Since the last book of my most successful series was just released on 12/20, I'm hoping to keep my readers invested in the extended universe. I'm already 30K words into the first character origin story and hope it is something that my fans will enjoy
and will attract new readers who will eventually pick up the 6-book series. This is the first time I've written something with such lasting and wide-reaching potential, so I'm really excited to build upon it and create new entry points to my work.
I have nothing but a positive outlook for this year. I write really quickly (the fantasy series is about one million words and I completed it in eighteen months), and so I feel like if I can accomplish
that, certainly I can write standalones and trilogies and other such works quickly enough to always have something new to focus on. It's also refreshing since the series had a large-scale military/epic focus and the companion novels have other various focuses (sword and sorcery, character studies, origin stories, more narrowly focused adventures, etc.). Additionally, if I ever need a break from fantasy I have about a billion dystopian/sci-fi ideas that wouldn't take long to pop out between my more popular fantasy releases.
One of these days I'll create a pen name to release books in a totally different genre than what I release now (I have about twelve completed novels in this genre sitting on my computer now), but not this year, I don't think. I ponder over everything I'd have to do for a pen name and always end up saying to myself, "How about
no?"