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…
Back when Sunshine Walkingstick popped into my head in September 2014, I seriously considered publishing her stories under my first pen name, Lucy Varna. Two years later, when the first Sunny novel was published, I decided that her stories were dissimilar enough from the Lucy Varna stories that I should publish them separately. Thus was the Celia Roman pen name born. Over the past few years, I’ve rethought that decision, often with a twinge of regret. How much farther along…
Spoiler alert: If you haven’t read the entire Daughters of the People Series to date, you may want to do so before reading this post as it contains serious spoilers. I’m working on Redemption, the penultimate Daughters of the People novel, right now. Well, I’ve been working on it for quite a while, since October 2017 to be precise. Long before that, I added the title in as an extra to the series. India Furia, the main female character, kept…
Note: Most of this post was originally published in January 2014 on a now-defunct blog. My process hasn’t changed significantly since then, only now I have the experience to understand exactly how hard it is to write when I deviate too much from this process. Lessons learned! Yesterday*, I promised to share the techniques I used to plot and write my first novel, in the hopes of helping another would-be author who’s having similar problems. I didn’t expect for that…