The first draft of book 19, Reapers is now complete!

Well, for some reason it took me almost three months to write this one.  Why’d it take so long?  Well, a lot of it had to do with some personal stuff I was dealing with, and I also had to edit a cookbook for our neighbor and get it ready for publication for her, so things sort of just kept getting in the way.  Tonight however, I finally managed to get it done, and I’ll start editing it tomorrow.  There will be one more book in the series, at least for now.  I may come back to it, but my plan is and has been to end it with book 20, which will mostly involve Jake and Lana’s story from a little before they met until they reached that town in Utah they were headed to at the beginning of Travelers.

The people in this series have become a second family to me, and as such I’ll never be able to truly say it’s done.  I know I’ll probably come back to it and write some more at some point, but I have another book that’s completely unrelated to the series that I want to write after the next one, and then we’ll see where that one goes.  Maybe it’ll become a series of its own, or maybe it’ll just be a standalone.  I really don’t know at this point, and I won’t know until I reach the end of it.  If I feel like it’s nothing more than a single story, then it’ll be a standalone.  If I feel like there’s more to tell with those characters, then I’ll continue on with it.

As for the characters in the Unseen Things universe…they’ll always live in my heart.  I’ve put so much into giving them life since I wrote the first book back in October of 2013, that I can’t even fathom writing a distinct and final ending for the series.  The thing is, after 19 books now, and soon a 20th, I need a little break.  I need some time to figure out where things will go in the future, or if they’ll continue on at all.  The way this latest book ends is different from the others in the series.  Most of the time there’s a little cliffhanger that leads you into the next book.  In this one, I just end it without a cliffhanger.  If this was the final book of the series, it would feel like an appropriate ending, and that’s how I’ll write the next one as well.  If the next one truly is the end, then I hope I’ll have left people satisfied.  If not, then hopefully I’ll have left them wanting more so they’ll continue this journey with me.  In any case, whatever the future holds, I’ll be eternally grateful that I’ve been a part of this universe, and a part of my characters’ lives.  They represent things to me that I often find lacking in humanity.  Things like honor, friendship, loyalty, love and a sense of family.  They give me hope, and they’ve given me something that no one else could – a sense of purpose.

Anyway, I’ll get started on the editing tomorrow.  Usually it takes me from four to seven days to do the editing, and then I’ll get it published.  After I finish writing the next one, which will be called Invasion by the way, I’m going to focus some of my time and effort into getting things reformatted and published on Createspace, so I’ll be able to make hard copies available as well as the e-books.  That will be a slow process, but I’ll start with the first one and get through them one at a time until they’re all available in print form.  For right now though, I just need to focus on what’s in front of me, which is a very tedious editing process that I very rarely enjoy.