Agony and ecstasy…

Dear Diary,

The agony and the ecstasy of writing a series… I never envisioned when I started writing the Nephilim pentalogy (five-book series) that I would have such a hard time sticking to it. The problem isn’t that I’m bored with the series or disenchanted in any way, but that I have so many other things I want to write in so many different genres (through a handful of pen names) that it’s hard to sit down and give all my attention to just one.

I have creative ADD. I’m not writing that lightly. I come up with an idea for a story and immediately set to outlining, rough drafting, and flushing it out before I remember that I’m supposed to be working on something else entirely. So I end up archiving it for later and reluctantly (painfully) pulling out whatever it is I’m supposed to be working on.

Repeat.

You should see my backlog of almost finished/unfinished stories. It’s horrific. There are so many…

Recently this creative ADD manifested with the Exitium Mundi series. See, I had finished the first Nephilim book, Daybreak, and as I was rough drafting the second installment, Prisoner, I decided to take a break and expand upon the universe a bit by flushing out some of the backstories for a few of the newly introduced characters. I figured I would write a short story entitled Exitium Mundi, which would deal with not only the new characters but serve as a catalyst for the event of the same name. I wanted to keep it short, around 7,500 words or under, and I would include it as a bonus to the paperback version of Prisoner. I do this kind of thing all the time with my paperbacks, so I figured it would be easy.

I was wrong.

I wrote the story fine, but it kept getting longer as I added more detail, fleshed out the characters, introduced new concepts and twists… to make a long story short, I ended up with five books totaling 300 pages and over 121,000 words. Not quite the short, 7,500-word story I envisioned. 🙄

I realized after I laboriously bore that child that I needed help. I needed to rethink my writing process and prioritize my projects, else I would never produce the things I really wanted to. So I devised a new system of what equates to a sort of creative tunnel vision – using any ideas towards Nephilim instead of new projects, and trying to find a way to integrate the sporadic ideas that randomly drop in my head into the current storyline. It’s a lot of fun so far and has led to some really unexpected results. Some exciting results. I love it.

So my focus is going to be solely on Nephilim until the series is complete. It has to be. Otherwise, I’ll get so lost in other projects that it will never get finished. And, in the future, I’m keeping series (not counting Voyeur or the Dark Jubilee) at a trilogy max.

Because of my new system, I am already about 52% finished with Nephilim: Prisoner. 🙌 So bear with me, beloved readers. You’ll have it in your hands before you know it. And you won’t have to wait long for the third, fourth, and fifth books either. Progress, y’all!

#Alexa

 

💡 The More You Know 💡

We’ve all heard of aphrodisiacs such as strawberries and oysters helping to put men and women in the mood, but what about apples? One 2014 study found that women who ate apples more than once a day reported better self-lubrication and overall sexual function compared to women who ate less than one apple a day.

 

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