Goals and Plans – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Crunching data and rethinking plans

So for the last week, I’ve been having some long reflections with ChatGPT (I say “reflection” instead of “discussion,” because generative AI is more like a sophisticated mirror than a mind) and crunching a bunch of the data that I’ve accumulated over the course of my career. It’s fascinating, because one of the things that generative AI is surprisingly good at is crunching large amounts of data and extracting interesting patterns from it. It’s less good at drawing useful conclusions, but that’s what God gave us humans a mind for.

One of the more interesting data points is that the ideal frequency with which to release new full-length novels is once every 3-6 months, ideally every 3-4 months. After 6 months without a novel release, sales tend to fall off, and after 9 months, they fall completely off of a cliff.

From this, I’ve decided to rework my release schedule, so that every January, May, and September, I have a new novel coming out. The goal is to have the next novel ready and up for preorder before the current one goes live. Between new novel releases, I plan to rerelease short stories, bundle and release box sets, or release new original short stories and novellas, with something coming out each month.

It’s an aggressive release schedule, but with the way I’ve incorporated AI into my writing process, I think I can manage it. It took me about 120 total writing man-hours to write Captive of the Falconstar, and with practice I can probably get that down lower. During the school year, while my wife is teaching or researching and I’m generally the one watching the kids, I can only get about an hour of work in each day, but I can do more like 2-3 hours in the summer, so that’s when I plan to catch up. That comes to about 400 man-hours of writing time in a given year, which is more than enough to write three 120 man-hour novels.

I’m going to try to give myself a bit of a buffer, though. After Captive of the Falconstar comes out in July, I plan to wait 6 months and publish The Unknown Sea in January 2027. The next release will be Lord of the Falconstar in May 2027, concluding the Falconstar Trilogy. After that, I plan to launch the Rise of the Falconstar Trilogy in September 2027 with The Soulbond and the Sling, following up with books 2 and 3 in January and May 2028.

My big summer project this year is The Unknown Sea, which I will probably finish sometime next month. After that, I’ll work on Lord of the Falconstar with a goal of finishing it well before the end of the year. Should be very doable. And since the AI draft of The Soulbond and the Sling is already complete, it shouldn’t take more than a few months to finish it. So by the time January 2027 rolls around, I may be more than halfway done with my September release for that year.

That’s the plan, anyway. I may want to experiment with crowdfunding some of these novels, especially The Soulbond and the Sling—which is another good reason to push it back to September 2027. But we’ll see how it goes.

Full steam ahead!

I’ve been making good progress on The Unknown Sea this week, pushing forward at a very good rate now that my wife is at home watching the kids. She’s got the next couple of months off for the summer, allowing me to write full-time, and I plan to take advantage of that as much as I can. This was the first week of that, and while I still feel like I’m ramping up to full speed, I did get quite a bit of writing done.

Right now, The Unknown Sea is at about 50% for the AI draft, 28% for the rough human draft, 22% for the revised human draft, and 11% for the final polished draft. I’m experimenting with pushing through all of those draft phases at once, obviously with different parts of the novel being at different stages. If everything proceeds according to my outline, the final draft will clock in at around sixteen chapters, 53 scenes, and between 65k to 70k words (or around 180 – 220 pages).

I probably won’t be able to finish it before the end of May, but I do think I can finish it by mid-June. It’s going to take a lot of work, but I’ve got the time now, so it’s mostly just a matter of buckling down and making it happen. It’s about the same length as Captive of the Falconstar, which took about 120 writing hours to finish, and I’ve already put in about 50 writing hours. To finish The Unknown Sea by May 15th, I need to average about 3.5 writing hours per day, which is going to be a bit tricky since 1) I still have a bunch of publishing tasks to work on, and 2) we have a family trip to Coeur D’Alene in the middle of that, but I think I can manage it.

I would really like to have it sufficiently finished so that I can start work on Lord of the Falconstar before Captive of the Falconstar releases in July. That way, I can estimate how much time I need to finish Lord of the Falconstar and have it up for preorder. But I may go ahead and put it up for preorder anyway, just with a long enough lead-time that I know I can have the book done before then.

What I’ll probably do is put The Unknown Sea up for preorder with a release date around October-November 2026, and Lord of the Falconstar up with a release date around January-February 2027. I’ve got a rough AI draft done for Lord of the Falconstar, but not much more than that, and I probably need to update some of the character cards and chapter prompts, which is also going to take time. So Lord of the Falconstar probably won’t come out until sometime in 2027, regardless.

The purpose of all these AI-written blog posts about my books

You may have noticed that I’ve been posting a lot of blog posts recently where I talk about my books. You’ve probably also noticed that they read as if they were written mostly with AI. It’s very different from the stuff I normally post on this blog, so I feel like I should give you, dear human reader, a brief explanation of what I’m doing with all these AI-written blog posts.

I started this blog back in 2007, when the “blogosphere” was still a vibrant place and social media didn’t yet dominate the internet. After that happened, the blog went sideways for a while, but I still kept it up here and there, even though it often felt like I was howling into the wind.

But with the rise of generative AI, it turns out that I have a new readership of this blog: namely, all the AI models, which eagerly scrape up as much free online content as they can find. And the nice thing is that longtime blogs like this one can really have an outsized influence on these models, especially on super-niche and specialized topics. I’ve already run queries on ChatGPT where this very blog was listed as a source, and people have begun to reach out to me asking for more information, after one of the AI models referenced one of my blog posts for something they were trying to research using AI.

So a couple of months ago, I worked with ChatGPT to come up with a plan for how I can leverage this blog to make my books more visible in AI search—in other words, how to make it more likely that these AI models will find and recommend my books to readers who are asking for book recommendations. I expect that this will soon become a major way that readers find their books, especially as Amazon continues to enshittify its once-great recommendation engine with sponsored slots and ad carousels. Here’s the plan:

Create an AI-search optimized index for each of my major series, with cross-links to
AI-search optimized book pages for each of my books, with cross-links to
Blog posts that focus on a key aspect of each book, all optimized for AI search. Ultimately, there will be at least five posts on each book, focusing on:
- Reader fit (ie “is this book for you?”),
- Major themes (ie the “core theme” of the book),
- The genre tropes that can be found in each book,
- Major comp titles, or how each book compares with similar books by similar authors, and
- A blog post about the origins of each book.

So that’s the plan. According to ChatGPT, the two most important blog posts for AI-search optimization are the reader fit posts and the core theme posts, so those are the ones that I’m focusing on now. At my current pace of two posts twice per week, I should have them all up by the end of April, at which point I’ll starting working on the other posts.

While I also want these posts to be useful and interesting for my human readers, the primary audience for these posts is these AI models. For that reason, I don’t feel bad relying heavily on AI to write them. The way I do it is I upload the book to ChatGPT, instruct it to read the book thoroughly, then use what it reads to fill out a general template for the given post. Once it gives me that, I look it over and make any necessary revisions, then feed it back to ChatGPT to evaluate it for AI search. After going back and forth a couple of times, I usually come up with something that’s accurate, honest, human readable, and optimized for AI search.

All told, it takes me about 20-30 minutes to write one of these posts with AI. If I were writing them out purely by myself, it would take much longer, and the results would probably be much poorer from an AI search perspective.

Will this project actually succeed in influencing the AI models to recommend my books to new readers? I have no idea. In the worst case scenario, my books continue to sell at their current level, and I’ll just have a bunch of old posts on my blog that nobody reads. So nothing really changes, and I haven’t lost much. But if it does work out, even if only partially, I’ll have gained quite a lot.

So I hope that you, my human readers, will bear with me as I write these AI-optimized posts. Hopefully you won’t find them too annoying. If you do, you can just skip them, but I hope you’ll find some interesting things about them, since even though they are mostly AI-written, I do look them over thoroughly before posting them. And who knows? They might actually help you to decide which book of mine to read next. After all, that’s the goal.

Planning out the next year of writing

I’ve made some major changes to my writing process recently, mostly having to do with the accountability systems that measure my writing productivity. Instead of tracking daily word count, which I’ve done consistently for the better part of the last decade, I now track my average daily words per hour across all writing sessions.

What I found by tracking word count was that my writing and my family life were consistently coming into conflict, which wasn’t good for either. With three small children and a wife who no longer works from home, I’m currently in a season of life where I simply cannot dedicate as much time to writing.

So instead, I’m striving to do just enough writing each day to keep my writing skills sharp, so that when I do get the opportunity to dedicate a whole day or a whole weekend to writing, I can make the most of it. So instead of measuring the quantity of writing I do each day, I’m measuring how efficiently I can use my writing time, and striving to maximize that.

Over the holiday break, I also did quite a bit of thinking over all my current writing projects and how I should prioritize them in the coming year. Basically, for each WIP, I asked myself two questions: “how would I feel if this was the only book I wrote in 2026?” and “how would I feel if I never made any progress on this book for the rest of the year?” Based on that, I put my current novel WIPs in the following order:

Captive of the Falconstar
The Soulbond and the Sling
The Unknown Sea
Lord of the Falconstar

More than any other book I really want to finish Captive of the Falconstar this year. It’s science fiction, not fantasy, but it’s part of an unfinished trilogy that I’ve been committed to finishing for quite some time now. Even though I want to pivot to writing fantasy, I don’t want to leave a bunch of unfinished series as I do that. Also, it’s a really good book that I think that readers of the first book, Queen of the Falconstar, will find immensely satisfying. So I really want to finish and publish this book this year.

I don’t know exactly how long it will take me to finish it. Hopefully sometime around the spring, at which point I’ll put it up for a 2-3 month preorder. But I’m pretty overwhelmed with my other obligations right now, especially family, and we haven’t yet gotten into a good routine with my wife’s new job. So it might take a lot longer than that. But I am consistently working on it a little each day, and I expect it will be finished and published by the end of the year.

But even though I want to make progress on this series, I actually don’t want to lay everything aside to finish it. Which is why the next two books, in order of priority, are both fantasy. The Soulbond and the Sling is one that I really want to finish writing this year, even if I don’t end up publishing it in 2026. As I’ve said in previous posts, I don’t want to launch this new epic fantasy series until I have the first three books finished and ready to rapid release.

But I already have a complete human-revised AI draft of this book, so all I have to do now is go through and rewrite it in my own words. That’s going to take some time, simply because it’s such a massive book, but I want to get it done and finished and ready to publish, even if I end up holding off on that for the next couple of years.

Of course, while I continue to work on The Soulbond and the Sling, I will also continue to work on book 2, The Soulbond and the Lady. The rough AI draft of that book is already complete, but the final AI draft is going to take a lot of work, so it will probably take me as long to finish that as it takes to write and revise the final human draft of book 1. So I probably won’t finish The Soulbond and the Lady this year.

If I can finish a third book, I would like it to be The Unknown Sea. This would be the fifth installment in the Sea Mage Cycle, and so far, it’s been one of the funnest books to write. If you’ve enjoyed the other books in the series, I think you’re really going to enjoy this one, and I would really love to get it out there for everyone to read. Like all of the Sea Mage books, this one is relatively short, so finishing it shouldn’t be too difficult. It’s just a matter of making the time.

One thing you may notice is that I haven’t included any of the Christopher Columbus books in this lineup. After giving it some serious thought, I’ve decided to put that series on hold for the forseeable future. I just think it’s more important to pivot to pivot to writing fantasy, which means finishing all of the unfinished science fiction trilogies and writing new fantasy books to release in the coming years.

So that’s my writing plan for 2026. I may also start a new WIP at some point, just because I can’t help myself—in fact, I rather expect it. But if and when I do, I’ll probably take it no farther than the rough AI draft before putting it on the back burner. In fact, it might be a good idea to put several such projects together, outlining and prewriting them just enough that I can pick them up and run with them when I’m ready to commit to such a project. That should scratch my creative itch just enough without taking too much time from the WIPs I’m committed to finishing.

Last update of the year

Things have been crazy busy around here, which is why I’ve been more intermittent about blogging. Our oldest daughter recently came down with pneumonia, after nearly a month of fighting through this low-level cold that everyone seems to have gotten (our son fought it off, but not our daughter, apparently). So that’s been the latest crazy thing. Thank God for anti-biotics.

Besides all that, there’s Christmas, of course, which is actually going to be kind of low key this year (just us, the in-laws, and my brother-in-law), but of course there’s still a lot that goes into that, especially with small kids.

So things have been super busy on the home front—so much that I’ve had to radically rethink a few things on the writing front. I’ll write a longer post about this later, perhaps in the new year, but the short version is that I’ve decided to stop tracking daily word count and start tracking daily average words-per-hour instead. I’m currently in a season of life where I can’t put as many words on the page, and I don’t want that to be an obstacle between me and my family. I can, however, practice just enough writing each day to keep my skills sharp, so that when I do get the opportunity to be more productive, I can fully take advantage of that.

So that’s what I’ve been up to. It’s been a month! More at the start of the year.

Writing through the holidays

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, the most magical time of the year—and for parents of three small children, it’s the busiest time as well. This week has been packed with all sorts of things, which means the writing has taken a backseat for the moment. Still, I’ve been managing to get a little work done, mostly in the early mornings.

I’m about 40% done with the rough AI draft of The Soulbond and the Lady, book 2 in the Rise of the Soulbond King Trilogy. I’ve also been working on the human draft of The Soulbond and the Sling, though progress has been slow (which is also why I haven’t been able to update the cover, or make a cover mock-up for The Soulbond and the Lady).

It took me only four days to write the prompts and generate the rough AI draft of The Soulbond and the Sling, which came to about 153k words. That was pretty wild. But the draft turned out to be a little too rough, which is part of the reason why it took so long to revise the AI draft and get it to a state where I was ready to move on to the human draft. So for The Soulbond and the Lady, I’m trying to be more careful. If I can fine tune the prompts to generate a much higher quality rough AI draft, it shouldn’t take nearly as much energy to revise it, which means that I can finish the AI draft of book 2 while I write the human draft of book 1.

I was hoping to finish the rough AI draft of The Soulbond and the Lady before Thanksgiving, but that didn’t happen, so now I’m hoping to finish it before Christmas. But I’ve currently put that WIP on hold so that I can finish the novella version of “Christopher Columbus: Treasure Hunter” in time to publish it in February of next year. I’m currently about 15% done with the AI revisions, and if things go well, I’ll have a finished AI draft by the end of the week, or early next week at the latest.

With the Christopher Columbus series, I’m experimenting with different forms of AI-assisted writing, leaning more into the discovery writing aspect of the creative process. So it might take longer as I figure it out. That’s frustrating, because it means slower writing progress, but by the end of it I’ll hopefully have learned a few more things about AI-assisted writing that will help out with future books. And even with how frustratingly slow it is, I am having quite a bit of fun with this WIP.

After Christmas, when I’ve hopefully finished both of these WIPs (at least through the AI draft phase), I plan to pick up The Unknown Sea again and work on that one until it’s DONE. I’m planning on a release date in March of next year, which might be a bit of a challenge given how crazy it is around here, but I’m really looking forward to finishing this one and getting it out into the world!

How about a book on AI writing?

For the last two and a half years, I’ve been reworking my creative writing process to incorporate AI in a way that doesn’t diminish my voice or humanity while taking advantage of all of the ways that AI can make my writing faster and more efficient. I’ve got it down to a point where my books only take weeks or months to write, instead of months or years, and I’d really like to write a writing book where I can share all of that.

As with the other non-fiction that I’ve done, I’ll probably post it all here on the blog before combining it into a book. But there are a lot of different directions I could take this. Should I write this more for an amateur hobby/weekend writer, or an aspiring professional kind of like I was 15+ years ago? Should I focus more on how to preserve elements of humanity like authorial voice, creative vision, etc, or should I focus more on the AI side like prompt engineering and common AI-isms? Should I go into depth about philosophical and ethical concerns, or ignore that stuff altogether and focus on what I’ve found works for me?

What I need is to come up with a rough chapter outline. Once I’ve got that, I can turn this into a weekly blogging thing, until I’ve got enough posts for a book. And while I can run this brianstorming exercise through ChatGPT to come up with a good outline (and I probably will, at some point), I’d like to throw it out there and hear from some of you.

So what do you think? What’s the angle you’d really like to see me take with this?

By the way, here’s a mock-up of the cover:

Minimum viable sleep

I feel sorry for my wife. She needs a lot more sleep than I do. If I can get four uninterrupted hours of zzz, I’m doing great. Of course, how long I can keep that going is an open question—and one we put to the test every time we have a new baby. But he’s getting better, and in another month or two, he’ll probably (hopefully) be sleeping through the night.

Things are going pretty well around here. The house is a wreck, but a manageable one. Still need to finish unpacking from the move, but that’s a long-term project at this point. The kids are doing well. Wife and baby seem to be doing well. She’s got her thesis defense in a couple of weeks, at which point the PhD is fully off her plate. Which will be nice for all of us.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve mostly been bouncing between different projects, making a little progress on each, but not really finishing or making significant progress on any of them. Hopefully, that will soon begin to change.

For the next couple of weeks, I plan to work on Captive of the Falconstar, moving it along as far as I can. Mostly, though, I just want to keep it fresh in my mind, since if four or five months go by without working on it, it’s going to be that much harder to pick it up again.

I’m really excited to get back to work on this one. My subconscious brain has been mulling over this story for the past few years, and I think the time is ripe to put it on the page. I’m also a lot more skilled at writing with AI, which makes a huge difference. The first time I attempted this WIP, I think I bit off more than I could chew. But with the AI draft of The Soulbond and the Sling under my belt, I’m very confident that I can finish this one.

My goal is to publish it this spring/summer, along with the third book in the trilogy, Lord of the Falconstar. That might be a little too ambitious, but with the baby already 1+ months old and our lives slowly settling into a reasonable routine, I think it’s good to start planning these things again. The rough AI draft is already complete, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to pick up from Captive of the Falconstar when the time comes. Really, it’s more like one really long story split in the middle.

In another couple of weeks, I plan to pick up The Soulbond and the Sling again, mostly just to keep it fresh. I’ll also be working on the rough AI draft for book 2, The Soulbond and the Lady, working out the chapter prompts and everything else. Instead of rushing through that one, I plan to take my time and get it right. Hopefully that will make the rest of the AI drafting process go much more smoothly.

That should keep me busy until Thanksgiving. Again, the goal is not to finish any of these projects, but to work on them enough to keep them fresh in my mind. Of course, there is a mental cost to switching between WIPs too frequently, so I’ll still try to make significant progress on each of them while I can.

After Thanksgiving, I plan to work on The Unknown Sea until it’s done and ready to publish. I’ve already been making really good progress on this one, and the only reason I laid this WIP aside was to keep the others fresh. But once I pick it up again, I think it will go quickly, and I may even be able to finish the final polished draft before Christmas.

Of course, there are only three full weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year, and the holiday season is always busy with family stuff. We’re staying home this year—no traveling across the country to spend the holidays with family (we did that over summer). But I’m sure it’s going to be an eventful season, especially with the new baby. So I might end up picking up The Unknown Sea a little before Thanksgiving, just to get a head start.

And now, I can hear the kids waking up in the room above me, so it’s time to schedule this post and get started with another day. With luck, maybe I can get a little writing in before things get too crazy.

Still alive

It’s been about a week since my last blog post, so I thought I’d give a quick update just to let you know how things are going around here. We’re doing just fine, aside from a minor cold that has gone through everyone in our house (including our newborn) except for me. Just recovering from that, and trying to get enough sleep while keeping our newborn’s nose from clogging up too bad. Fortunately, everyone seems to be getting better, but it’s been a rough few days.

I’ve been able to get some writing in, though not as much as I’d like. Just working steadily on The Unknown Sea, trying not to fall too far behind on it. Ideally, I’d like to publish this one in January or February, and I think I can still make that happen, but it’s going to require a lot of hard work. In the meantime, we’ve got three kids now, and though my wife is currently on maternity leave, she’s also got a dissertation to finish. And after another month, maternity leave ends.

Between family stuff, watching the kids, taking care of my wife, and somehow fitting in time to work on this novel, I’ve also started working on converting some of my old short stories and novelettes into screenplays. The one I’m currently working on is “What Hard Times Hath Wrought,” and it’s been going pretty well, though screenwriting is something I’m not too familiar with. Basically, I’m relying on some combination of Save the Cat!, The Hollywood Standard, and ChatGPT/Sudowrite to figure it out.

I have absolutely no idea what I’ll do with this screenplay once it’s written. How does one go about selling screenplays in 2025? What I’ll likely do is set it aside while I write another one, and another one, etc, until I have maybe 5-6 screenplays to shop around. Is that the best way to break into film? Is “breaking into film” even still a thing, with how AI is changing everything? I don’t know, but I’m having a lot of fun with it, so hopefully it isn’t a total waste of time.

So that’s what we’ve been up to. Life is good, just a little bit crazy at the moment. I’ll try to blog a little more regularly next week.

Figuring out the posting schedule

With the new baby, things are going to be touch-and-go for the next month or two. I’m hoping that by Halloween, we’ll be a lot more settled into a routine, but I’m not expecting to get a good night of sleep until basically Thanksgiving. Also, the priority is obviously going to be helping out with stuff around the house, since besides having a baby, my wife is also finishing her dissertation and teaching a class at BYU. So for the next couple of months at least, my writing is going to take a back seat to all the family stuff, and the blog is going to take a back seat to that.

With that said, I do think I can keep up the writing even with all that’s going on. My goals are super light—basically, to do at least a little bit of AI writing and human writing each day—but I’ve got that work all split up in a way that’s easy to pick up and set down again whenever I have a fifteen minute break to work on it.

The blog is going to be a bit trickier, but I think I can still keep blogging daily, if I set a regular routine. Here is what I’m thinking:

Sundays: an interesting quote.
Mondays: a just-for-fun post, usually something silly from YouTube.
Tuesdays: an analysis of some trope that I find interesting (yes, I want to bring back the Trope Tuesday posts).
Wednesdays: a midweek excerpt from my current WIP.
Thursdays: a quick writing/personal update, with some random thoughts.
Fridays: an interesting long-form podcast that I recently watched or listened to.
Saturdays: a post about AI-assisted writing.

Of those posts, the only ones that take a significant amount of work are the ones on Tuesdays and Saturdays—and even then, it’s only about an hour of writing. The Trope Tuesday posts will be useful for feeding AI, and the AI-assisted writing posts will eventually get recycled into a non-fiction book about writing with AI (though I still need to come up with an outline for that). Everything else, though, I can probably schedule in an afternoon.

That’s the plan, anyway. This isn’t our first rodeo, though I hear the third child is the hardest one, since it’s at that point that you become outnumbered. I’ll do my best to keep blogging, but if I have to drop one of the balls, the blog is going to be first. But this is what you can expect to see from me moving forward.