Since I’ve already gotten all my presents from Santa, I’m going to be a little naughty in 2018. I’m going to be decadent, give in to my desires.

I’m going to go against everything I’ve ever preached on this blog.

I’m going to genre-hop.

I know. I’m sorry. There are so many reasons not to do this, and I’m going to disregard every single one. If you don’t know what they are, let me give you a short run down . . .

1. You can’t build an audience that way.
   When you’re an indie, you need to focus all your energy on writing and finding your readers. You can’t do that when you’re skipping around genres. Write one genre, focus your time on getting books out there. Eventually, you will be known for writing that genre and your readers will find you through advertising, consistent content. You’ll become known on social media as a writer for that genre. I’m not saying you can’t ever write something else, but if you’re a new writer and looking for readers, genre-hopping is the fastest way to waste time.
2. You don’t have anywhere to concentrate your energy on social media.
   Maybe, if you’re like me, and you write romance, you follow other romance writers, you follow book bloggers who blog romance, agents who rep romance. You’re networking with that genre. So, how easy do you think it would to turn around and decide you’re going to write horror? It’s not easy. There are writers who set up different twitter accounts, do this that and the other thing, and pretty soon, they aren’t writing. They’re doing social media maintenance all the time. It’s not productive.
3. This goes with number two. If you genre-hop, you may decide to write under a pen name. Pen names need new twitter handles, maybe a new website, blog posts. And that’s just what you want to do. What you have to maintain is your new Amazon author page for that pen name, and a GoodReads profile, too. Now we’re back to social media maintenance, and who wants to be online all the time? Blah.
4. It wastes time. If you decide you don’t like writing in that genre, you’ve wasted all that time you could have had writing something you like. I did that when I wrote Summer Secrets. Summer Secrets is six erotica novellas published split between two books. I think I was in the middle of writing novella 4 when I realized I didn’t want to write erotica anymore. All. That. Sex.
   
   

   Anyway, so you get the idea. By the time I was done with those six novellas, I knew I never wanted to write erotica on a regular basis. Summer Secrets, from start to finish, took me a year. Do I regret that? No. The stories are solid; I learned a lot from writing them. Not only writing but cover design, editing, etc. Every time you writing something, publish something, you learn something new, and that is experience you can’t learn in a book, no matter how much you research.

Do you want to know what I’m going to write? Sure you do! Before I wrote Don’t Run Away, I jumped into writing a high fantasy novel. It’s got everything: dragons, unicorns, wolves. Princesses, Princes, Kings, Queens. It is almost a fully completed series. Book One is 71,278 words, Book Two is 58,019,  Book Three is 114,815, Book Four is 88,005, and Book Five is 108,567, so far. Book Five not completed, as I took a break to write Don’t Run Away for my NaNo project, back in November 2015. I opened the file for Book One on January 4th, 2015.

Even though they are full of mistakes I have long since hammered out of my writing, I would feel sick if all those words went to waste. I’m confident that with what I know now, I can make those books into something I can be proud of. But it will take some work. A lot of work. And my contemporary romance schedule will be put on hold for at least a year but probably a lot longer.

Things I see I need to fix just by skimming the files as I retrieved my word count:

1. Double spaces after my periods. Yep. I’m old, and that’s how I was taught to type. I didn’t know any better then.
2. Head-hopping. I had a lot of head-hopping in Don’t Run Away, as well, and Joshua Edward Smith was nice enough to give me some much-needed feedback. Everything he pointed out in Don’t Run Away is there in that series, X 5. Will it be fun to correct all that head-hopping? Nope. Will the story sound better when I do? Yep. Fixing head-hopping is probably the hardest thing a writer can do during editing. Sometimes it requires so much rewriting and POV fixing, it can take months.
3. These are very raw, and just the amount of typos I’m going to have to fix leaves me shaking. I can type 90 words a minute, but sometimes my brain is faster than that, and it leaves me with typos and missing words.
4. Actually complete the 5th book. I need to finish book five, and I think I estimated I still need about 20,000 more words to end it. I know how I want it to end, and providing that doesn’t change, it should be easy enough. A piece of cake, really, compared to the massive amount of editing I’ll need to do before I write it.
5. If I remember correctly, the main plot is a little shaky. I’m hoping with editing and POV-fixing that will naturally sort itself out. Fingers crossed!

I’ve gone back and forth about fixing this series for a long time, mainly for the reasons I listed above. But, this is the part where I’m being bad, being naughty, and I’m just going to say it. I’m going to follow my heart, write what I want. I’ll genre-hop from contemporary romance to flat out high fantasy, but you know what? I’ll be indie here too, I don’t care. I’ll publish under a pen name, I’ll do what I’ll need to do to get it out there. I’ll hire an editor, hire a cover designer (I could never do fantasy by myself). Pay for some advertising and then leave it alone. I’ll have it out there, I’ll be proud of it, and if it flies, it flies. Like this guy.

It will set my writing schedule back by a year, maybe even two, because I know the score: editing these is going to be a labor of love. Lots of labor, but also, lots of love. I want to get my characters out into the world so you can love them, too!

That is all for now. I’m tired and being it’s Christmas Day, it’s been a long day. But I will use my blog as a way to keep you all updated on how editing is going and look for a new chat series with my friend, KT. She’s going through the publishing process for the first time, so we’ll be chatting about that up to twice a week. Tune in for newbie questions, road bumps, and hurdles that can slow you down. Use our chats and finally know what you don’t know!

Let me know what you think!