It’s 2017! Where did my word count go??

As you may have noticed, I haven’t had a book out since May. That is, shall we say, not how I planned things. The Noah book has been a really slow one to write, plus it’s turning out to be one of the long ones (I’m optimistically aiming for 120K now, about the same length as Guard Wolf; this is up from an original estimate of 60K).

During the times I’m stuck on Tiger, I’ve been working on side projects. The result is that I’m now hip-deep in half-finished novels and short stories in the Shifter Agents universe. If all goes well, 2017 should be a bonanza. It’s just a matter of finishing things.

Besides Noah’s book, the other projects I’m currently working on are:

• A spinoff series involving the Valeria from Dragon’s Luck (this one is really more urban fantasy and will probably be four books long).
• Another spinoff series that is going to be a series of stand-alone novellas about human men and shifter ladies – the first one involves a curvy shifter bartender and a guy who hunts rogue shifters for a living (sort of a shifter bounty hunter) who shows up in her town looking for a shifter criminal. The idea is that these will be shorter, fairly quick to write, and can come out in between the longer books.
• A short-ish casefile story set between Dragon’s Luck and Tiger, along the lines of Chasing Bigfoot.
• A side story tentatively titled Risk Factor, set during Tiger and involving some of the other agents, which is basically a subplot I couldn’t squeeze into the main book (I mean, it’s already going to be at least 120K words; it didn’t need to be 150K instead).

In addition to that, I’ve tentatively plotted the Shifter Agents series out until book 8 or 9. So, uh, lots more books coming! I just have to write them!

And on that front, here’s how all of those are currently looking, thanks to some handy little word-count status meters from Writertopia.

Shifter Agents #4 – Noah & Peri’s book

Valeria spin-off series – Book 1

Shifter lady/bounty hunter novella

Casefile story – post-Dragon’s Luck

“Risk Factor” (Tiger deleted subplot)

Final word counts are, of course, tentative. Whatever finishes first will be published first! Right now I expect it’s probably going to be the bartender/bounty hunter one followed by Tiger. The Valeria spinoff will definitely not be first, because Tiger sets up a couple of necessary plot things for it.