Generally, I don’t have this long of a wait between books, but last year got a little bit crazy when I started a new job outside the house. Candy, Loving a Winston, Book 3 was released in September; that is the last one I released!
Carmen and Coral are the last two books in that series, and I promise they are coming!
Carmen is currently being written, and I have about half of it done. Unfortunately, due to finally getting a diagnosis of Psoriatic Arthritis, I can’t write as much as I used to. My hands just don’t let me type 12-18,000 words a day anymore. I have settled on writing 2500-5000 words daily, basically 2 chapters a day.
So slowly but surely, I am getting the work done, and I will announce soon when Carmen will be released. There will be no preorder, so keep an eye out here on the website, my social media, or my newsletter. I hope to release this mid-summer. Fingers crossed!
The Loving a Winston Series is a spin-off series from Loving a Young. These books are exclusive to Amazon and available on Kindle Unlimited.
In 2010, I decided to write a book. That was the first book I had ever written, and I had never entertained the idea of creating such a thing. With the birth of that book, so began my passion for writing.
The first book was My Blood Runs Blue, and in that story, I created a world of vampires unlike any other world created. How the vampires were created, how they reacted to humans, and even how they smelled to each other came from my fantasies.
Shortly after the first book, I wrote Blue Blood For Life. There were a few years between that book and the next, The Pulse of Blue Blood, and that third book became the second in the series to explain how Kristin got to where she was. During that time, I rewrote parts of the first two books of the series and then quickly went on to write Mixing the Blue Blood and Blue Bloods Final Destiny.
As I was writing that final book, I realized I wasn’t ready to let Kristin go. She was a police officer who gave everything to protect those she swore an oath to. Kristin was me, and I wasn’t ready to let go of who she was and what she had become. So I did the only thing a writer can do, I created another world and spun Kristin off into Blue Blood Returns 40 years later.
With this new series, I could bring new life to the stories. I could intertwine pieces of the past and introduce new characters. Kristin is still the lead, but her sister is right beside her. New and old faces were together where questions from the original series, never answered, finally were.
The new series was darker, grittier, and much steamier than the first one, but that is what I saw for my characters in the future.
In this final book, Reckoning, I had a hard time. I knew what needed to happen but struggled to get the characters to behave. I started and stopped this book several times. I realized that one of the things that held me back was knowing that I would have to say goodbye to these characters.
Kristin was no longer a cop in this book, and neither am I. It took me a while, but I finally realized that both Kristin and I needed to move on. It was time to let the past become the past and move on to new things.
I have already been asked by some earlier readers if there will ever be another spin-off, and the answer to that question is, I honestly do not know. Did I leave it where I could jump into the future? Yes. But will I? Who knows. Only time will tell. For now, I will step away from the paranormal world for a while and finish a few other books that need my attention.
For all of you who have followed the stories of Blue Blood through the years, I thank you. You will never know how much it has meant to me to share these stories with you.
Now, it’s time to say goodbye to Kristin, Zander, Alex, Gabe, Olivia, Angelina, Trent, Hugh, and Garda and turn the page. At least for now—
We have all seen how much the world can change in the last two years. With that, so do priorities. With significant issues needing to be focused on around my house, I had to prioritize my family and our household. In doing so, I started working outside the home again.
My job is a very important one, and I am passionate about what I am doing, but it is intense, and it is hard to switch that intensity off to write sometimes. I travel a lot and spend hours teaching classes online and in person. My creative side isn’t always at its best when I am home.
I have been working on Mission: Gratitude for the last several weeks. It was set to release in November, but unlike the first four books, this story is not flowing the way I expected it to. It’s been like pulling teeth, and I know better than to force the issue.
With the deadline closing in, the stress was growing. These books go through a much more in-depth editing than my other romance novels. Scenes are reviewed by special people who have given input on the technical aspects of the story. The story is then read by a couple of ARC readers before it even goes to editing, then it goes through 3-4 rounds of editing with my main editor before it goes through two separate proofreaders, and then on to more ARC readers. This process takes months, and I don’t even have a quarter of the story nailed down.
That is why I have canceled the pre-order for Mission: Gratitude. It was a tough decision, but one that I believe I needed to make. I will not rush this story. It is not like I am just trying to give two characters a happily ever after, but I am showing how people overcome struggles that some of us could never quite comprehend.
When will it be released? Well, when it’s ready. I will not put it on pre-order again but will immediately release it once it has been written to my satisfaction and has gone through the entire editing process.
My sincerest apologies to those of you who have been waiting for it. I know this is the second time I have canceled the pre-order, and it frustrates me to no end that I have had to do that. I just can not rush the books in this particular series. I do hope that you can understand how difficult this decision has been.
