Choosing Project Order

Recently I was asked how I choose project order. How do I pick which characters within a series to write first versus last. And also how do I choose when to write one series over another. So here is my answer:

It really depends on the series. For example, in the Seasons series, I knew Gray and Rosalinde would be first, as this is how the families involved in that series are introduced to each other, at the failed wedding of Rosalinde’s sister Celia to Gray’s brother, the Earl of Stenfax. After that, the order just fell into place. I wanted Celia to find her match next, Stenfax made sense to happen after Celia and that left Felicity, whose secret ended up sort of through lining through the series, even though that wasn’t necessarily my intention when I started plotting.

It’s hard to write a series that doesn’t have some kind of through line, at least for me. So that helps a lot. For example, even though there will be no overarching mystery or storyline that goes through the entire 1797 Club series that starts in March, some of the ten books are pretty strongly linked (especially the first three).  There is a reason for the order I chose based on relationships between the characters.

As for when to write projects, that gets more complicated. I intended to write the Seasons series all the way back in 2015. But then I left Samhain, I took the idea for the Flynns and that morphed pretty quickly into a ten book series between it and the related Woodleys series. Those books made sense to link together right away and put off writing Seasons. But I didn’t know for sure I wanted to write Fascinated, my m/m novella that is a Woodley novella, until later, when the series was done. So it became writing it and then I thought putting it between the releases of my current and next series made the most sense.

I got the idea for the 1797 Club in February of 2016, so that became a priority for me after Seasons. And then my BIG 2019 project (which I haven’t talked about yet) came from an idea I had not really about a series, but about a way I wanted to release in 2019.

Basically, it depends on my thought process, my timeline and what I’m most excited about.

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