Switching Gears

So recent devel­op­ments — too com­pli­cated to go into detail here — pretty much con­vinced me to step back and reassess what I’m doing. That is, think about what I write, how I approach story ideas that come down hard and fast on me, where I go to sub­mit my man­u­scripts, and where I go to pro­mote new releases.

An ongo­ing email con­ver­sa­tion with an online friend also gave me pause, so much so that I’m tak­ing a momen­tary break from writ­ing out-and-out YA fic­tion in favor of mate­r­ial that strad­dles two mar­kets. Recent expe­ri­ences I’ve had, espe­cially in pro­mot­ing my books, pretty much turned me off the idea of pur­su­ing the usual avenues as well as to take a break from my usual work. I’ll be going after other oppor­tu­ni­ties for mar­ket­ing as well as other pub­lish­ers for the novel I’m cur­rently work­ing on. A writer at one of the mail­ing lists I’m a mem­ber of kindly shared links to review blogs out­side my usual go-to list. I’ll give them a shot and see if they’ll take on my recent release.

Woll­stone isn’t dead, but it’s cur­rently put on hold for that rea­son. I’ve been dis­tracted a lot by ongo­ing dif­fi­cul­ties I have on a vari­ety of lev­els, and I think I should step away from the LGBT YA mar­ket for the time being and re-energize myself through a com­pletely dif­fer­ent work of fic­tion. I’ll keep you updated on my progress there the way I usu­ally update you guys. :)

In addi­tion, I’ve also been seri­ously con­sid­er­ing writ­ing a new series that takes place in a shop that’s very much like where I work. I’ve talked about this in an older post, and it’s been get­ting more and more dif­fi­cult to ignore inspi­ra­tion when­ever I’m at work, even though I’m only there twice a week. What I’d like to do with that series is going to be light but real­is­tic. No fan­tasy ele­ments, no weird stuff hap­pen­ing, and you really can’t go wrong, when you’re work­ing in the art indus­try, deal­ing with cus­tomers who run the gamut in terms of expe­ri­ence and knowl­edge of art, as well as co-workers who’re col­lege grad­u­ates and cyn­i­cal, strug­gling artists of all stripes.