Blues, a Sneak Peek

I got this review today, which got me thinking...

When I originally started writing Roll as a novel, I had the first half of the book set up for Beau to deal with his issues, and the second half for Vin to deal with his. As I continued writing, it just wasn't working out the way I wanted; Vin's stuff kept getting shoved off to deal with Beau.

(In my opinion, Beau is the main protagonist in this story, where Vin is the protagonist in the 2nd novel)

By the time I got to a point where I felt Beau was stable enough to deal with Vin's issues, I was already at a full-length novel word count. And while 60,000 is a short novel, 120,000 words is a LONG freaking novel... especially for a romance, which even mainstream romances tend to cap out at about 80,000 words. 130k (ish) would be a 400+ page novel...

I'd wanted to include a sneak peek chapter - since Blues was already almost completely written (altho not edited) by the time Roll was published, but inquiries to my editor said that wasn't feasible. I suspect many things; 1) a lot of authors don't always write sequels, they mean to and don't get 'round to it. Or like Robert Asprin who originally promised 1 or 2 Myth books per year and then there were several years between one novel and the next.... 2) Blues could suck, and then my publisher would have to reject it, leaving readers going "where is it?" and 3) I could change my mind about chapter 1 in Blues and then it doesn't mesh up with the published novel. In any case, I agreed that we should not publish the sneak peek chapter with the novel.

But I have written the whole book - it's out to my beta readers, altho I've only gotten one selection of notes back thus far... (One of my beta readers had a death in the family, and another one recently got married, so real life and all that. THIS IS NOT a complaint. I'm not going to be able to work on those edits until after I finish writing Howling Bitch, so there's plenty of time. I promise!!) In fact, I've even written the first couple of chapters of book three, Classic and outlined more than half of it.

But, in case you want it, here it is... (UNEDITED WORK IS UNEDITED!) Keep in mind this chapter has some spoilers, so if you haven't read Roll yet, you might want to not mess with this, okay? okay.