Naked Crow. The series.

I honestly never thought I'd 'say' this but writing a series can be hard.

When I started writing this first naturist based story I had no idea that so many more would follow.

Thirteen stories about Sheila have appeared so far and I'm proud of each and every one of them. For those who enjoy the series: there is a fourteenth book in the making and that one triggered the first sentence of this post.

Writing a series is hard.

To be more precise, writing a consistent naturist series is hard while at the same time things become easier.

How does this contradiction appear?

The easier part is that the people in the stories grow. Develop. Become so much more real, with family and backstories and everything that comes with actual people. It's great knowing so much about Sheila, Jeremy, Josy, the parents and so on.

The hard part is to come up with interesting, intriguing plots and subjects while still sticking it all to naturism. Part of this is also a consequence of the 'easier' bits I mentioned above. The world the characters move in is getting more and more defined which can be restrictive.

The fourteenth story is now in its second incarnation. The first idea I had worked until around chapter 12 and then it died. Full stop, no more way forward. The second idea I had worked a lot better. Until December of last year.

As you can see here on the right, in the histogram of words written per day, the number of words dropped fast, and after December 13 there was nothing until the 21st of February. That's more than 2 months of deadly silence and the story collecting dust. I needed all that time to get my mind focused on the next move in the story because it was getting difficult. Complicated. I dumped some parts and tried to fill those in again in a better way. That's necessary because if I can't even follow what's going on in there, how can I expect the readers to tag along?

Can't have that, right, so I had to make this work again without being confusing. I think I managed it so I'm going ahead once more after writing down a LOAD of notes on what is going to happen, when, to whom, and why. I won't share those with you (they're in Dutch anyway 🤣) or you'll probably run away screaming.

At least now you have an idea why Naked Crow 14 is taking so long.

And Naked Crow 15, I hear you ask? Now I am running away screaming.