The last weeks, months, year have been especially awful in one regard or another. I don’t get political on my blog or on social media. I’ve pulled away from social media for the most part and don’t have plans to return to the drama and negativity anytime soon.
Given the state of things around this country I call home, yet fail to understand most of the time, and the state of the world we all live in, the only world we have, the following performance from the 2010 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremonies in Vancouver by K.d. Lang of the late Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, should serve as a reminder that we all need to come together, to love one another, to respect one another, and that when we do, it’s a beautiful thing.
So, I just had a new release (and yes I did sneak that buy button in there). It’s getting some great reviews and I’ve received some interesting, supportive, and bordering on obsessive emails and messages regarding the series. I love that people enjoy it, especially since I’m so far out of my element with what’s contained in the rest of this post.
The following image is one of my whiteboards. It has arrows and colors and a very, very, very loose idea of how I’ll be connecting several shifter series… Read this one as ‘Lissa’s brain on coffee’
It’s not pretty, but I do understand it… I see the overall picture…
This is a visual idea of what my brain looks like with the details and even with some of the overall idea of what I’m attempting to do…
Notice the difference? My mind is a scrambled mess of interwoven details and ideas and thoughts and “OMFG WTF am I doing?” Read this one as ‘Lissa’s brain on coffee but obviously laced with something because there’s no freakin’ clarity’
I know you want the next book. Some book. Any book that has to do with the shifters… Many want more Gus and Bex. Many still want the rest of Denali Heat. Some now also want the wolves that I’ve introduced. So on, and so forth. I get it. I really do.
Denali Heat books (This is indicated on the whiteboard in the upper left corner that got cut off)… Those are different. The first one is still at Samhain Publishing and I can’t have it back, yet. It will need to be revised and added to in order to incorporate it into the huge, jumbled mess I’ve shown you above. I can work on that before I get the rights back and get back to working on the next book in the series, but it won’t be available to anyone until I get the rights back to Arctic Shift.
Just bear with me as I try to figure out how to do what it want to do…
Just bear with me as I try to untangle my brain.
In the process, I’m also working on the new contemporaries I promised earlier in the year. My ‘Fuck You if you don’t like what I want to write’ books.
When I wake up in the morning, I grab my phone and check email, Facebook, Twitter, my Amazon KDP dashboard (this one always makes me want to pull the covers over my head and hide), and Pinterest.
Twitter isn’t often fun for me anymore. My feed is full of links to blogs, books…things so scheduled out that I’m never sure anyone is actually there. I hate that. I understand the need and ability to schedule tweets or send all your social media posts automatically, but it’s called SOCIAL for a reason… and Twitter is meant to be social. My feed is no longer social. It’s a bunch of headlines and links. No engagement, no investment. This is fine and works for some. Not me. I like a good mix of interaction and links to what’s out there beyond my usually small window.
But today, I found some inspiration on Twitter…the most unlikely of places.
I’m a sports fan. We all know this about me. If you don’t know it, stick around, you will soon enough. After all, football season is only 5 months away. 😉 And golf is getting into full swing… (see what I did there?)
But, I’m a race fan. It goes back to when my son was little and seeing the cars on the track on TV helped him speak, helped him learn, helped him stand…
I’ve got a small racing series I write that I hope becomes a bigger series with spins offs and all sorts of fun. I have to be careful with the terms I use in my books, terms like Nascar, and the images I use on covers. But the basics of my book series stem from stock car racing, my own little fictional world where I can have and voice opinions, where I can share a few things I’ve learned over the years going to races, listening to radios and scanners, touring pit road, and seeing the garages.
And while I’ve been considering a spin-off, one of the directions I didn’t even know I wanted to go in hit me hard this morning. It was a total light bulb moment. It is a brilliant and fun and so full of possibilities direction, I can hardly stand it.
And this, my friends, is what writing is all about for me. It’s all about passion. What I’m passionate about. It’s not really going to sell a lot, because I’m not writing in a trending sub-genre of roamnce. I’m not changing who I am to write something. Through my writing, I am finding me, and I think that makes for a better, more fun book because it’s a journey I can take readers on.
What is this new idea? Nope. Not sharing yet. What I will say is it’ll be full of fast cars, strong women, and hot yummy guys… And you’ll see more information soon.
I love inspiration and being inspired and when it comes along in places I no longer really enjoy, that’s makes it all the more special because it makes me realize that perhaps I shouldn’t give up just yet…
If you don’t follow me on Twitter, click HERE. I would love to tweet with you.
This is an idea I’ve been pondering for a while. It’s not about writing a book or changing the world. It’s about having fun, doing something I love (aside from writing), connecting with readers, bloggers, other authors who might enjoy it too.
I’m going to start a baking group called Books ‘n Baking. Sort of a take on Julie and Julia and sort of a take on an idea that a food blogger I follow is doing, but with my own spin. (No, we’re not going to bake our way through a Julia Child tome, I promise.)
The premise is, we take a cookbook (a general baking one) and bake our way through it for a year. One recipe a month. And then, we blog about it. The why, the what, etc… (more…)
