I have some news: I no longer will be publishing two novels a year for a couple years at least. This is sad but excessively relieving news, otherwise known as bittersweet.
If you've read my books, you'd know I was publishing two YA romance series simultaneously: the fantasy trilogy Celestial Spheres and the paranormal trilogy The Immortal Transcripts. The next up would've been book 2 of Celestial Spheres titled Fever. This book will now be delayed and come out in 2022.
Why? Let's say it is complicated. My publisher had to scale back. Covid has forced them--and me--into a situation where everything from children's schooling to the day jobs is just so overwhelmingly time consuming thanks to Covid. My day job is a college Lecturer. I literally only wrote over the summer and fell behind. I was going to miss my deadline for book 3 of this same series. It's done, but it is not pretty. We decided on one book a year and negotiated which one that would be. I decided on finishing the Celestial Spheres trilogy and push back The Immortal Transcripts a year.
So in 2021, I will still have Bladesung published, book 3 and the ending of Toury and Alex's Celestial Spheres story. I do plan on other works dealing with other Sapphirians later on, but it meant a lot to me to finish their story first.
A positive is my publisher did not shut down as so many small businesses have as well as big publishers closing imprints and merging to sustain themselves. Second, this gives me time to catch up. I had rushed my last books and with the editors needing to rush, we might not get the best quality. Now I can give them great polished drafts and they can get through them quicker. Third, I can also catch up, more importantly, in life. I will be able to direct more attention to my child. I will have time to pick back up exercising since it fell away, literally not having 5 minutes to spare since my Covid life has been to homeschool and teach my students back and forth from 7:30-5:00 pm, run errands, make and eat dinner (think I missed my own lunch often), bath and bedtime for the kid, then grade or write, then bed. Next day repeat. Now, I might still have those days, but I can delay the writing to the summer if needed and squeeze in 20 minutes on the elliptical. Fourth, it might give me time to develop and query my pen-named children's books, as well as so many shelved projects I wasn't sure what to do with. Next year, when the pandemic is hopefully a footnote in history, I could blow the dust off them, revise them, and try to publish those. It would be great to one day again be able to publish two books a year, maybe three.
The future is looking bright. I have sixteen books, and some short stories, that have a home already or will in the future, so what more could I ask for? I also might get ahead to the point I can write other projects I have always longed to complete but never had the time. This delay is a blessing in disguise. As always, what you do with a setback in life, how you view it, speaks volumes. I strive always to be positive, and my 2020 was a rough one and 2021 is starting off tough too, but it is all in the way you look at things. I will never let anything shut me down or stop me finding the positives.