The Post of Random Updates & One Southern Arcana Question

There’s been lots of stuff going on lately, though it feels like a lot of it has been behind the scenes.  This is one of those times when I remember how much non-writing work goes into getting books from our brains to your ereaders!

The quick round-up overview of what’s going on outside our office, first:

• Demon Bait has a cover! And a blurb! Wheeee!
• I’m giving away review copies of Cipher as well as the first three Southern Arcana novels.
• But there will also be many, many chances to win copies, as The Bookpushers, Fictionvixen & Smexybooks host a Southern Arcana Read Along.  The first chat is on August 3rd at Smexybooks, where you can discuss Crux and win fun stuff, like maybe a kindle.
• There’s a new Southern Arcana website: http://www.southernarcana.com 
• And we’ve confirmed that Southern Arcana book #5, Impulse, is coming out in 2012.  Book #6, Enigma, is due out in 2013. The hero & heroine of Impulse are confirmed in a secret spoiler page linked from their temporary blurb.

And that’s just the stuff we’ve posted/talked about!  Other things going on behind the scenes in our respective Evil Lairs of Authordom:

• Blurb blurb blurbs. Lots of paperwork goes into this author gig, but we should have the blurb for Hammer Down all finalized soon.  We’ve been doing a lot of work on Children of the Undying lately, including finalizing edits on Demon Bait and getting close to the end on Hammer Down. The novella & book are coming out 5 weeks apart, which should be exciting and nerve-wracking. Or both. I pick both.
• Writing! Fingers crossed, but if all goes well, our next two releases after Hammer Down will be Bloodhounds books!  After a forced 12 month wait for Hunter’s Prey, book #3 will (we hope) be out just a few months later.  A lot of people said they wanted to know more about the world and how the bloodhounds were created, and those are both topics that we plan to address.
• More Writing! Because after those two bloodhounds books, it’s time for IMPULSE! I can not believe we’re writing the fifth Southern Arcana book already.  But with proposals and outlines for book 5 and 6 in, we’re turning our attention to rough outlines for books 7-10.  I can say that one character who has been requested pretty much from day one will finally get a very hard won HEA in book 7.
• Secret projects!  We’ve been working very, very hard since April on our next secret project of doom, and we’re hoping to unveil it in the next month or two.

Otherwise, we’ve been doing a lot of watching, a lot of talking, and a lot of evil planning. One reason Donna & I have been watching the self-publishing adventures of others with such interest is that it’s always been an interest of ours.  Looong time readers may know we played around with kindle publishing in 2009 and even planned to self-publish a series in 2010.

I never did post about that again, and the reason is…rhetoric killed my excitement.  I’m a pretty hippie dippie group hug sort of person at heart, and the viciousness that took over social media in 2010 between the traditional publishing & self-publishing circles pretty much destroyed my interest in experimentation.   There’s only so much negativity I want to look at in a day, and in the end we threw up our hands and decided we were busy enough, and we didn’t need to deal with any more.

However, it’s a new day.  The viciousness is still out there, but there are also lots of smart, savvy romance authors who are excitedly exchanging information without holding any particular rancor for those who still want to pursue alternate methods of publication as well.  Since things have gotten a little less THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE and a little more WHEEE SO MANY OPPORTUNITIES, my excitement is slowly re-kindling.

There are a lot of ideas we’ve tossed around, including the chance to write stories about some of the Southern Arcana characters whose romances haven’t had a chance to play out “on screen” as it were, or stories revisiting old couples facing the new challenges.  There are so many opportunities, and so MANY stories to tell, that the idea of having a way to slip them in between our existing release schedule is really exciting.  Of course, some will still be written as freebies, but some might get their own novellas in the future, which would be a lot of fun for us. 

Of course, we’d probably also pay attention to what readers want!  If you’ve made it this far, tell us… is there a Southern Arcana character/couple you’d just love to read more about?