Over the last year and a half, my writing output has diminished greatly as I’ve suffered from more MS-related relapses and fatigue attacks. I’ve had to take a long hiatus from all writing and most editing to give my brain a chance to recover from the stress of last year, and that’s also meant reassessing the projects I have ongoing. I still feel confident that I can complete most, but there is one exception, and I’ve spent a long time debating what to do with the Mystical World Wars series.
When I first got started writing, it was nothing for me to crank out a book a month, and my plans with the series were to create a world where all the various tangents existed in the same time line. I had all of these mystical races crossing over from one book or the other, and the ultimate plan was to bring them all into a huge final conflict. This would have taken me close to fifty novels to do so, and I managed to publish twelve, with another four completed and awaiting final edits.
However, as my ability to write consistently has dwindled, I’ve worried more and more about leaving the few readers buying the books without closure. It’s not fair to them, and I feel like it’s better to remove those books from my vendors and focus on what I know I can finish. This is why, effective immediately, all twelve books have been taken off of the virtual shelves at Amazon, Kobo, Nook, and my Blog bookstore.
I am not giving up on writing or publishing. I’m just changing how I write to ensure that I don’t leave readers hanging. Unless a series is meant to be open-ended with no defined final book, I’ve been writing the whole series before publishing the first book. For instance, all the books in the Alice the Wolf series are done. I’ve even got cover art and a general release schedule for them. I plan to release them one per year so readers won’t be overwhelmed by too many releases all at once.
Beyond Alice’s books, I’ve got a pair of sequels for The Life and Death of a Sex Doll and a new trilogy to complete the Zombie Era series. After that, the future is a bit more hazy. I plan to put out new books in the Sandy Morrison and Tobe White series, and I’m working on two other projects that could work out to a trilogy and another multi-book series.
I want to close this update with an apology to the people who read any of the arcs from the Mystical World Wars. I feel like I’ve let y’all down by not being able to finish things properly. But it’s no longer possible for me to work the way I had been when I started a little over ten years ago, and if I tried, I’d only make myself worse. I suspect that in the process, the books would also suffer a decline in quality, and I’d rather pull the plug and divert my energies into shorter projects to ensure I never leave y’all hanging like this again.