All Good Things ...

After a flurry of weekend editing, Book 7 of the Enchanted, Inc. series, currently called Kiss and Spell, is off to the Japanese publisher.

And we've lined up the cover artist and copyeditor for the English release. The targeted release date is May 17. Things may come up to change that, but that date gives us some cushion. It will be like the last two books, in various electronic formats and in paperback, but I'm hoping we can get the paper release closer to the e-book release date.

Now for the slightly bittersweet part of this news. It's likely that this will be the last Enchanted Inc. book for the time being. I started realizing this as I wrote the end of the first draft. Normally by that point, I already have a sense of what the next book will be, to the point that it's difficult to revise the book because I keep thinking about the next one. But this time, I didn't. Because of that, I wrapped up the loose ends instead of leaving things hanging and wrote the end as though I'm ending the series. (And I LOVE the ending.)

However, I didn't kill all the characters or do anything I'd have to undo if another idea came to me, so if I get inspired later I can always do another book. But I think I'd be okay with it if this is the end. Seven books is a pretty long series, and I think it's best to stop before I start hating it or before the quality slips. I think this book is fun and clever and romantic, and I'm very proud of it, so I think I'd be ending on a high note. These characters are usually very pushy, nagging at me to tell more stories about them, even while I'm working on other things, and now they're strangely silent, so perhaps they're content with the way I left them.

And lest anyone resent the new book as a shiny new toy taking me away from my earlier series, I wrote two Enchanted, Inc. books after writing the initial draft of it, so that book didn't kill the series. It's just that for the first time in about a decade, none of the many ideas swirling around in my head are for this series, and I don't even have any concepts I want to play with that I can map onto this series.

Of course, now that I've written this, I'll probably suddenly be hit by an idea that I absolutely MUST write. Though I discussed this with my agent last week, and nothing has hit me since then. Every time I try to think of these characters, it won't go beyond the last scene in this book.

First, though, I'm going to let myself celebrate the new sale. It was in the works for so long that I never really had the definitive "I sold a book!" excitement. I usually buy something fun (shoes most often) to celebrate a sale, so I need to go shopping. And then I need to make my house livable again and catch up on a bunch of business-type stuff before I plunge into another book.