Goals for 2020

Happy New Year, everyone! Hope all of your holidays were wonderful, with quality time spent with family and friends. We had a great Christmas ourselves. We live in different states, so we don’t usually get to celebrate the holiday together, but this year I went to visit D for two weeks in December. It was before Christmas, but we got to do all the Christmasy things like going to parades, making a gingerbread house, cooking cookies, and watching all the holiday movies. It was an experience we’ve never shared before and I really enjoyed it.

As we begin 2020, we enter with a very different mindset than we did with 2019. Last year, we had these big goals but we lacked the proper understanding of just what was possible for us. 2019 was also a very rough year, as we had to say goodbye to two beloved dogs. Rest in peace, Mina and Havok. But we thought we could just fly through the edits on The Cabin Girl while simultaneously writing up quick drafts of two other romance books. Oh, past self, you were so optimistic.

Now that we’ve finally finished and published a book (hello Redemption), we have a much better understanding of what we can accomplish and what exactly went wrong last year. As I’ve said before, our work on Cabin has been a huge learning experience. It was because of the two years we spent on that book, that Redemption came along so much easier.

So, what do we plan to accomplish this year?

First on the good ol’ To-Do List is to finish the Valentine’s Day themed romance we’re currently drafting. This is a story about a woman named Emily and a man named Nolan who had a falling out in high school. Now, as adults, they get paired up by a dating app that sits them together on a blind date. We’ll share more about this story as it develops.

We’re also, obviously, going to continue marketing for Redemption. We’re going to look into setting up a giveaway, and maybe getting some copies sent out to reviewers. I have the paperback interior already formatted, but the full cover spread is still on the To-Do List. If anyone has any advice on how to promote Redemption, we would love to hear it!

After the Valentine’s Day romance is completed, we plan to work on the second book for the Heart’s Peak series. We have a loose plot in mind, but that story still needs a lot of work and we’ll have to sit down with it after we finish our current project. We definitely want to keep the Heart’s Peak series going this year, though.

Another goal we have is to get The Cabin Girl published sometime this year. If you read our December update about Cabin, you know that we have some big decisions to make about the book. Right now, we’re leaning toward giving the book a scrub to make it shorter and more in line with the romance genre, to push it as one complete book. That’s not set in stone, but we will gives updates down the line when we make more final decisions. We plan to start working on this soon, before or after the Heart’s Peak book, possibly even alongside it.

And not book release related, we want to get a newsletter set up. That’s something we’ve thought about before, but it felt a little pointless before we actually had any of our work available for the public to read. Now that we’re rolling, it seems a good time to get a newsletter going.

Those are our goals that should take us through the spring. After that, we hope to publish one or two more of these quick romances, like Redemption. I don’t want to put an exact number on it, because there’s no way to know what the entire year holds, but I will say we’re both feeling very optimistic about our goals this time around.

Thank you again to everyone who’s supported us along the way. We truly hope you’ve enjoyed Redemption and we hope you enjoy the new books we’ll publish in the coming months! And, of course, we hope that all of you are successful in your own 2020 goals!

-A