republishing – Ladies of Mystery

by Janis Patterson

Dumfungled is a Scots word that means to be physically and mentally worn out, which is as good a definition of burn out as I’ve ever heard.

Burn out. It’s an ugly word, and an uglier truth, and right now I’m feeling like a charred match.

It’s been a tough year. On the personal front, I lost three long-time friends to Death, two of whom were younger than I. Now that The Husband is retired we have been traveling more, including a recent expedition to dig for diamonds in Arkansas. Yes, Arkansas. It seems that at a rough estimate 25% of the world’s surface diamonds are in the 40 +/- acres of the Crater of Diamonds State Park. Not that we found any – the only things I found were a couple of muscles I didn’t know I had. Ouch!

On a professional front, in case you’ve been living under a rock this year and missed my continual updates, I republished 22 reverted books – each freshly edited, freshly formatted and most with new covers – one every other Wednesday beginning on 15 January and the last one released 25 October.

That’s a lot of work, and a lot harder than you’d think, and because of it I only wrote two new books this year instead of my normal four or five. Oh, and just in case I get bored four dear friends and I are putting out our own anthology in the spring. (Follow this blog for more information…)

I’m tired.

I have a book that I would like to finish, a book I really like, but when I sit down to write it always seems that suddenly there is something else that absolutely demands to be done at that exact moment, like cleaning the dishwasher’s gasket or paste waxing the top of the dining table. I know, I know… escapism.

However, I’m proud of what I have accomplished. Those books are out there, and they will be there for as long as I want them to be.

And to reward myself, I am taking the rest of the year off. My kitchen and office both need excavating, my wardrobe desperately needs some attention and as I sorely need a distraction The Husband is taking us to Germany in December to see the Christmas Markets. He says I need to see something outside the parameters of my computer screen. I didn’t argue!

So this is my last blog for 2023. I’ll be back in January, probably with lots of tales about Germany, and hopefully with a couple of ideas for new books… and the enthusiasm to actually write them!
Wishing you all a Happy Thanksgiving, a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! See you in 2024!

by Janis Patterson

For every beginning there is an ending… and conversely, for every ending there is a beginning… and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

This year has been a landmark year for me – it’s been one of the lowest output years for me in well over a decade (only two books as opposed to the four or five I usually do) and yet I’ve been busier than I ever have.
In case you have been living under a rock and not heard about my republishing blitz I’m going to give you a quick précis…

During the covid crazies I got very lazy. The Husband was home – and even retired during this time – s0 we had things to do and my writing business came in a distant second to being with him. I knew that rights on previously published books were coming back to me, but being distracted by other things I just let the reversion letters pile up on my computer.

Until January of this year. Life was returning to a semblance of normal and I realized I wasn’t getting any younger (are any of us?) and if I wanted to get back into this writing thing I had to get busy, so a good start would be republishing those reverted books through my own company. A quick wander through my hard drive shocked me, because there were 26 (yes, TWENTY SIX) of the little beasties. Gulp.

A quick perusal decided me that for various reasons four of them were going permanently ‘under the bed,’ hopefully never to be seen again. That left 22 to be republished. As I am lazy, doing that could possibly take a couple of years, years which I might not have. As I was raised in advertising and journalism, the fact that deadlines are sacred is bred into my blood and bones. My father taught me that (to use his words) “There is only one excuse for you to miss a deadline, and that is death. Yours.”

So I set myself a deadline – I would release a book freshly edited, freshly formatted and most with new covers every other Wednesday until all were out, starting on January 15. MISTLETOE MAGIC, the last book, comes out October 25.
22 books released every other Wednesday, each on schedule, each reworked as promised and all without missing a single release day. (Actually, there were 24 released – one through one of my publishers and the other as an outlier which appeared suddenly through a set of circumstances too complex to go in to… neither of which I counted as part of the blitz.)

I’m exhausted. I would love to take a few weeks off away from the computer, but I have deadlines… one for a July 4th mystery anthology, one for my new Flora Melkiot book and one for a summer Regency romance anthology. Sigh. Even though we spend our days pretty much in the same room (the den) The Husband says I spend more time with the computer and my invisible friends than with him and lately he’s been right. I’ve taken my computer along on every trip we’ve made this year – and it saved my sometimes tenuous sanity the days we were holed up in a motel in Mississippi when he fell ill on our way home from NINC!

Anyway, the blitz is now over and the encroaching deadlines await. It doesn’t get any easier, people. It really doesn’t.

And now for some good news! EXERCISE IS MURDER is now available in audio from Audible! (The ebook is available from Amazon and will hopefully be available in paperback before too long… it is the first appearance of the redoubtable Flora Melkiot!)