It’s Read Around the Rainbow time!!! On the last Friday of every month, we’re a group of authors who get together and blog about the same topic. This, the last month of the year, we figured we’d do a looking-back-at-the-year-that’s-been and what-we-have-planned-for-2024 kind of post.
As Holly, the goal was one new story a month. This is the third year I’ve done that, and I’m quite pleased with myself for having managed it. My stories have been longer this year, and it’s been a bit hectic to be able to meet all the deadlines. I’m not a person who likes to cut things short. I show up twenty minutes early for every appointment and have zero understanding of people who are late 😆 I don’t like handing in stories on the day of the deadline, but I have several times this year.
I’ll try to do better.
Those twelve new stories (I have a couple of box sets too, but they are of previously published stories, so I’ll just disregard them in this post) add up to about 395,500 published words.
Just for the fun of it, I added up the 2022 stories and the total word count there was 317,500, so I’ve written 78k more this year compared to last.
Of my 2023 stories, only one is contemporary (Dear John). The rest are paranormal. We have six shifters, one alien, four vampires, and the contemporary one.
It’s been a lot of fun!
2024
I’m behind! 😅 Nah, I’m okay deadline-wise so far. I’m currently working on Holly’s April story, so the first quarter has already been submitted. But I promised JM, my publisher, that I’d send her a list of the days I would write stories for, so we could add them to the release schedule, and I haven’t.
I will. I might even do it today. I have some days decided, I just need to make up my mind. What messes things up for me is that when I started Holly, I told myself I would only write standalone stories. I’d write something for the fun of it and then never revisit that universe or the characters.
Series stresses me out. In series, there is a reader expectation pressure that never manifests with standalone stories. In a way, it’s fun, because it means readers like what I write, but it’s also creating the fear of disappointment. You know how it is. You fall in love with the sidekick, and you want to read their story, and then when it comes out, it’s not at all what you expected. I wanted to escape that, so I was only gonna do standalone, but now I’ve set myself up for series.
And I love some of my series. Like the Dragon Row stories. They’re standalone and yet a series. But then we have The Vampire Chew Toy stories that I want to write more of but don’t really know where to start. I want to write more in The Birthday Bear world. I want to write more blood witches. I want to write about the rescued blood slaves in Vampire Food, and I want to write more stories in Last Hope (Panther’s Luck). The result is that I sit here a bit paralyzed and can’t decide on what days to write, or which world to revisit, and a little scared of making the wrong decision.
The plan is to continue monthly releases and, so far, I have:
❤️ January: The Dragon’s Prisoner (Dragon Row)
🧡 February: Squirrel Hunt (A Scurry of Squirrels)
💛 March: The Snaccident
The rest will solve itself, right? Yes, it will.
Holly Day 
Lots to be proud of! Congratulations!!
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thank you ❤️
LikeLiked by 1 person