If you follow my Jinsey Reese books and are on the mailing list, about a month ago I had to make a really hard decision…and subsequent announcement. Something I really didn’t want to do.
But, well, let me back up a little…
When Tors and I wrote the Untamed series, we had big plans to write series for each of the Wilde siblings—something that we were very excited about, especially the next series because we fell in love with Dash Wilde and his band when they made an appearance in Untamed 3. We couldn’t wait to tell Dash’s story and have more fun interactions with his bandmates.
We finished the Untamed series at the end of August, burned out (200,000 words written, polished, and published in five months) but elated it was DONE. Then we took a good long break. In November, we finally reconvened and started writing Dash’s series, Unbound.
And from the get-go it felt off.
We wrote through December but still something wasn’t working. In January we decided that maybe the first book we were writing needed to become the second book because there was SO MUCH history between the two main characters. Maybe we needed to write their history as the first book. We were sure that would solve the problems we were having. So we set to writing that.
And still things simply weren’t coming together right. We discussed and tweaked…discussed and tweaked. Fell in love with little details, but the overall still wasn’t gelling. But we kept at it because we’d promised our readers that this series was coming soon and we couldn’t disappoint them.
Then, in mid-February, during yet another discussion about how to make this story work, one of us finally said, “What if we took a break and wrote something else?” A scary thought because we’d made promises and we weren’t delivering on them. We were talking about disappointing our loyal readers—few though they may be, lol, they are nonetheless REALLY important to us. Plus we’d already put SO much work into it. So many hours wasted. We talked back and forth about it, took a few days to think it over, and finally decided that we needed to abandon this project, at least for the time being.
Neither of us is capable of putting out work that is less than our best, less than something we are 110% proud of. We didn’t want to let down our readers, but we also couldn’t force ourselves to keep working on something that just. Wasn’t. Working. No matter what we did with it.
Can I tell you how scared we were to make that announcement? But we sent out the email, announced it on our Facebook pages, and…ducked.
But we also had this new idea—a new series of standalone books about a group of 20-something friends, each book focusing on a different friend. Funny books. Sexy books. Smart books. Friends meets Sex and the City. Something we’d been talking about for a few months and were REALLY excited to get started on.
So we started, dove right into this new world, and I’m loving these characters so much, you guys. The stories are flowing, the words tumbling out onto the page with ease again. (Thank god.) And as I’m working on this first draft of one of the books, I’m dreaming about the Intangible series on the side, gearing up to start working on the next book (the final book, I think) this summer.
So many plans.
Failures and successes. Ups and downs, my friends. That’s life, right? I’m disappointed about Unbound, but I’m also so stinking excited about the new smexy rom-com series I can barely stand it. Funny AND sexy? Yes, please! You don’t usually get both in romantic comedy novels, and since I’m a big fan of both, I’m thrilled to be combining them. Can’t wait to share them with you!
Hope you’re having a great week!
<3
jen