Hey everybody! It’s been a while since I’ve been online, but I promise I had good excuses! I’ve had a few bad bouts of writer’s block over the past couple years (I blogged about how I coped with it on my Story Sensei blog), and I also was unsure about how I wanted to structure my Lady Wynwood series.
When writing The Spinster’s Christmas, a lot of plot and character twists came up that I hadn’t expected when plotting the book. I was writing the book for the Mistletoe Kisses anthology, so I didn’t have much leeway in changing how that book turned out, but when it came to writing the next book in the series, I was undecided about how I wanted it to go. I could continue in the same vein as The Spinster’s Christmas and write historical romantic suspense novels only loosely related to each other, or I could go with the new overarching series idea burning in my head that would take the series in a slightly different direction.
I discussed it with my husband, Captain Caffeine. My new idea for the series would be similar to the Japanese light novels (translated into English) that I had been reading. Most light novels series consist of several volumes and a plot mystery gradually uncovered in each book. The story in each volume is heavily dependent on the volumes published before—you can’t just dive into a volume in the middle because you’d be really confused about what’s going on.
However, I only knew of a few Regency romance series structured that way. Most Regency series are books that are complete stories that don’t necessarily need to be read in order.
The problem was that the series idea and the cast of characters in my head was too large to be structured that way. But I’ve been writing those types of standard romance stories for my entire writing career, and it would be a big leap to change to a new structure, especially since there aren’t many serial Regency novels out there right now.
But Captain Caffeine pointed out that God had spoken to me about writing for Japanese women. My plan was that the books in the Lady Wynwood series would be all eventually translated into Japanese and released in Japan. Since that was the case, he suggested I structure the series more like a Japanese series than an American series.
So The Spinster’s Christmas became a prequel book to my series, which I retitled Lady Wynwood’s Spies. I had spent considerable time plotting the next book and trying to make it fit into a typical romance novel, but now I scrapped all that and began plotting my books as several volumes, or “episodes,” in my series. It was a lot of work (I’m still not entirely done) but I had enough plotted to be able to write Lady Wynwood’s Spies, volume 1, which I finished on November 2nd. Yay!
I’ll be titling each book in the series like a light novel series, as volume numbers rather than different titles. So far, volume 1 is pretty long and will probably be around 80,000 words, but I think the other volumes might be a bit shorter. The nice thing about self-publishing is that I’m not constrained by a particular word count, so each volume might vary widely in length.
I really feel this is the direction God wants me to go with this series. It was especially nice to have the words flow so quickly as I was working on it—I started this new version in early August this year and finished in only 3 months!
I hope to start editing the rough draft in December and then maybe have it ready by spring 2020. If you’re on my Camille Elliot newsletter, you’ll be sure to hear when it’s available for preorder.
When writing The Spinster’s Christmas, a lot of plot and character twists came up that I hadn’t expected when plotting the book. I was writing the book for the Mistletoe Kisses anthology, so I didn’t have much leeway in changing how that book turned out, but when it came to writing the next book in the series, I was undecided about how I wanted it to go. I could continue in the same vein as The Spinster’s Christmas and write historical romantic suspense novels only loosely related to each other, or I could go with the new overarching series idea burning in my head that would take the series in a slightly different direction.
I discussed it with my husband, Captain Caffeine. My new idea for the series would be similar to the Japanese light novels (translated into English) that I had been reading. Most light novels series consist of several volumes and a plot mystery gradually uncovered in each book. The story in each volume is heavily dependent on the volumes published before—you can’t just dive into a volume in the middle because you’d be really confused about what’s going on.
However, I only knew of a few Regency romance series structured that way. Most Regency series are books that are complete stories that don’t necessarily need to be read in order.
The problem was that the series idea and the cast of characters in my head was too large to be structured that way. But I’ve been writing those types of standard romance stories for my entire writing career, and it would be a big leap to change to a new structure, especially since there aren’t many serial Regency novels out there right now.
But Captain Caffeine pointed out that God had spoken to me about writing for Japanese women. My plan was that the books in the Lady Wynwood series would be all eventually translated into Japanese and released in Japan. Since that was the case, he suggested I structure the series more like a Japanese series than an American series.
I’ll be titling each book in the series like a light novel series, as volume numbers rather than different titles. So far, volume 1 is pretty long and will probably be around 80,000 words, but I think the other volumes might be a bit shorter. The nice thing about self-publishing is that I’m not constrained by a particular word count, so each volume might vary widely in length.
I really feel this is the direction God wants me to go with this series. It was especially nice to have the words flow so quickly as I was working on it—I started this new version in early August this year and finished in only 3 months!
I hope to start editing the rough draft in December and then maybe have it ready by spring 2020. If you’re on my Camille Elliot newsletter, you’ll be sure to hear when it’s available for preorder.
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