With the release of my next Celia Roman novel A Witch and Her Familiar (Vanessa Kinley, Witch PI, Book 2) a few days past, I'm already anticipating the release of the next book in the series.

Mostly, that means the writing end of things. When the manuscript for A Witch and Her Familiar was finalized, I took a couple of weeks off from writing to brainstorm the next book, Black Witch Rising.

This is the first novel I've brainstormed since recovering from burnout, so I was a little tentative about the outlining process. Admittedly, part of the hesitation comes from losing my sounding boards; I no longer have anyone to bounce ideas off of, so the ideation part of my process occasionally feels short-circuited.

But part of it also has to do with the way I create stories within a series.

This harkens back to my days as a baby writer, during the development of the Daughters of the People Series (Lucy Varna).

Years before I wrote the first novel, The Prophecy, I created a list of titles along with brief one to three sentence descriptions of what should happen in each one.

When I began writing those stories, writing them out of order never occurred to me. Each story depends too heavily on events in the previous stories, and I don't know all of those until I actually write that story.

In the same way, I don't write chapters or scenes out of order. I may brainstorm future pieces of the story, but I don't (usually) write them until I get to their proper place in the story; the present always depends on the past, as far as writing is concerned.

My writing, anyway. I know several writers who can write scenes out of order and they do just fine. Noted indie SciFi author Chris Fox does so, I believe, and so does Urban Fantasy author Larry Correia.

At times, I wish my brain worked that way, too. Alas! It doesn't, so I lean into that and the result tends to be a tightly woven story.

(Speaking solely of my process and the outcomes here. That statement isn't meant as a judgement of anyone else's process or stories. To each his or her own, and we're all the better for it.)

Anyway, working on Black Witch Rising reminded me of the developmental work I'd done with the Daughters of the People Series. When I initially put the Vanessa Kinley books up for preorder (to release last year), I crafted a solid blurb for A Witch and Her Familiar (Book 2) because I had already partially developed it and had a good sense of its major story threads.

Black Witch Rising (Book 3), however, only got a one-sentence description. Book 4, A Witch Called Justice, got even less: a vague tagline saying something like, "The stunning conclusion to the Vanessa Kinley Series!"

Lame, right?

That's because I didn't then have a clear enough idea of what would happen in each book to add any meat to the descriptions. Yes, I had a vague idea (the titles tell a story all on their own, if you know the series' major story threads), but that's about it. And I won't know enough about what happens in those stories to write a solid blurb until it's time to write them.

If I can't even write blurbs for future stories, there's no way I could write major stories in a series out of order or nonsequentially.

(Although I do write short stories out of series order, but that's a different situation all together; generally speaking, they only describe past events that have already happened, and any influence they have on future events have already been accounted for within the stories describing said future events. If that makes sense.)

Of course, ideas for future books do occur to me as I'm writing previous ones. I dutifully jot those down in the appropriate places and use them to jumpstart the development process when it's time to write them.

That part of my writing process has flooded back with a vengeance over the past couple of months. I'm so thrilled, too, as it makes the actual writing so much easier.

Black Witch Rising, for example, is coming along at a much faster clip than I expected. Certainly, it's coming along faster than its immediate predecessor. A good chunk of that is because, thanks to the intensive work needed for burnout recovery, my personality and writing process are more aligned; and because they're better aligned, ideas for Book 3 popped up during the writing of Book 2, which in turn is allowing Book 3's story to unfold more quickly.

Leaning into one's strengths for the win, right?