I don’t even know where to begin with this blog. How do I update you on everything that’s happened since April last year? I’ll try and get the blog updated with all my old newsletters because I write heaps in those if you’ve missed them and want to catch up.
Needless to say, 2021 was a complete shitshow for me. Despite everything, I somehow managed to get through the Harrison’s Wedding release.
I’d hit the 50k mark on The Stalker the day that Jared died and the remaining 85k took me a whopping 18 weeks to write. I told everyone that I was going to be kind to myself and allow myself the space to not hit the deadlines for The Stalker and Sebastian’s Baby.
That was a lie.
I was giving myself no space, even in my time of deep grief, to not publish when I was meant to. So I knew that by taking too long to write The Stalker, I was eating away at the time I had available to write Sebastian’s Baby.
I finished it with exactly eight weeks to the SB deadline. I think The Stalker actually ended up being my favourite book in the series. It’s cute and fun and I love it. That eight-week deadline to write Sebastian’s Baby was horrendous, though.
The Baby is 174k, so I knew that it would be long because the other hero series books had both been about 20k longer than the heroine version.
I ended up writing Sebastian’s Baby in six weeks to the day and it was 204k words.
Never again.
I moved on to Wicked Opportunity. Remember forever ago when I said I wrote dirty fics about Sebastian and Heather? Well, that’s going to be a trilogy of its own now.
Wicked Opportunity comes out on January 11th and is currently available to pre-order by clicking this link. I actually really love it.
When I finished writing it, as a joke, I took all of the plot out to see exactly how much of the book was smut. My RH author friend, Vera Valentine, coined the measurement unit Smut-By-Volume and Wicked Opportunity is 64.58% SBV (I checked), so I made this teaser:
Truth in advertising, right? I rounded down because the whole number looked prettier and I didn’t want to lie and say it had 65% smut! 🤣
I’m currently 61,109 words into book two, Wicked Betrayal, and that’s currently sitting at 71.79% SBV so that’s going well. I really love the reverse harem genre and I’m excited to publish my first RH next week.
I’m not completely finished with contemporary romances, though. I still have April Conway’s trilogy to write, with the first book coming out on July 8th (her birthday, of course). I also have Hayden’s Stalker, which releases on October 23rd and will be the final book in the whole Cruise Control series.
I’m still writing in their world, though, and I love seeing those characters pop into other books. They show up in Wicked Opportunity and will play a big role in April’s books. 💗
I have big plans for this year starting with me going back to the Gabriel’s Album project. I abandoned it when I was having technical issues last year, but I’m back on track now. This project is where I’m reading the entire book on YouTube chapter by chapter and also doing a discussion video breaking down each chapter.
It was a lot of stress trying to do two videos a week and I want to do other videos as well, so I’m going to do one video a week on this project releasing it every Tuesday. I’ll start by uploading the chapter five discussion video this week!
You can find a playlist with all the videos by clicking this link. If you could also subscribe to my YouTube channel, I’d really appreciate it because I’m trying to get to 100 subscribers so I can change the channel name. 😘
I think that’s basically everything that’s happened in the last year. On a more personal note, Christmas was obviously really hard. Jared’s loss was felt deeply. I think the times that are meant to celebrations are probably the ones that hit the hardest. We had Christmas breakfast at the cemetery sitting on my grave. I do get a giggle out of having a cemetery plot and if I don’t laugh, I’ll cry.
Anyway, if you’ve read all of this long post, thanks for being amazing and thanks for sticking with me through my author journey. My readers are the best readers and that is a hill I will die on! 🥰