What's Next?

I have something of a love/hate relationship with this question. On the one hand, I’m a planner. It’s in my nature to constantly ask myself what I should be working on right now so that I know what I’ll work on after that and when I can get to the other thing that I can do while I’m waiting for this and so on. I always want to be working toward some goal, usually several.

On the other hand, I’m sort of insane. I spend too much time thinking about and revising my plans to make sure everything I do still fits into a plan when “life” happens. Sometimes my favorite goal is having good goals. I have, for example, already spent a lot more time planning what to write for this month’s blog post than I will spend actually writing it. It’s possible to make the argument that I’m really dedicated to creating good content or that I… Let’s just stick with dedicated.

I was thinking about what comes after my Coffee and Donuts series long before I finished that series. I have a rough draft of the next book. The part I haven’t figured out is whether or not I’ll release it with a pen name. My children (one of them in particular) have been asking me for some time to please, please, please write something that is not a love story. My next two releases will be children’s novels. They are a pair of adventures with no love interests in sight.

This is a temporary reprieve for the kids. I’m also planning a new Christian romance. I expect it will not be part of a series, but it’s currently a few pages of notes and imagination. I have time to revise that plan. I’m hoping it will be finished sometime next summer.

In the meantime, I’m about to release large print editions of the four main Stories From Hartford novels. This sounded easy. Just change the font size, right? I only predicted a couple of days for the project. But changing the font size changes the page count, which increases the spine, which requires a larger gutter and a new cover file. I also need to register new ISBNs. And revising all the books at once lets me clean up a few things that weren’t uniform in the originals. Every time I tweak something in one book, I have to tweak the other three to match. Yeah, I have to. It’s part of the plan.