Beginnings, endings, and other important things

Posted July 7, 2017 by Kelly Apple in Monstrous Matchmaker, Monstrous Tales, Writing / 0 Comments

The first week of July has been pretty stellar for me. I wrote. A lot. Which feels, you know, good. Because June ended up being a weird month where I took more time off than I thought I was going to and a bunch of real life STUFF happened (all good, but there was a lot of stuff), so getting back into that writing groove makes my muse happy.

Trust me, a happy muse is a good thing.

But being all productive and on top of things got me thinking. I’ve started the Monstrous Revelations series and…I just realized this is the final part of Ari’s story I have planned. And that’s weird.

Weird because I wrote her first book back at the end of 2013. Ari and her crazy, monster lovin’ ways had been in my head for almost four years. FOUR YEARS. Considering The Wicked Woods was supposed to be a one-off, smutty experiment in writing, I think that’s pretty incredible.

Then the idea that I’m closing out her story hits me and I get all squirrely.

Because I have a tough time with endings. A seriously tough time. My bookshelves are bulging with great trilogies of which I’ve only read the first two books. You know how it is, if I don’t read that last book, the series is still ongoing, right?

Yeah, okay. Maybe that’s not how it works outside my head, but there you go.

Writing the final series in a cycle I’ve been living with for so long is…tough. Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited to do it. I’ve had the idea for this series rattling around in my head for a while and I WANT to tell it.

But saying goodbye is hard. So I soothe the muse by reminding myself that just because I’m closing out a series, it doesn’t mean I can’t ever return to it. (Not going to lie, that’s something I tell myself EVERY series.)

And since I do better when I have accountability, I’m going to lay out my plans for this series. While these plans may change somewhat down the line, this is what I’m aiming for now.

  • Like Monstrous Tales and Monstrous Matchmaker, the Monstrous Revelations series will be serialized. At this point, I’m planning 8-10 installments of between 8-10K words each. For scale, MT was 10 books long and MM was 8, so this is in line with the others books in the cycle.
  • The working title for book 1 is Monstrous Connections. I’m REALLY liking how it ties in with what happens in the book, though, so I won’t be surprised if the working title becomes the actual title.
  • I’m planning on an end of 2017, beginning of 2018 release for the series. To be honest, I’m leaning more toward Jan of 2018 for book 1, but that all depends on if I can whip the two books I’m planning for Nov/Dec into shape for release (It’s probably just my anxiety, but they feel like they need a lot of work right now).

 

There you have it. Beginnings and endings and all those things that make up the middle.

Now I’m off to play in fictional worlds and make a wicked nymph do spectacularly naughty things.

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