Another One Down

Okay, wow. When things get moving they get moving. Last week I finished my first draft of Biker Blues and put it to the side so I can go back and edit it with fresh eyes. I still wasn’t quite feeling Lucky and I gotta be in a specific headspace to work on Marriage in Reverse. That left me either Moonlight and Storm or Ace of Wands.

So I sat down, started typing, and when I blinked, the first draft was finished.

Don’t take this the wrong way. The Tarot Mafia series is going to be a mammoth one, so the books are all much shorter. Ace of Wands is only 40,000 as opposed to both Wolves and Rain books I’ve written, which were 80,000 a piece by the time I finished. If I’m being honest, I took a lot longer to write Ace of Wands than I wanted, but I’ll get into that and the nitty gritty of the story on another update blog.

So, since I finished two first drafts in as many weeks, I did something I’ve been avoiding: I made a Patreon. It has terribly named tiers and no real content yet, but I made it! It exists in the world now!

I’m not under the impression this is taking off any time soon. I have a lot of books and ideas, but no cover art, no promotional art, and, sadly, no funds to commission something at a price to compensate the artists (because we respect artists in this household). Right now my writing update posts are getting minimal engagement, and I have no clue what I’m doing marketing-wise.

But I saw a post on reddit that really got me thinking. I can’t remember the whole kit and caboodle, but the gist of it was “is anyone here writing just for the love of the game?”

Yes, I want to make money off my books. I want to get some kind of income to supplement everything else, but something I always say to friends, family, coworkers is “we work with what we have”.

I write these novels either in the bathtub as I hide from a Velcro toddler or in between calls at a job that, thankfully, doesn’t mind me writing Fae romance as long as it’s on a machine with no camera.

Can I, theoretically, write the next great romance like this? Yes. There is a non-zero chance.

There’s also a non-zero chance I’ll win the lottery. If I gotta pick, I’d rather the latter.

So, for today and this weekend, I’ll just relax. I’ll read terrible but entertaining Time Travel Fix It fanfictions. Maybe write a couple of chapters of my Dragon Age Isekai fanfiction that will never see the light of day, and just let my brain rest. Next week, I’m tackling line by line editing for Wolves and Rain and Howls and Thunder so I can get started on Moonlight and Storm. I’ll see how much writing I can get done for that the next few days and go on from there.

I’ll also start looking for a Beta reader. My husband and friends are great, but I can’t meet up with them often, and if I make my husband listed to the first quarter of Wolves and Rain one more time it might drive him clinically insane instead of just socially.