Why I wrote Family Treed and Louisiana Lagniappe

I was searching through all my posts and realized that I didn’t write a “why I wrote” for Family Treed, my short story in my Big Uneasy series. I might not have done it because it was a short story.

I honestly don’t remember.

So I think I’ll cover both “Family Treed” and Louisiana Lagniappe today because both stories were meant to be longer and happened during some Life Happening.

So I wrote a book called Relatively Risky, that released in April or May of 2013. I don’t remember the exact date and back then Amazon would change your release date if you uploaded a new file. I do know it was my first indie release and it was also the first book in my Big Uneasy series. My Grand Plan was to release a book a year and perhaps some shorter stories in between the novels.

Yeah.

So my publisher died. All my rights reverted to me and I was scrambled to get my books back on sale. And Stuff Happened in my real life.

Despite all this, I managed to release “Family Treed” in either Sept or Oct of 2013. Again, not sure of exact date now. See above.

And then a bunch more life happened before I could write and release Dead Spaces in May of 2015.

So this is 2017. Late in 2017. I can tell you I released other stuff, but not a Big Uneasy story. And last year I released one short story in Pets in Space. Life AND death happened in 2016 and blew my production schedule out the window.

So I was determined my readers who had hung with me would get something in 2017. I penciled in a novel, but it was a lot harder to get the words flowing again than I anticipated. So Louisiana Lagniappe became a novella.

I took who I was going to write about (one of the siblings) and put them on the schedule for 2018 and queued up someone I was not expecting to write about anytime soon: Zach, the dad of the Bakers Dozen.

Despite this not being the book I meant to write, I enjoyed telling Zach’s story and I think my Muse healed some more while writing it.

So I have a few chapters written for the now unnamed Big Uneasy story and the beginnings of an unnamed Project Enterprise story. But I have had an initial sit down with both sets of characters and we’ve opened a dialog. There is hope.

Just tell Life not to Happen for a bit, okay?

I really need a break.

So how has Life been treating you? Do you need a break, too?

Perilously yours,

Pauline