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Happy December! Have another free book!
I genuinely can't believe I finished this BUT I DID.
The cover is .... there. It may need work.
Anyway - another Fated Mountain Lodge novella arrives for the holidays to answer the question everyone is asking: will the lodge's reservation system work any better this time than it has in the previous four books?
Download from Bookfunnel if you'd like a copy! It comes out on Dec. 7, so the link will stop working then.
https://dl.bookfunnel.com/lzcdk6pga8
Under the cut: a brief history of how this book came to be written.
So Christmas Wolf (a full-length novel) came out on Nov. 21, and I had absolutely no intention of writing anything else this year, at least nothing long. I was just going to have a nice vacation.
Then I got a Bookbub for the Fated Mt Lodge collection on Dec. 7.
This is objectively great, but the problem is that I tend to mostly make my actual profit on Bookbub promos from series readthrough. Fated Mt is especially not-so-great for this because the collection has the first three books, and after that, there's just one book (Shrew). And they're all $2.99, and not great on KU reads because of the short length.
So I had the wild thought that I might write another book to come out around the time the Bookbub happens and maximize my chances of actually making money off this series this year. (Shrew was fun to write, but it didn't do all that well, for a few obvious reasons.)
This wasn't a completely hare-brained idea because I already knew exactly who and what the next book was going to be, and what the title was, *and* it was a Christmas book. (It's the story of Maggie, the magpie shifter from the previous book, and Sam, Fawkes's partner at the detective agency.) I had actually tossed around the idea of writing it this year, but decided not to, because Shrew hadn't done all that great and I'd rather spend the energy on Wolf this year.
So when I got the news about the Bookbub, which IIRC was on Fri the 21st, I started wondering if I actually COULD write this book fast enough to have it out by the time the Bookbub came out. I could never have done anything of the sort if I hadn't just come off a break, but in fact I'd collapsed hard when Wolf was done, and had spent the previous week or so in a kind of mentally flat state in which I had been basically resting. So I figured that what I would do is sit down, plot out the book, and write the first chapter and see if I thought I could actually do this.
.... by Sunday night I had about 10K and I was thinking, wow, I actually COULD do this.
When I hit 20K, I set up a preorder for Dec. 18 just in case it turned out that I was wrong and I could not in fact do this, because by that point I was confident that with a couple of extra weeks, I could definitely get it out for mid-December regardless. But it was falling together fast enough that I still felt the Dec. 7 deadline was possible. (If not wise.)
I finished the draft last Friday, the amazing![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ellenmillion did me a truly heroic lightning-quick beta turnaround, and I finished the edits from Sunday through today, and went ahead and moved the preorder to the 7th because in fact, I think the book is actually done. And it's cute and fun, and I was very happy with it! I don't think there's anything I would have done differently if I had taken longer, creatively speaking.
I definitely don't want to do this too often, but it's nice to know that I can.
The cover is .... there. It may need work.
Anyway - another Fated Mountain Lodge novella arrives for the holidays to answer the question everyone is asking: will the lodge's reservation system work any better this time than it has in the previous four books?
Download from Bookfunnel if you'd like a copy! It comes out on Dec. 7, so the link will stop working then.
https://dl.bookfunnel.com/lzcdk6pga8
Under the cut: a brief history of how this book came to be written.
So Christmas Wolf (a full-length novel) came out on Nov. 21, and I had absolutely no intention of writing anything else this year, at least nothing long. I was just going to have a nice vacation.
Then I got a Bookbub for the Fated Mt Lodge collection on Dec. 7.
This is objectively great, but the problem is that I tend to mostly make my actual profit on Bookbub promos from series readthrough. Fated Mt is especially not-so-great for this because the collection has the first three books, and after that, there's just one book (Shrew). And they're all $2.99, and not great on KU reads because of the short length.
So I had the wild thought that I might write another book to come out around the time the Bookbub happens and maximize my chances of actually making money off this series this year. (Shrew was fun to write, but it didn't do all that well, for a few obvious reasons.)
This wasn't a completely hare-brained idea because I already knew exactly who and what the next book was going to be, and what the title was, *and* it was a Christmas book. (It's the story of Maggie, the magpie shifter from the previous book, and Sam, Fawkes's partner at the detective agency.) I had actually tossed around the idea of writing it this year, but decided not to, because Shrew hadn't done all that great and I'd rather spend the energy on Wolf this year.
So when I got the news about the Bookbub, which IIRC was on Fri the 21st, I started wondering if I actually COULD write this book fast enough to have it out by the time the Bookbub came out. I could never have done anything of the sort if I hadn't just come off a break, but in fact I'd collapsed hard when Wolf was done, and had spent the previous week or so in a kind of mentally flat state in which I had been basically resting. So I figured that what I would do is sit down, plot out the book, and write the first chapter and see if I thought I could actually do this.
.... by Sunday night I had about 10K and I was thinking, wow, I actually COULD do this.
When I hit 20K, I set up a preorder for Dec. 18 just in case it turned out that I was wrong and I could not in fact do this, because by that point I was confident that with a couple of extra weeks, I could definitely get it out for mid-December regardless. But it was falling together fast enough that I still felt the Dec. 7 deadline was possible. (If not wise.)
I finished the draft last Friday, the amazing
ellenmillion did me a truly heroic lightning-quick beta turnaround, and I finished the edits from Sunday through today, and went ahead and moved the preorder to the 7th because in fact, I think the book is actually done. And it's cute and fun, and I was very happy with it! I don't think there's anything I would have done differently if I had taken longer, creatively speaking.I definitely don't want to do this too often, but it's nice to know that I can.
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Thank you for the book.
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(The summary for this book contains a small but plot-significant spoiler for the previous book, I just realized - I didn't know you hadn't read that one yet. So uh, try not to read it? I'm sorry about that!)
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Maybe I'll post book reviews again some day?
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Wow, that is a lighting-fast dash to the finish line!! Congratulations on banging out so quickly, and thank you for the free book <3
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