Tag: amwriting

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July 2021 Blog Status

The good news is July’s traffic numbers increased above June’s low. The bad is that it didn’t improve on any other month in my history (since moving to BlueHost). I’m well aware that implementing Books2Read links back at the end of March diverted traffic away from the blog, so comparing numbers before that is pointless, but July was still lower than April and May numbers.

Despite the increase in traffic, sales declined after the boost provided by releasing “Package Deal” in June. Not even the Smashwords Sale increased units sold for older titles, while sales on the new book predictably declined.

And I had NO sales at Amazon at all. Summer doldrums? I’m certainly feeling them, too. Time to bear down and get some words written on my WIP.

<Shrug>

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How big should a coven be?

I have an idea for a paranormal erotica story preliminary titled “The Sex Coven’s First Warlock.”

Background: 80 years ago, a witch battles a succubus who was targeting her husband and steals the succubus’s powers, then learns to use those abilities to power her magical spells, making her a “sex witch”.

She was then able to take on acolytes by transforming into male form and impregnating them as well as duplicating the succubus powers, but since the sperm produced should still only contain X chromosomes, only daughters were expected.

At least, until my main character is unexpectedly conceived as a male fraternal twin, 61 years later. Now 19, he’s about to become the coven’s first acolyte warlock, in the hope that he can father sons as well as daughters.

Let’s just say he’s about to be in high demand…

Where I’m getting a bit hung up is deciding on a scheme to allow the daughters to become acolytes, generation after generation, without having sex with their relatives. The two schemes I’ve figured out produce totally different coven sizes, though – one has 88 witches after 80 years, the other almost 600.

It mostly matters because I need to know how many witches are in my warlock’s “dating pool” and how many aren’t…

Which size would make more sense to you?

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Feedback on Cover Designs?

For a while now, I’ve wanted to redo the covers for my novel series, consisting of First Year After, Second Year After, Third Year After, Fourth Year After, as they were rather simplistic (see above). When I originally created them, they were what I was capable of in GIMP2. After further study of the various options in GIMP2, I’ve managed the following redesign of the First Year After cover to add a background photo behind the three hearts image that I’ve always liked for the series. Making the background of the original hearts image to be mostly transparent without losing the shadows that surround them was the hardest part. But, I finally learned how.

It’s my intent to vary the background photos for each book. The series starts with the death of the narrative character’s father, so I thought I would start with a funeral theme, with Second Year After having a wedding theme, Third having a baby theme and Fourth maybe more of a party theme.

What I’d like to know is which of these three variants you like the best, based on changing the color of a semi-transparent layer in between the hearts and the photo. Do you like the light, the dark or the in-between grey shading?

Any other feedback you might have would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance…

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Just a status update

Just to let my readers/followers know, I’m about 7000 words into writing the final section of the Mom and I series, “Mom and I Year’s End”. I want to be sure I’ll wind up around 20-25K words and split it into two parts to publish, unless it turns into more. Then I’m moving on to complete the sci-fi erotica novel “Shards” and work on the expansion of my short story “Thirty Five Years Late”, to be published as a separate ebook.

What will come after that, I’m not sure yet, but I’ve had requests for sequels to both the “Years After” books and “Rumors” and ideas I have along those lines might link the two. I’m hoping to increase my word count in 2018 back to what it had been in 2016 and 2017 (about 25K per month).

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Coming up – Mom and I XXXmastime

If you have been patiently waiting for the next (sixth) installment in the Mom and I series, here is a status update.  I’m planning to cover Derek’s Christmas break from college in two parts, “Mom and I XXXmastime” and “Mom and I Year’s End”, which should also bring the series to a close.

I’ve already written 11,000 words of the XXXmas book, and haven’t even gotten to Christmas Eve yet, so this promises to be a fairly big one, if I don’t wind up splitting it further.

Thank you in advance for your patience.

M.R.