What Happens When You Are Obsessed With Your Own Books

It’s really not so bad. I can quit at any time. Any time.

But I won’t! I am writing two series at the same time, a Tudor mystery series called the King’s Fool Mysteries with Henry VIII’s real court jester Will Somers as the sleuth, and alternating with a Victorian cozy and Sherlockian pastiche called An Irregular Detective Mystery. But I am afraid that the latter has stolen my heart more than the former, and so I have resigned myself to continue to live in the late Victorian period, at least for a while longer, and put off the Tudor mysteries until…well, until I’m ready to write them again.

Authors can get obsessed by their characters, by the setting, by the time period. And I have gone all in with the Victoriana of it all. That’s why the last two Tudor books are on hold, because I am going gangbusters into the 1890s.

I had only just released book number four, THE VAMPYRE CLIENT, when I decided to finish writing and releasing the fifth book in the Sherlockian series THIS December 1st, THE MAGICIAN’S MISADVENTURE. I can’t stop writing them! And I don’t want to stop. I think it’s the dynamic of the two main characters (well, three now. Four, really). They are definitely buddy books, with these two main characters who really care about each other, they always have the other’s back, and they truly enjoy when the game is afoot.

But what happens when there is a delay in writing and publishing one of two of a series?

This is the last one I published and will be so for a while.

I’m fortunate in that now I am publishing my books myself without a publisher, because it’s tough to have to tell them that you won’t be writing the other for the foreseeable future. They get a little prickly over those author decisions. Look, I know there are those out there who take a strictly commercial attitude towards publishing and the creative flow. “It’s your job,” they say, to continue to write, even when you don’t feel it. Yes, it is a business, and there is that element of creativity that we learn to tap into when there’s a deadline. And maybe that’s the problem. The deadline is of my own devising. And maybe it’s also the problem of no advance anymore for either series. Money is a real incentive. I betcha if you dangled that old carrot of an advance in my face, I might get up the umpf to get to that 5th manuscript for old Will Somers. Or maybe not.

Except it’s that Victorian thing. I really love it. I, who have inhabited the lives of medieval people in the fourteenth century and the sixteenth century with the Tudor mysteries, have utterly and completely fallen in love with the nineteenth century. Who knew?

Perhaps it’s the fact that the research has been so different from my investigation into hundreds of years past. That I can SEE photos of the actual, everyday people. Even film! And that London, the city that I have learned to know so well when it was three miles square, has spread across miles, encompassing Westminster in its relentless march. I can READ the newspapers of the day in clear, modern English instead of struggling with hand-lettered manuscripts and documents, often in Latin or medieval French, two languages that I can’t really muddle through in a primary document. I don’t know. This feeling is new to me.

I have to say, that it’s also far easier to develop plots when the detectives are HIRED rather than manufacturing a REASON for the AMATEUR sleuth to do their sleuthing. But that’s only a minor detail.

Oh, I am still compelled by medieval stuff I come across in the news, when this or that has been discovered, and the same with the latest Tudor revelations. But there’s nothing quite like walking the streets, riding the hansom cabs and omnibuses (in my mind) through a London we can all pretty much still see today. And on top of it all, SHERLOCK HOLMES!

Like a fan girl, I get to play the Great Game when I write them (the “Great Game” is pretending that Sherlock Holmes really existed) and having him involve himself in the lives of these two chaps who are his proteges. They are young and still need his mentorship, though their growing renown has meant that by book six, THE GHOST CARRIAGE, that I am writing now, they no longer require his financial help.

To be released June 1, 2027

It’s strange, really, knowing these characters so well, letting them inhabit so much of my own brain attic, and finding new ways to entertain them with a challenging investigation, and how much or how little Mister Holmes will intervene. It’s like owning a little piece of the Doyle world.

So just look the other way when I yell at the TV screen about a castor set that I spotted, or I chuckle and nod sagely as I read through the canon yet again to get the cadence of the language and pick up yet more vocabulary, and try, once again, to master the Method. At least my addiction is not a seven percent one. It’s just an innocent obsession. Whether it’s a one or two pipe problem, I cannot say.