Fiction Friday: December Progress Report

My overarching goal, if you may remember, is to release a trilogy of paranormal romances in the fall of 2018.

At the end of last month, I was feeling optimistic. I knew that to reach that goal, I needed to finish an editor-ready draft of the second book, The Demon's in the Details, and be ready to start on the third book, a Faust story about a writer who sells her soul to the devil to make the New York Times bestseller list, in January.

I was feeling pretty good about meeting that goal.

Unfortunately, December proved to be one of those months that afflicts both men and mice--my plans went agley,.

November and December are tough months for writing. I've always figured that the person who thought it was a good idea set NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, in November was a man, who wasn't going to need to combine Christmas shopping and making a turkey feast with with all that writing.

Despite the start to the holidays, I came pretty close to meeting goal in November. Part of how I achieved that was by putting off buying Christmas gifts for my dozen or so grandkids, which left all that to be done in December. Along with putting up the tree, hosting Christmas Eve, visiting my daughter on Christmas Day and getting together for lunches all month with wonderful people I see all too seldom.

But to be honest, all that holiday-making wasn't the real problem.

The real problem was I got stuck. I hit a point in Book 2 where I needed to know why Satan was so determined to collect up my protagonist's sculpture (left to her by her artist mother). With some Skype-advising from Jilly, a couple of phone calls with my clever older sisters, and some quality time with the brilliant plotting group from my RWA Chapter, I was finally able to resolve the issue in a way that was not only satisfactory, but makes the whole book a lot stronger and more cohesive.

So, yay! but also, How the heck did it get to be the end of December already?

Needless to say, I'm not going to meet my December goal. I now expect to finish my editor-ready draft by the end of January. That means I'm running a month behind on starting The Demon Wore Stilettos, which was already going to be a fire-drill to finish in time to meet my June date with my editor.

All that said, I did make one solid bit of progress last month. I lined up my first guest blog post to promote The Demon Always Wins when it's released in September. I'll be guest blogging over at Nancy Lee Badger's blog, Happy Ever After Meets the Road Less Traveled on September 7th. Hoping it's the first of many!