I wanted to check in since it’s been a number of months since Homestead’s release, and update everyone on the progress of the next book in The Queendoms Series, Sanctuary.
I started writing this post about a month ago. I’m sure you can guess what stopped me from finishing and posting it. We’re all going through an enormous disruption of everyday life, as well as an ongoing shared societal tragedy that I suspect will be brought home to each of us personally at some point in the future, if it hasn’t been already.
In the face of a global pandemic, with no clear path as to when it will end—it’s interesting how questions of what is really important just naturally arise. I think American society is destined to greatly change, and for the better, on the other side of this disaster; but we’ll be pulled through a lot of chaos and pain before it happens.
One’s writing can feel irrelevant in the midst of a world crisis. There’s a temptation to minimize the art we create, the writing and painting and music, as not being that important. In the U.S. in particular, if one doesn’t make a lot of money at it—it’s definitely seen as not important. :/
So I, as a writer, have to see my work as being important at least to me, before anyone else’s opinion comes into it. I have to, or the work won’t get done—the books won’t be written. I have to regard my stories as having enough value that the imagination and hours of work I put into them makes sense to me.
I first got the idea for Rebellion in late 2013, wrote the book, and published it in 2014, followed by The Hunt, Queen of Califia, Second Bond, and now Homestead. Two books remain to be written in the series: Sanctuary and To the Farthest Shore.
Most of what I write is in the subgenre of romance known as m/m romance. I do no marketing of my books and my readership, judging from my sales, is extremely small.
A reasonable observer might then ask—why am I doing this?
The observer may well ask, but I don’t ask myself that question, ever. The reason is because writing is what I’ve always wanted to do, and the doing of it is fulfilling in a way that can’t be replicated by doing anything else.
That’s not to say that I wouldn’t like to have more readers. I would love to have a larger audience for my work, and maybe one day I will. But the only thing in my control is to keep writing the stories I want to write—and I will definitely keep doing that. My releases may be few and far between due to my work obligations, but they will keep coming.
So now—here’s the update on Sanctuary.
I’ve been working on the outline for Sanctuary. It’s an interesting process since I already know what I have planned for the final book, To the Farthest Shore, including what happens in the story and what happens to all the characters.
And yet... it’s more complicated this time, compared to the first trilogy. In The Califia Trilogy there were four main characters: Anming, Kellen, Tavon and Ryn, and two queendoms—Califia and the Kashaya Sky.
Now, with the addition of Madrona and Rio, there are four queendoms. Not to mention many more characters, including several disparate groups of antagonists.
I tried not to end Homestead on a cliffhanger and I think I succeeded in not doing that. But I left a lot of balls up in the air, and plotting what everyone does and where everyone goes in Sanctuary is proving to be a challenge.
But I know it will all come together in the end. I know this, because it happened when I wrote the first trilogy in this series.
All the scenes in Rebellion where Anming Lee and Richard Shue hint at their past relationship, well... actually, I didn’t know at that time what happened between them. My sense was that they had been lovers and it ended badly in some way, but that was it.
So, in other words—something in my writer’s mind simply trusted that when the time came to write the next book, I would realize what ended their relationship and why there was such enmity between them. And when I started writing The Hunt—I did.
Writing can involve leaps in the dark like that. Your subconscious can put two and two together way before your conscious mind does it. The process involves trust.
As does living in our present-day situation. I believe that if we all do our best, we’ll come through this.
The image above is the one I intend to use when I design the cover art for Sanctuary. One day I’ll do a post about cover design. I’ve designed the covers for all of my self-published books, including The Queendoms Series. It’s something I really enjoy, so I’ll share my process of designing them with you sometime. :-)
