I finished the New Mexico book. I think the series went sideways, and it never went as commercial as I intended, and I don't seem to be able to find my readership for it.
But this what I've been doing since 2019. Six years of work (and change). A series, five books and counting (and that's another half a million words there). That's a bit too much of my writing life and output to shelve it.
So now I'm back in that terrible limbo I was in when I finished Shirato (my actual trunk novel, now) as I shopped it around to publishers and never heard back.
I have a vague plan forward, which is multiple steps of scouting expedition. Get some beta readers to tell me if I'm writing books, or absolute crap (and I should go back to fanfiction and stop tricking people into paying for it).
Depending on that, both see if I can learn what I'm doing badly and should work on going forward (in hopefully more commercial work), and potentially, do some developmental editing on the way to revising the books. And, simultaneously, get opinions on how to best place these books in genre and towards audience.
And depending on how good I feel at that point, spend the money and time for more robust editing.
And then, depending on what I might have changed in order to find a market, change titles, covers, re-issue under different ISBN and so on.
What hurts, though, is that during all of this, the book isn't being read. It doesn't really "exist" because it is only on my own computers right now. There's no way for someone else to encounter it. I think I might be less attached to this one than any of the others. Hard to tell; I've been feeling very detached from everything lately.
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