Jessica Meigs

What a Ridiculously Long Absence It’s Been

I figured it’s about time I shuffled around over here and updated; my shameful silence since—holy crap, has it really been that long?!—October is frankly an embarrassment.

Firstly, the Becoming Series is over, done, finito. I really don’t have anything else to say with those characters in that world. I toyed with writing a novel that focuses on a certain trio of characters (for those who have read The Becoming: Redemption, I’m sure you can guess which ones), but it’s lowest priority right now, because I have more important projects to take care of first. There may be some novellas and short stories in the Becoming universe in the future too, which are more likely because they’re less of a time commitment, but they would be self-published and that requires cash that frankly, I don’t have right this moment. So I can officially say that any further work in the Becoming Series is decidedly backburnered.

So what am I working on, you ask?

Allow me to address this in list format.

1. Wicked Creatures: The Unnaturals Series, Book 3. Urban fantasy / covert ops thriller. Supernatural meets Mission: Impossible. Yes, you read that right. This is the third book in The Unnaturals Series, which originally had a publishing deal with Permuted Press but is now a free agent in search of a new publisher (long story, that, which I’ll not be discussing here). Yes, I am on the third book of a series that doesn’t even have a publisher yet. But you can’t stop the creativity choo-choo train (did I really just write that?), and besides, if I write them all now, you’ll have less time to wait between each book coming out when it does get a deal.

2. Revenant: The Agency Series, Book 2. Urban fantasy / covert ops thriller. Supernatural meets Mission: Impossible…again. This is the prequel series to The Unnaturals Series, ongoing tales meant to explore the dark, red-dripping underbelly of the supernatural world, from the point of view of the characters Ashton and Zachariah. I’m continuing this four-part series despite the fact the first book is probably not selling as much as I’d like (but that’s probably because I don’t promote—or post over here—as much as I should and hey, while you’re at it, you could hop over to Amazon and pick up the first book). It’s been fun to write, which is probably why I keep going with it despite its lack of sufficient sales.

3. The Deadening. Horror / historical western. Pick a western. Any western. Add a whole lot of scary shit to it. That’s this book. Takes place in 1868 in the New Mexico Territory, features a “soldier’s heart”-riddled Civil War vet-turned-sheriff, a rather feisty, independent schoolteacher, a couple of deputies, and a four-person outlaw team who band together to protect the town from the spooky things that show up in the dark. It’s been way fun to write but very difficult, because it requires getting as close to historically accurate as possible, which obviously involves research.

4. The Hollow Men. Dark horror / post-apocalyptic / literary. Yes, literary. I blame the influence of my current education during my work towards my English and History degrees. This one is deep. I’ll be self-publishing it, unless it turns out so well that I feel it needs to take the deep dive into traditional publishing.

So now that that’s out of the way, I’d like to address a few semi-personal matters that I feel need to be said by way of excuse.

I’ve been largely absent from online activity for a while now, and it’s for a couple of reasons.

Firstly: I’m currently full time in university, working to finish my degrees in English and in History. This is, obviously, a huge time suck. Add in working full time at my job on overnights and trying to keep up with my writing, and I’m sure you can understand why it takes me longer to get back in touch with people when they tweet to me or message me/post to my Facebook. That said, if you’d like a reply to anything you have to say to me and you want to make sure I see it, please email it to me rather than post it on social media. This way I can give it the attention it needs and you will be much more likely to get a response. My email address is jessica(at)jessicameigs(dot)com. Please insert appropriate punctuation in place of the punctuation placeholders.

The other reason for me being mostly absent from social media (and this blog) is much more personal. In July 2014, my father passed away, just three days after my twenty-ninth birthday. I’m sure it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that it’s been a very rough year and a half for my family and me after this very much life-changing event. We’re still trying to adjust to life without him. As a result, I often have days where I lack motivation to do pretty much anything relevant or useful to my career—even including simple matters like writing a blog post. This is part of why it’s taken me months to get around to posting here on my site. Fortunately, I seem to be crawling out of this morass, likely because I was forced to by school last semester, and I haven’t backslid again, which is a huge plus. As such, I’m hoping to post more here, and not just about my books. So the site will, hopefully, be getting a little bit of a rebranding soon. It will still be the best place to come for book/publication news, but I’ll be making more posts with my thoughts on assorted matters. Because ultimately, I’m not advertising my books so much as myself—I want you guys who read The Becoming and its companion books to read my other works too!—and I want you guys to be able to get the opportunity to learn a little more about me and the way my brain works.

What these posts will entail, I don’t know yet. Some of them will be interesting things I’ve discovered through research for novels; some will be informative things I’ve picked up along the way at school. Maybe even some of it will be commentary on current events (but I haven’t decided if I want to do that for sure yet).

Anyway, expect some tweaks to how things are done here, but be assured they are good tweaks—tweaks that will hopefully make this site more of a place to come to read interesting posts in addition to my regular, sparse posts about my books.

Announcement Regarding The Becoming Series

So I have a little bit of an announcement to make, now that the ink is dry on the paperwork.

There will not be six books in The Becoming Series.

There are a variety of reasons that this is going to happen, but the primary reason is that, contrary to the outlines I drafted almost two years ago, there just isn’t enough material left to get an entire sixth book written for this series. I’d rather give you guys five great quality books than six so-so books. This isn’t, of course, the only reason I’ve made this decision, but this is the primary reason for it.

So what I’m doing is this: Book five is being retitled to The Becoming: Redemption. Instead of publishing a sixth novel, Permuted is going to reissue The Becoming: Origins, BUT Origins will have an added bonus of including two never-before-released novellas, one called “My Brother’s Keeper,” which is a story about the twins Sadie and Jude O’Dell, and a currently untitled story that tracks Remy Angellette when the outbreak reached New Orleans. Both of these stories take place before or concurrently with book one in the series. The Becoming: Origins will still include the novellas “Brothers in Arms” and “Origins.”

Hopefully all you guys are understanding about the need for these changes to take place, but I promise you that, in exchange, Redemption is going to be EPIC.