Day 1045 - Figuring out my next contemporary novel

I really thought I’d have more time to write today, but it seemed like it was just one thing after another this morning. I had a lot of technical difficulties today—an app I use daily on my phone suddenly stopped working, and I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out what happened. Then I had issues with an alarm coming from our external hard drive, and I had to see what the problem was and figure out how to turn off the alarm. And finally I had issues booting up my dictation software, Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Granted, it’s version 13 and my ancient Mac Mini is coughing and sputtering, but it had worked fine the last time I did dictation a month ago.

I was shocked to realize that I last dictated on March 1st and it’s now April 12th, so it’s been 6 weeks since I did dictation. No wonder it felt so rusty. But I’m very glad that I managed to get about 30 minutes of dictation done today on my Regency book. Unfortunately, because of the technical problems, it took over an hour to get it transcribed.

I also did some work on the Hawaii book today, finishing the scene I didn’t complete yesterday, so I feel rather good that I got that done. I’m working ahead of schedule at the moment (it’s the serial novel being posted monthly on my blog) so after one more chapter, I’ll have done the writing for the book for the rest of the year. That will be a good stopping point, and then I’ll work on the new contemporary novel I plan to release in October this year as part of a multi-author box set.

I had originally intended to make that book into the first in my Hawaii series (the current book is a prequel). However, I’m rethinking that because I don’t want to have the first book in the series be released as part of a multi-author box set. At the same time, if I make it into another prequel, that’s THREE prequels to this Hawaii series, which seems ridiculous.

I considered making the box set book be part of another series. After all, I have the Sushi series, the Protection for Hire series, and my Sonoma series, and I could just write a novella in one of those story worlds.

But since the box set will be garnering me a lot of readers who might not otherwise know who I am, I want the book to be something that will lead them to my current contemporary project, which is the Hawaii series.

And while I wouldn't mind writing another book in the Sushi series or the Protection for Hire series, I don’t want to write another book in the Sonoma series, which is a much more serious series and more typical of romantic suspense.

Protection for Hire involves two characters who are already together, so I’d have to come up with a completely different character in order to make it a romance, and I don’t want to do that since it isn’t in the style of the other books in the series.

I suppose I could do a final book in the Sushi series, since I have a single cousin left, who had been a minor character in all 4 books. In order to point it to my Hawaii series, I could have characters from the Hawaii series appear in the novella. But would that be enough to lead readers to my Hawaii series?

It might if the Sushi book were set in Hawaii, with more of the flavor of the Hawaii series than the Sushi series. So maybe that’s an option?

Actually, the more I blog about it, the more feasible it seems. It will finish off the Sushi series once and for all, so it will technically be part of the Sushi series and not the Hawaii series. But since it will involve characters from my Hawaii series and be set in Hawaii, I can do my best to make it feel like a prequel to my Hawaii series. It might even be fun to have those Sushi characters appearing in my Hawaii series, too, even though I hadn’t planned on it.

Now I’m glad I decided to blog about this. I think I could make this work. I’ll need to do some brainstorming about this—which would be good to do over dictation, so that’ll also give me more practice with dictation so I can get used to it again.

I am a bit hesitant to stop work on the prequel serial novel in order to work on the box set book, but I know it’s absolutely necessary. I just hate that I’ll probably forget about a lot of the serial novel’s plot. And I know I won’t be able to work on three novels at once, so if I have to sacrifice one, it has to be the serial novel, especially since I’m ahead in the writing.

I suppose I’ll work on the box set book tomorrow instead of the serial novel. Hopefully I can brainstorm some ideas. Unfortunately I might have to reread the Sushi series, which will take a long time since I’m such a slow reader, but it can’t be helped.

Anyway, I only got 90 minutes of work done on my Regency and Hawaii series today—30 minutes dictation, 22 minutes cleanup editing, and a little more than 30 minutes revising/editing the Hawaii book. I’m disappointed that I didn’t get more done, but a lot of time was wasted in trying to boot up my dictation software, and I still don’t know if I actually fixed anything.

Hopefully, I’ll be better tomorrow and be able to focus better and work longer hours. I knew it would be tough getting back into dictation, but this is pretty rough in terms of my (lack of) self-discipline. It would be better if I were on a dictation streak, which I might be able to do now that I’m back home and back on a regular schedule.