So there’s kind of a joke among authors, one that they don’t often call out in words, but that we all know, anyway, that if you ask your existing fans what you ought to write next, they are always and universally going to tell you: MORE.

They love the worlds they know.  That’s *why* they’re an existing fan.  It’s really not complicated or nefarious, and it’s one of the most affirming things I know, as an author.  They get to the end of a series – its current endpoint, at any rate – and they *want the next book*.

Yay!

I win.

Authorpoints.

The inherent tension with this is that authors want to try stuff.

Not universally.  I won’t speak for all of them.  Some of them build one thing, love it, love the fans they have of it, and they do *that thing* quite successfully as a career.

Kudos and huzzah.

But ME.  And a lot of the authors I hang out with.  We like to try lots of stuff.

Sometimes they don’t make a scene about it.  They pick up a new pen name, write some new stuff with that new pen name, and they never mention to you that they even did it.  They know that you’re a fan of *the thing that IS*, and they’ll come back and write more of that thing at the appointed time, whenever that is.  All is well.

Sometimes they try that new thing and they tell their fans, and their fans get really livid because *that’s not MY thing*, and the fans feel like the author has wasted his life energy putting something into the world that isn’t *MY thing*.  I’m sure I have some of this sort of fans, but broadly speaking, I don’t *have* fans like this.  I haven’t run into any of them.  My fans tell me what series they came in on and desperately want more of, then they wander off and read some other stuff and come back and admit that, while they still *love* that thing they came in on, they have a new favorite.

Authorpoints.

I love this.

My point is that I have spent… quite a long time, now, writing *different* stuff.  I write 4 books in a series to get the characters into a place where they do-a-thing-well, then I try to leave them in a reasonably happy place and I go write something else.  For years, I would tell people that I wrote science fiction, fantasy, urban fantasy, and paranormal, and people who *reaaaallllly* knew would say: but you don’t write any fantasy.  And technically, they were right.

I snickered quietly and thought: just you wait.

I started this pen name with urban fantasy/paranormal.  I played there for quite a while.  I wrote science fiction.  And some more science fiction.  I wrote more paranormal.  And I knew that I was going to get around to fantasy.  I love fantasy.  I love all kinds of fantasy, and I write all manner of it in short fiction all the time.

I just hadn’t had the right bug bite me to do a series of it, and I was still trying other things.

And then Verida happened.

And now my fantasy collection rivals either other major genre.

(Seriously?  I’ve got the wordcounts in my spreadsheet.  Adding them up quickly: Verida is 2M, urban fantasy/paranormal is 4.3M, and science fiction is 1.4M.  Sam and Sam is 2.7M all by itself.  I love big universes.)

I’m wrapping up the big sprint (ha, if an ultramarathon can be considered a sprint) on Verida, and looking to the future, and hence we arrive in NOVEMBER.

For those who haven’t found a November post, before, I do a very big writing effort every year for November.  It’s fantastic and energetic and… sadly maturing a bit, but that’s okay.  It’s still the high holiday of my writing calendar, and it is also when I look forward at the next year’s writing plans.

I will finish the Hill Chargers series for December, which means that the core series of Verida (can I hashtag it?  #Veridaverse anybody?) are complete.  I’ve still got a lot of plot left in… most of them, but they’re at that happy place where I’m allowed (by my rules) to walk away and do other things.

Which means that I’m thinking about what I want to do next, and this year I have come to a different conclusion than I have in many of my past years.  I’ve also telegraphed this a lot of other places, which… steals my own thunder, but whatever.  I’m still allowed to unpack the decision and put it into a planning post because the fact that the core decisions are already made doesn’t make the thinking behind them unuseful.

My readers want *more*.

They always do.

They’re supposed to.

And while very few of them (if any) would gripe to my face if I decided to go write a new series in a new universe, I’ve reached a point from a business prospective (uck, I know) where I think that my wisest course is to actually do it.

Write more books.

In existing universes.

Existing series, even.

I have favorite series.  I know that I do.  I’m even allowed to.  The funny thing is that, when I go involve myself in one, I find that I really love that world and those characters, and it’s *better* than I remember that series being.  (I say that cautiously, because being an author is a very strange paradox of profound self-confidence, trying to charge people money for things I made up in my head, and self-doubt, looking back at all of those stories and all of those series and knowing that *I made them up*.)  A lot of it is because I move onto another series that I involve myself with profoundly, and I can’t remember the previous series with the same intensity that I experience the present one.  It’s a very special series that stays with me through that.

Long way to say, I love my stories and my work, and if I were completely divorced from the economic reality of it, guys, I would do some crazy stuff.  Like… some of you would go with me on it, but… crazy.  Yeah.  But given that my goal is financial independence, just based on my writing income, I have to make pragmatic decisions about what I’m going to write.  There’s nothing wrong with that, and there are no series I have written *just* because I think that they’re going to sell.  Not ever.  But I do have a handful of series, the most popular ones, that they’re easier to put into people’s hands and had them know that that was the thing they wnated.

And once I’ve got readers who read those series, they want MORE.  I don’t have to go find them again.

So I think that my next evolution as an author, and as a businesswoman, is to take those series that have the strongest popularity and actually do what my readers ask me to do: write MORE.

Now, I’m going to do it my way.  Because when have I ever done anything the normal way?

I’ve come to a strong conclusion that I really like writing books four at a time.  It gets me deep into a world, it lets me build *really* big arcs that go across multiple books, but it gives me a sense of *seasonality*.  This thing starts, it hits a middle, and then it’s *done*.  And done is important for me.  It gives me something that I’m working toward, then I hit my moment of transition, of metamorphosis, and I can go and be something different.  I avoid the sensation that I’m just going to do this one thing until I die, even if *that one thing* is the one thing I most want to do.

So I’m going to write four books at a time, in four different series, for eight books a year.  I looked at it, did some strategic planning, threw some bird feathers in the air, then said ‘screw it’ and made a decision on the order of these four series additions.

In 2024, I’m going to release 4 new books in The Queen’s Chair, and 4 new books in The Carbon Chronicles.  (Spoiler: in 2025, I’m going to do 4 new books in School of Magic Survival and 4 new books in Tell, the Detective.)  In that order.  I’ll be starting book 5 of The Queen’s Chair sometime this month, depending on how much momentum I can generate, finishing out Hill Charger’s 4 as I head out the door for the 20Books conference.

I’m not done, there.  I also plan on releasing a 4-book collection of novella-length stories in a new setting, each year, but I haven’t announced those because those are *really* big writing goals, and I don’t want to make promises that I end up not keeping.  i do that sometimes, anyway, but I do try hard not to.  Ideally, The Queen’s Chair 5-8 would come out in January-May of 2024, and Carbon Chronicles 5-8 would come out September-December of 2024, with 4 novellas coming out in June, July, and August (plus one bonus title that’s already written and is just patiently awaiting its moment in the timeline), making 13 titles in 2024.

My ability to get that much done depends on a lot of things, so I’m just going to stick with the topline goal of 8 full-length novels in two existing series, and we’ll see how far I get on the stretch goal.  I’ll probably update as I go along, because I really can’t help doing it, but you have to be in the right places to see those updates go by.

Not everything ends up in a blog post.

Sorry about that.

In some ways, it’s… a bit… disillusioning? disappointing? to have a two-year plan in front of me that I’m so confident in.  The Verida plan was 4 years long, but I knew that it was going to get jumbled around a bunch as I figured things out.  There were things that I didn’t write, there were things that I wrote out of order, and there were things that I pushed to write some other time.  I probably even added a few things that I didn’t anticipate.  It was a very open canvas, even after I wrote it all down, and for a pantser like myself, that mystery is the excitement of the thing.

A this point, I genuinely don’t see myself swapping out the plan for anything less than a movie deal.  Probably not literally, but that’s the level of not-gonna-happen I’m considering.  I’ll cut the novellas as I must in order to hit the schedule on the novels, but the 8 book headline titles are pretty much set.

And that’s *good*.

It’s mature.

I ought to have a five-year plan with similar levels of confidence, probably.  Or at least a consistent two-year plan that I’m going to stick to as I’m still making up year three.

But in some ways, there’s a feeling that this is a business plan, rather than a creative one.  I’m *not* making things up as I go along.  Before Verida’s madness, I would genuinely get to the end of a series and ask: okay, what am I going to do next?

And that was scary, but it was also exciting.

I think that my career is evolving, that I’m making decisions that are more than just random guesses and headstrong impulses at what I want to do next.  Which means that they’re probably better decisions.

And it isn’t that I’m not excited about the books.  Ohmygoshyouguys I want to get back into these universes.  I *miss* these characters.  I *grieve*, leaving them behind.  Possible that 2026 is another year of existing series, too, either Ever in a Pirate’s Eye and Murderers, Thieves, & Velvet, or The Queen’s Chair and Carbon Chronicles.  There’s more story.  I know there is.  These aren’t characters who are just going to settle into a nice, quiet life and stop going against the problems in the world around them.

This is what I live for, these characters, these worlds.  And I don’t think that the sense of… loss of magic is that I’m going to write existing series.  I’m profoundly excited about that.  I think it’s that I know what’s going to happen.

Not in the books.  I never know that.

But month by month.

I’ll come around.  It’s just a very new state of being, professionally, and I am not a planner, by nature.  I had a sign on my door as a teenager that read ‘geniuses thrive on clutter’.

At any rate, I don’t know that I intended to be this transparent, setting out, but this is the state of my year, the state of my plan, and the state of my mind.

It’s going to be a great year, and there are going to be some great stories.

Happy November, y’all.  Here’s to a great year to come.