Copy Cat?

Okay, so I had this really great idea I was going to pitch to my editor. Not just for one book, but for a whole series of books.

Since I spent (a lot of) time recently working on edits for my bullrider book, which is the third in a series of sorts, it reminded me how much I love the setting and world I'd created for those three books. I thought it would be fun to create a bunch of spin-off stories featuring characters who have had a mention in the other three books, but really weren't featured at all in any major way.

I even had the premise. The Corral (Which is the bar in my stories and features prominently in all of them.) would be putting together a calendar to raise money for an Adoption Fund started by one of the main characters in the series. In actuality, there would be no calendar, but each short story would feature one of the men from this calendar. I was going to title the series "The Men of The Corral" and each book would be titled with just the hero's name and say "Mr. January". This would give me a short story release every month for a year. (The stories wouldn't be long...just ten to twenty pages or so, so the project seemed doable.) How cool would that be?

I started making notes about ideas for some of the characters. I even went as far as to make up a proposal with my ideas. I was waiting until I submited my Halloween story to my editor. Once that was underway, I thought I'd hit her up with this to see if Wild Rose had any interest.

Turns out it's probably a good thing I waited. Because I happened to come across (from some blog or another) a book called "Jumping Mr. January". I looked it up, and as I delved further, came to find that a series just like the one I was thinking of proposing...literally with the same premise of a charity calendar...and books featuring the calendar model for each month...was already being published this year by another publisher.

I was one, disappointed, because I'd been looking forward to seeing if TWRP was interested and seeing if I was up for the challenge of creating twelve stories for one year, and two, amazed, because I honestly had thought my idea was a unique and different one.

Oh well...

So now I'm trying to decide what to work on next. I submitted a query for my Halloween story on Monday and sent off the requested mss later that afternoon, so for now, that project is out of my hands. I did start another story called "One Great Night" that I could revisit. Or, I might go really crazy and work on the time travel story I had an idea for. I'll have to pull out the notes for that one and see if it strikes my fancy.

I'll let you know what I decide!

Until next time,

Happy Reading!

Debra
www.debrastjohnromance.com