Planning

Do you set monthly/yearly goals for your writing? What are your goals for the coming year?

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Open to Edits

I have a loose goal to publish a book every year. That said, I am my own publisher so I am not held to any dates. I don’t advertise release dates until the book is finished and I’m just doing last-minute cleanup, so I don’t have to sweat that goal.

So far, I’ve been really good at keeping it, and I usually publish two books a year. During covid, I published three books in a year. But it’s a loose standard, subject to revision as conditions allow.

When I published Worm Moon last summer, I turned my attention to the next book in What If…Wasn’t and immediately hit a writer’s block. I don’t get those very often because if I can’t write one story, I’ll turn to another which usually gets me going on both.

And it was understandable for this book because it’s the first full-length romance I want to write and, well, yeah, me and romance aren’t really close. I’m feeling my way through it. And it was also summer in Alaska, so wanting to be outside would have slowed me down a bit anyway.

In September, I realized I needed a break. To give myself some time to marinate the story I was struggling with, I decided to start work on the book that comes after Worm Moon (title tentatively “Inalienable Liberties”). Turns out, it wasn’t just romance that had me down. Writing the most-complicated book in the Transformation Project series turned out to be a struggle. Or maybe it’s writer’s block in general because I haven’t written much nonfiction either. Anyway, throughout October and November, it was like writing through molasses. I wrote a bunch of scenes in no particular order and felt like I was scattered and never going to finish. But then on Thanksgiving, I had a lovely conversation with some of my alpha readers and they gave me a bunch of ideas that provided the climax to the novel. Because everything is out of order, it still feels scattered, but I’m getting to a point where I can actually organize the story and then work on what is missing and what can be trimmed.

Whew! I still need about 40,000 words to make it a novel, but I know that’ll come once everything is organized.

So the point is, I will probably still keep my loose schedule of one book published per year, but it probably won’t be two books in 2023.

Beauty in Flexibility

I am still working my full-time job and trying to live life. I refuse to be a hermit-writer. So naturally, I can’t be too ambitious about writing goals. I strive to write somewhere between 350 and a thousand words a day about anything, but it’s not always my novels that get the attention. I try to finish a book every six months and publish yearly, but I’m not going to kill myself doing it. And sometimes, I go through dry periods when writing doesn’t flow like normal.

There’s beauty in flexibility because I don’t need to freak myself out if I’m not producing like normal. I did this once before a few years ago, where I watched TV instead of writing for about three months and then wrote the rough draft for the next book in six weeks. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a more productive period of writing. Sometimes we need to take breaks to recharge our battery/muse.

I still do have a couple of dates marked on a calender that tell me when to start pushing myself hard to complete my loose goals.

Bright Spots

The good news is that Cai Delaney may be talking to me again. The character had stopped talking to me a while ago and I put him in a position where he could die at the end of Worm Moon, but now I’m getting slivers of a future story, so I might need to resurrect him. I try never to kill off a good character unless they stop telling me their story. And I really love Cai. He’s such a nice guy and I put him through hell. I think this resurrection isn’t going to be a walk in the park. I’m not a capricious god-creator, but bad things definitely happen to good people in my books.

And then there’s what I’m working on over in What If…Wasn’t. I put Peter in prison, where I don’t really want to write his story. Even with my friend Bern giving me insight into the experience, I don’t want to write Peter in there. But the story of what happens later in his life is almost entirely written. I thought I’d concentrate on what happens to the people he affected, but that’s where I started struggling. I know Lily and Ben fall in love while Peter is away, but writing it as a traditional romance is s struggle. I know the other stories too and they will be easier, but I have to get past that hurdle first. Maybe finding a dead body is the answer. Or, er….

And then there’s Daermad Cycle. The fourth book is largely drafted and I just have to find time to write it. Fantasy takes time and a lot of immersion compared to writing real-world fiction. It also requires a reset in my own thinking because I’m entering a different world with people who think very differently from ordinary people.

The point is, I have lots to work on, so I shouldn’t have any difficulty with keeping up with my goal for a few years.