switching things up.
If you read my last blog post, I mentioned I’d begun drafting the third installment of Tales of Angaride. While this statement still rings true, there has been a bit of a change.
I didn’t say much about the book in question, but I did mention the initial of the title; MITS. This book is still in development and is still being written, but it is taking a back seat and will no longer be the third book in the series. Instead, you’ll be seeing me talking about an alternative third installment acronym: BOTJK.
The reason for this change is fairly simple. My current obsession is the characters and storyline I came up with for BOTJK, and while it was originally slated to be the eighth book in the series, a thought occurred to me; since the books are non-sequential and can all be read as stand-alone novels, why would I wait to work on a project I’m inspired for now? It seems silly, right? Shouldn’t that have been obvious?
Well, not exactly.
When I was initially planning out the series and coming up with titles and rough ideas for each book, I decided I wanted to assign each cover a different color so when displayed on a shelf, the spines make a nice color gradient. This then led to picking which colors suited which stories and titles best, and thus I gave myself a rigid structure for which books in the series were to come first, despite the fact that there was nothing chronologically holding me to that work flow. I’m excited just as much about MITS as I am about BOTJK, but there is a lot that I want to do with MITS that I just don’t currently have the bandwidth for figuring out. The story is there but it’s also bare bones, and I’ve been struggling to figure out the core of the story, thus leading to writing sessions that went nowhere and felt too disjointed. I haven’t even been able to write a proper outline.
On the other hand, when I think about BOTJK, I know exactly who my characters are, where their motivations lie, and what I want to happen. It’s the same sort of feeling I had for Dance on the Sun when I was first coming up with ideas, and how I started to feel about Before the Lotus Blooms after scrapping the original manuscript and starting again from square one. That alone tells me that this is the book that I should be chasing, and the project I should be putting my time toward.
So the books won’t be in color order when published. I thought a lot about this and if it was a problem or if it would be annoying to readers. The solution I came up with is trying to—at the very least—publish in pairs or groups of similar colors and to also remove the book number from the spine. After all, the book number is fairly arbitrary given the books are not chronologically connected. If at any point there is required knowledge from a previous book to give context to something happening in a new title, I will make sure it’s understandable without reading another novel, if you don’t want to. That was the original goal with the TOA series and I want readers to be able to pick and choose and enjoy whichever books they please. While I’d be over the moon to know that someone has read the entire series, I don’t expect that since they aren’t all connected.
Rather than a series, it may be better to just call TOA a collection, going forward.
MITS will still be a part of Tales of Angaride and will be revisited, and hopefully I’ll start to come up with more ideas for it as I work on other projects so it can be just as good as its predecessors, and something I can be proud of in the end.
That being said, TOA Book 3 is in still in the works, and I will continue work on my stand-alone modern day romcom mentioned in the previous post, BFBC, to hopefully have published in 2026, ideally a July or August timeframe. I can’t make any guarantees of course, but that’s the goal. Since acronyms are hard to keep track of, I may also refer to it as Project Beaver, which I promise will make more sense once the title and synopsis is revealed.
Some small tweaks will also be making their way into the paperback versions of all books in the TOA series, including Dance on the Sun; just small cosmetic changes to help the series look more polished and feel more cohesive. The actual book matter is not changing at all.
As the year winds down, I’ve got a bunch of social content I’ll be pushing out on Instagram and I’ll pick back up on WIPSNIPS on Bluesky in November. I have a special surprise planned for December and as long as things continue to go well, it should be announced some time at the end of November or right at the beginning of December, likely on Instagram. I’ll be putting out a blog post for it as well, when the time comes.
I’d like to be more regular with the blog, but I tend to forget easily with so much else going on. Eventually I’d like to be in the rhythm of posting a blog at least once a month, if not twice.
I greatly appreciate everyone’s support thus far and look forward to sharing more about Before the Lotus Blooms as we approach its release in March, and more about the other coming projects such as BOTJK and Project Beaver!
