a few books written before the launch so I can make a bigger splash. This one is structured more like a traditional mystery series, but it still has magical elements and a dash of romance. I have a first draft of the first book and am revising that, as well as starting to plot book 2.

And I’m starting to do the research to build a new fantasy world where I can set a series of semi-standalone novels — the connecting tie for the series would be the world, with some overlapping characters, but the plots of each book would more or less stand alone. You’d get more out of the story if you read all the books, but you wouldn’t be totally lost if you hadn’t. At least, that’s the idea.

I don’t have a lot of book events planned this year. I’m still waffling on whether to attend the Nebula Awards conference or possibly the World Fantasy Convention. I’m not really getting invited to conventions or other book events these days. But I think this is mostly going to be a year for buckling down and writing. You have to have something written before you can sell or promote it, so there’s not much point in going to a con for either promotion or networking unless you’ve got something ready to go.

So, off to work, and here’s to a fabulous 2020.