To Be Or Not To Be

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I am a voracious reader. I enjoy nothing more than losing myself in a book, sinking into a plot, becoming immersed in a character’s personality, opinions and adventures. To me, many characters become people with whom I laugh and cry. So why am I surprised when readers feel the same way about characters I have created? Although Tiff, Royal, Jack, Mel, Gia, Mac and all the rest feel real to me, it didn’t occur to me that they do to anyone else. So all the emails, messages and comments which say, “I love this series. Please, please, don’t make this the last book!” knocked me on my tush.

And what do you do when you finish a series, and get those messages? You feel awful. You have a conversation with yourself something like this:

“I feel terrible. I hate to disappoint all these lovely people.”

“Then write another book.”

“I don’t know if I have it in me. The characters aren’t speaking to me right now.”

“Then tell them no.”

“Tell them no?”

“Yes, be honest with them. Say it’s the last book.”

“Okay. But, what if, sometime down the line, ideas explode in my head and I want to write another? I’ll have lied to everyone.”

“Then tell them maybe.”

“Yeah, but what if I don’t write another?”

“Oh, for goodness sake, you’re driving me nuts. You can’t have it both ways.”

“I’m driving you nuts? How do you think I feel?”

My problem is I have a hard time saying “no” to anyone, about anything. I hate to disappoint people. So I’ve vacillated. I’ve said yes it’s the last. I’ve said maybe, just maybe, there may be another. An author friend suggests I write an anthology of Whisperings short stories, so I’ve mentioned that, although I don’t know if it will happen. But one thing I can’t to do is force myself to write another Whisperings. I know of some authors who’ve done that to satisfy readers or their publisher, and it hasn’t ended well because the books lack that essential something, and their fans know it. And, boy, do they let the authors know.

The bottom line is I don’t see another Whisperings in the immediate future, but the door is still open. Right now I’m busy with other projects. I’ve almost finished the first draft of my dark urban fantasy Downside Rain. I will finish re-writing, then republish, my sci-fi/fantasy novels Mindbender and Galen’s Gate. They have been languishing in my computer for far too long.

If you’d like to be one of the first to know when a new Linda Welch book is published, there is an email sign-up at the top of this website. I hope you’ll take advantage of it, because apparently Amazon’s notification service (on the Amazon Author Pages) doesn’t always work, and using the sign-up will ensure Barnes & Noble, iTunes and Kobo customers are notified.

Back to work for me now. And I’ll try not to have any more arguments with myself.

 

A new action-packed urban fantasy, DOWNSIDE RAIN, is available for Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook and Sony iTUnes.

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