What’s coming up for 2010?

Donna and I signed our ninth contract with Samhain Publishing last night, and that was pretty darn cool.  I love Samhain and I really love working with Anne Scott.  Partly because Anne doesn’t laugh at us when we say crazy things like, “We wanna write about werewolves and wizards, only maybe during the Great Depression.”  (If she does laugh, she’s kind enough to do so quietly.)

So nine books seems like a lot!  I actually thought it was eight for a little bit, but then I stopped and counted, and our list breaks down like this:

Southern Arcana (Romantic urban fantasy/paranormal romance novels.)

• Crux (March 2009)
• Crossroads (February 2010)
• Deadlock (January 2011)

Red Rock Pass (Category length paranormal romance.)

• Cry Sanctuary (October 2008)
• Sanctuary Lost (June 2009)
• Sanctuary’s Price (October 2009)
• Sanctuary Unbound (June 2010)

Building Sanctuary (Paranormal novellas set during the Great Depression.)

• A Safe Harbor (July 2010)
• Undertow (Fall? 2010)

We’re multi-taskers because it’s the way it works for us…it takes us a little longer to write a book because we’re both working hard to meld our styles together and make it seamless.   However, because of the way we work, trading manuscripts back and forth, it’s actually faster for us to work on three (or four!) projects at the same time than it is to work on just one.

With just one, only one of us is writing, and the other is probably wandering off to do something else.  If we have two or three, though, we have to stay focused because there’s always a project for each of us to be working on.  It means we may take 6 months to write a book instead of 3, but we can write 2 books, a couple novellas and a short story or two in that 6 months.

However, while we’re plotters, we don’t plot precisely enough that it’s a great idea to be starting the next book in a series before we finish the previous one.  That means we always need three or four distinct projects going on at once to stay at our most efficient.  So that’s why we can write lots, but can’t get those Southern Arcana books out much faster than we do.  (Though hey, 11 months isn’t that bad!)

What are we writing right now? Deadlock, of course. The last 10,000 words of the Mysterious Project of Mystery.  We’re finishing up our little Mammoth Book of PNR 2 story and getting ready to pick up Undertow again.  And because we needed a little balance in there, and something to carry us forward, we’ve gone wild and decided to try a story for Samhain’s steampunk anthology call.   (The story with the hero so crass, Donna keeps IMing me with, I can’t WRITE this! It’s too dirty!)

Anyway, that’s what’s up with us. 

Now for a gratuitous picture of Karl Urban dressed like a cowboy.

Just Because I Can