Tag: Goals and Plans

Beginning of September Update

It’s September, my favorite month of the year! Maybe I’ll revisit that post in a blast from the past or something. So many reasons why September is awesome.

Things are going well on the writing front. I’ve switched up my daily routine to make more writing time, and it’s working well so far. My alarm goes off at 5:45 am (just after oh-dark-thirty) and I write for about an hour before heading off to my part time job. I’ve found that I tend to write a lot more when I start first thing in the day, so the earlier I can start, the better.

I won’t bore you with the rest of my routine, unless you want me to write a post about it. There’s a bunch of interesting lifestyle tweaks I’ve been trying out, like reading a couple chapters from one of the books I’m reading as soon as I get back from work in the afternoon, in order to refill the creative well and not get caught in a Youtube / general internet trap. Stuff like that.

My current WIP is A Queen in Hiding (Sons of the Starfarers, Book 7) which is proving to be a surprisingly difficult book. It’s definitely one of the weirdest things I’ve ever written, and that’s saying a lot. In Captives in Obscurity, Reva and Isaac get assimilated into a hive mind, and things only get crazier from there.

Sometimes, stories come really easy, almost like they spring fully formed from the mind. Other times, I’ve found I have to throw out almost the entire first draft before I discover the story.

The weird thing is that it has nothing to do with actual book length. Stars of Blood and Glory and Outworlder are totally different lengths, but they both came out almost perfect in the first draft. However, almost all of the Star Wanderers novellas took multiple drafts filled with stuff that had to be cut. Heart of the Nebula took years to finish, and I had to throw out multiple characters and subplots. I struggled for a long time with Genesis Earth, until I decided to throw the whole thing out and start with a blank page. The book was finished less than four weeks later.

The holy grail, of course, is to write a perfect book in four to six weeks (or less!) every time I set off to start a new one. But as awesome as it would be to barf rainbows and poop gold, all of those things sadly remain out of reach.

My goal at this point is to publish the last four Sons of the Starfarers books in 2018, two months apart from each other. Ideally, I’d like to have the next one up for preorder in time for the previous one’s release. It’s going to take some coordination, but I already have all the covers, which leaves just the writing and editing (metadata and formatting doesn’t take more than a day).

Unfortunately, that isn’t going to happen unless I can get A Queen in Hiding ready to go by December. So that’s what I’m trying to do.

Gunslinger to the Galaxy is on hold for now, though so far it’s coming along very nicely. I should be able to pick it up and finish without too much trouble. Edenfall is also on hold, for how much longer I really don’t know. Before the end of 2018, I’d like to publish either the one or the other, but publishing them both is probably a bit of a stretch.

Also, I haven’t even started The Sword Bearer yet (second book in the Twelfth Sword Trilogy), though I have lots of great ideas for it. Since The Sword Keeper is coming out in just a couple weeks, I should probably get on that.

On the publishing side, I dropped the ball a bit in August. It took so much energy to get The Sword Keeper ready for publication that I totally spaced publishing anything. I do have a bunch of shorts that are nearing the end of the submissions gauntlet, and some bundles that can go up too.

I don’t sell many print books, but I want to get print versions of all of my books up, including short stories. That’s going to be an ongoing project for a while. I also want to put up audiobook versions eventually, but it’s going to take some time to get that ball rolling. However, it has moved up the priority list.

That’s pretty much it. So much stuff I want to do, so little time to do it. Time, money, or youth: you can only pick two (and one of them isn’t your choice).

Take care, and thanks for reading!

Mid-August update

It’s already mid-August? Where in the heck did the last eight months go? Feels like the election drama from last year never really died down.

Don’t worry, this post isn’t about politics. Not enough time in the day to follow the latest circus sideshow in the Emerald City of Oz. Time has been on my mind, though: specifically, how to write 10k words a week (minimum) while catching up on the massive list of publishing tasks. I think I’ve found the answer.

I already get up every day around 7am to get ready for my part-time day job. Recently, I started getting up at 6am to put in an hour of writing first thing in the morning. The goal isn’t to pound out words so much as to get the mental gears turning, so that later in the day (such as lunch break) I can pick up very rapidly where I left off.

So far, it seems to be working. Plus, it’s a whole lot easier to sit down and write at the end of the day when you know you’ve already got more than a thousand words under your belt and can hit that daily word count goal with just another few hundred. My writing productivity is improving significantly, and as I continue to work out the kinks, I believe it will continue to improve.

On the writing front, I’ve put A Queen in Hiding on the back burner for the moment, and have instead moved on to Gunslinger to the Galaxy. This one is from Jane’s point of view, and so far, it’s a blast. Should be finished with that WIP by the end of September.

On the publishing side, there’s all sorts of stuff going on. I’ve got a cover artist for The Sword Keeper, and the preliminary sketches look really amazing! Also going through the edits and getting the metadata worked out. I’ll probably write the author’s note over the weekend. By the end of next week, it should be up for preorder with a release date of September 23.

My goal is to get to the point where I’ve always got a novel on preorder. Another goal is to have print books and audiobooks for every title more than 15k words, but that’s going to take some time.

This would all be so much simpler if I didn’t spend 30 hours a week at a day job. Time, money, or youth: you can only pick two of the three, and if you’re under 40 one of them has to be youth.

That’s what I’m up to these days. Expect to see some exciting stuff in the weeks ahead!

The thousand year view

How will your life impact the world in a thousand years?

It’s an easy question to dismiss. After all, how can one person possibly shape the course of history? Even if we accept the impact of certain great men, how can we have the hubris to think that we might one day join them?

But the truth is that our lives have more impact than we realize. Each one of us is literally a product of our ancestors. Their decisions, for good or for evil, have put us where we are today. We also have a hand in shaping the people we come into contact with. That impact can be felt through multiple degrees of separation—and how many degrees does it take to encompass the world?

In the year 1017, Europe was rising out of the ashes of the Viking age. Kievan Rus was ascendant in the east, vying with the Romans who dominated the religion and commerce of Europe (we know them today as the Byzantines). However, tensions were rising between Constantinople and the bishopric of Rome, where one of the last vestiges of the Roman state in the West would soon break communion and form the Catholic Church. Meanwhile, an apocalyptic Muslim death cult known as the Fatimids had swept from North Africa all the way to Baghdad, the cultural and scientific capital of the world. From the harsh steppe wilderness of central asia, the Seljuk Turks were building an empire that would save Baghdad from destruction, while in China, the Song dynasty had invented the first paper currency.

In short, it was a completely different world. How different will things look a thousand years from now?

By the year 3017, we will probably have established an independent colony on Mars. Other parts of the solar system will probably also be colonized, and we may have even begun our expansion to the stars. After all, faster than light starship drives are about as fantastic to us as cars, airplanes, and space stations would be for medieval serfs.

It is highly unlikely that the United States—or any other country, for that matter—will exist with its current borders. In fact, it’s highly unlikely that the majority of countries extant today will even exist at all. China is probably an exception, but let’s not forget that China is a civilization pretending to be a country.

Pessimists will say that there’s a good chance humanity won’t exist at all. They point to things like climate change, pandemics, and global war as challenges we may not overcome. But in the last millennium, we faced all those challenges and rose above them (little ice age, Mongol hordes, black plague). Same with the millennium before (extreme weather and crop failures of 535-536, Muslim conquests, plague of Justinian).

So how will your life impact the world a thousand years from now? What sort of impact do you want your life to have? How have the things you’ve done today brought you closer to leaving that legacy?

I’ve thought about this a lot over the past few weeks. I want to impact the world through my books, but it’s unlikely that most of my books will still exist. My family and descendants will, though. I want to leave them with the best foundation I can. Here’s how I plan to do it:

Step One: Master the Basics of Provident Living

Provident living is more than just learning how to do your laundry and keep up with the maintenance of your car. It’s learning how to live sustainably, with a degree of self-reliance that can see you and the ones you love through hard times. It’s all the stuff I’ve been writing about in the Self-Sufficient Writer blog series.

I’ve made a lot of progress in this area, but there’s still a lot of progress left to make. Here are the next few steps I want to take in this area:

  1. Establish a rotating 90-day food storage for dry goods.
  2. Establish a herb garden.
  3. Expand food storage to canned goods.
  4. Buy a chest freezer and expand to meats and dairy.
  5. Plant a garden and expand to fresh fruits and vegetables.
  6. Learn how to can.
  7. Learn how to hunt.
  8. Begin keeping livestock (chickens, goats, etc).

A lot of these steps are going to have to wait until I have my own land, which brings us to:

Step Two: Live Debt-Free and Own the Place Where You Live

When you live on someone else’s land and owe them a portion of your labor, that’s a form of serfdom. In both historic and modern times, this has been the norm for the vast majority of people.

It shouldn’t be.

When my ancestors came from Europe to the United States, one of the first things they did was buy land. There was a reason for this. In the old country, they were serfs. They paid the corvée. They were not free.

They knew that unless they lived on land that they owned, in a home that was theirs, their children would not be free either.

We’ve enjoyed a century of prosperity in the United States. It’s led us to believe that home loans and mortgage payments are normal. They aren’t. When your home is the collateral for a loan you’ve taken from the bank, and you spend most of your adult life paying it back to the tune of 250%, that is a modern form of serfdom.

Until you own it outright, your house is a liability, not an asset. And in some places, true ownership is impossible. After all, if the government has the power to seize your house for non-payment of taxes, did you really ever “own” it to begin with?

It’s a similar thing with debt. All debt is a form of bondage. “Leverage” is when someone else has control over you or something that belongs to you. Unless you can get out from under it, you will never truly be free.

If most of your life is spent in serfdom and bondage, the thousand-year impact of your life will be muted.

The Habsburg dynasty started with a small castle on the top of a hill. From that starting point, the family went on to shape the development of Europe into the modern world. The castle was so important in that effort that the family took their name from it.

I know how to live debt-free. I’ve been doing it for several years. But I do not currently live in a place that I own. That is my overriding goal: to own the place where I live within ten years.

The government isn’t making it easy. Neither are the central banks. A decade of 0% interest rates has ravaged the middle class. As a direct consequence, home ownership rates are dropping to historic lows. 70% of Millennials have less than $1,000 saved for a down payment on a house, while at the same time, the helicopter money from the Fed has inflated a new housing bubble larger than the one that burst in ’08. In California, Google employees with six-figure incomes are living out of RVs because they can’t afford to buy a house.

It’s brutal. These are the same economic pressures that led to the rise of medieval serfdom in Europe. But there are also opportunities, for those who know how to take advantage of them. Which leads to:

Step Three: Build Multi-Generational Wealth

Poor people buy luxuries. Middle class people buy necessities. Rich people buy investments. If I want to leave something behind for my children and descendants, I need to master the skills of investing and managing wealth.

This goes back to the thousand-year view. The biggest impact I’m probably going to make on the world is going to be through my children and descendants. Raising them will be the most important investment I can ever make. I want to give them a life of opportunity, so that they, like me, can make a thousand-year impact on the world.

This is what my ancestors did for me. My Mormon ancestors crossed the plains in the Willie handcart company so that their descendants could grow up in Zion. My first-generation immigrant Czech ancestors invested in Texas farmland that still pays a small dividend to their descendants (greatly increased now because of oil royalties). There are many other countless others who made great sacrifices so that I could enjoy a life of privilege and opportunity. I’m sure that’s not unique to me.

We seem to have forgotten, here in the United States, how important it is to make sure that our children enjoy better lives than we have. To some generations much is given, while of others much is required. I fear that we are transitioning from the former to the latter. Nations are born stoic and die epicurean, surrounded by mountains of debt.

This is why it is so important to build wealth: not for your own personal consumption, but for the security of your children and descendants.

The most important investment you can make is in your education. If I’m going to develop these skills, that’s what I need to do: invest in my own financial education.

I also need to learn by experience, so I’m taking $100 of my book earnings each month and investing them. I’ll probably experience a couple of big losses, but that’s called paying tuition. The knowledge I gain from doing this will hopefully help to accomplish this goal: to build wealth that will bless the lives of my children and descendants for generations to come.

A lot of things fall into perspective when you take the thousand-year view. When you focus on the challenges of the present, it’s easy to become pessimistic, but when you take a clear-eyed look at the future—not just the immediate future, but the long-term future as well—you cannot help but take an optimistic view.

How will your life impact the world in a thousand years?

Write every day or quit now?

Hoo-boy, do a bunch of writers have their panties in a twist over this article. Who would have thought that the suggestion to “write every day” could be so triggering? Not just for aspiring writers, either, but for Hugo-award winning authors as well.

I’m being a jerk, of course. So is Stephen Hunter. But he isn’t wrong.

Writing is hard. Habits are automatic. Turn writing into a habit, and you’re much more likely to succeed. That’s it. That’s the whole message.

In particular, I really liked this part:

The most important thing is habit, not will.

If you feel you need will to get to the keyboard, you are in the wrong business. All that energy will leave nothing to work with. You have to make it like brushing your teeth, mundane, regular, boring even. It’s not a thing of effort, of want, of steely, heroic determination… You do it because it’s time.

Now, do I follow this advice? Do I write every day? No, but I probably should. It would certainly make life interruptions easier to deal with. I would probably finish a lot more books, too. Right now, I write almost every day, but there’s a very big difference between finding success and almost finding success.

As far as professional goals go, making writing into a daily habit is a pretty damn good one. Unless, of course, you’re just a professional victim and/or Twitter queen with a writing hobby. Which seems to be the case for a great many butthurt people.

And what if health, or circumstances, or whatever else prevent you from writing every day? What if just the title of the article throws you into fits of self-guilt? Remember that it’s free advice. It’s just an opinion. Take a deep breath and like it or leave it as you will.

Personally, I like it. It feels right. If writing were so habitual that I didn’t have to expend any willpower to do it, I could get so much other stuff done. Why would I want to do otherwise?

Great article. Check it out.

Trying something new

I’m going to try something new and post to this blog every day for a while. I’ve heard that blogs do best if they have daily content, and while I personally find it difficult to keep up with those blogs (unless, like The Passive Voice, they’re more like a subject-specific newspaper), I’m willing to give it a shot.

I gave up social media about a year ago… or was it two? I still post stuff to Twitter occasionally, but only to procrastinate or waste time. For a variety of reasons, it’s not a platform I take very seriously.

But blogging, I actually enjoy. Mostly, I just like reading other people’s blogs, but I have been posting to this one for… what, ten years now? At times, it’s been more sporadic than others, but it’s something that’s definitely stuck. I’ll probably keep blogging for the rest of my life.

In any case, I’ll try this out for the next month or so, just to see how it works out. If you have any ideas or suggestions, or you’re a longtime follower who just wants to say hi, feel free!

January update

I had hoped to write a big blog post detailing my goals and plans for the year, but January got off to a rocky start (food poisoning, the flu, massive back-to-back snowstorms, and sub-zero temperatures), and this week I’m working a temp job. The big New Year’s post will have to wait.

I do have plans, however, and they’re already in motion. The main thing for now is to finish the 3.0 draft of Gunslinger to the Stars. The story is pretty much ready to go, so now I’m doing a final draft to tighten it up. I’m hoping to get it down from 66k words to just under 50k. Should make for a rip-roaring adventure.

My original deadline for Gunslinger was the end of this week, but with the job eating up all my time, it looks like I’ll have to push that back to Wednesday. Fortunately, that’s still quite doable. Revision is a pain, but it goes a lot faster for me than drafting, especially if the story is already in place.

After that, I plan to work on The Sword Keeper and finish the 2.0 draft. These are major story revisions, so it’s going to take some time to work them all out. My plan is to publish it in August, and I want to have it finished before it goes out for pre-order.

With luck, both of those projects will be finished by mid-February, freeing me up to really throw myself into Edenfall. You guys have been asking for it, and I plan to deliver. The Genesis Earth trilogy has waited long enough!

There also seems to be a great deal of interest in more J.M. Wight stories. “Worlds Without Number” has been performing exceptionally well, especially without any kind of promotion. I have some great ideas for more stories in that universe, and do hope to finish Starship Lachoneus sometime in 2018. There’s still a lot of work to do before that can happen, but if this is the story you guys want to read, I’ll move it up from the back burner.

I also just came up with a great idea for the next two Gunslinger books. The first one will be Gunslinger to the Stars, the second, Gunslinger to the Galaxy, and the third, Gunslinger to Earth. If the first one does well, I’d love to expand it into a trilogy.

But first! I’ve got to finish book one. The next big step is to find a good cover artist, then send it out for edits and put it up for pre-order. Right now, it’s scheduled to release in May, going up for Amazon pre-order in April and everywhere else in February. Gotta get on that!

TL;DR, things are crazy crazy busy around here (but in a good way). I do have a resolution to blog more frequently this year, especially with these quick update posts. Let me know what you think, or if there’s any particular book you’re looking forward to! In the meantime, thanks for reading!

Some crazy ideas for 2017

So it’s the end of another year. I’ve spent the last week or so taking stock of my writing career, figuring out what I did in 2016 that worked and what really didn’t.

Writing is a career where you have to periodically reinvent yourself. My goal from the beginning has been to make a living telling stories that I love, and until 2015, I was doing pretty well. I tried out a lot of new things in 2016, but it was still a tough year, so there’s still a lot left to do.

Here are some of the things I tried out in 2016:

  • Dropping perma-free for a free-pulsing strategy: This actually worked out fairly well. From a pure numbers point of view, I managed to give out more free books by free pulsing in 2016 than I did with my old perma-free books in 2015.
  • Unpublishing my novellas in favor of more novel-length works: This was really stupid. It made my free books less effective, and seriously undermined my earnngs. The goal was to give more prominent placement to my novel-length works, but sales didn’t increase accordingly.
    Moral of the story: so long as a book is selling, don’t unpublish it.
  • Submitting short stories to traditional markets: Worked pretty well. I got a handful of semi-pro sales and made a little north of $120. Not a huge boost, but not insubstantial either. And most of those were reprint sales.
  • Proactively building my mailing list: Probably the best thing I did all year. Instead of waiting for people to organically sign up, I started using InstaFreebie to get my name out. Now, I have a list that is just shy of 2,700 subscribers. It’s not enough to push a new release up to the top of the charts, but it is enough to noticeably boost sales and reviews.
  • Using my mailing list for more than just new releases: I was a bit worried about this at first, but it’s worked out quite well. So long as I’ve got something of value like an author cross-promotion, a free book, or book recommendations, the response has been quite positive.
  • Publish more short story singles: The jury’s still out on this one. Short stories definitely arent money-makers, and the response from free-pulsing has been rather tepid, but I have been able to use them effectively as incentives to subscribe to my mailing list. I will probably keep the ones that still sell after six months and unpublish the rest, opting instead to publish them in bundles.

Which brings me to my crazy ideas for 2017:

Release a new title each month

I went through all my WIPs and short story submission logs, and it looks like this is something I can actually do. Right now, the schedule consists of five short story bundles, four short story singles, one novella and two novels. Everything except the novella and two of the short stories are already written.

This would be fantastic. They say that nothing is better for book sales than publishing a new release, so this would really put that to the test.

Release a series in Kindle Unlimited

I’ve made it very clear that I’m against exclusivity, something that the Kindle Unlimited program requires. However, not having any of your books in Kindle Unlimited is also kind of exclusive, just in the opposite direction. Probably the craziest thing I’m considering right now is putting a series in Kindle Unlimited, just to see how it does.

However, unless I can try this with a new series, I probably won’t do it. At first, I considered putting Sons of the Starfarers in KU, but then I realized that this wouldn’t be fair to my non-Amazon readers who are waiting for the last four books.

Then there’s all the reporting anomalies with KU that numerous readers are reporting. Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Combine that with the low payouts and the relatively high probability that KU readers won’t try out my non-KU books, and I’m loathe to do this.

But enough readers pester me about it enough, I may give KU a try.

Raise book prices

By far, the biggest mistake I made in 2015 was underpricing my Star Wanderers books. Now, I’m starting to wonder if all my other books are underpriced.

There are a couple of ways to figure this out. One of them is to jack up all my book prices as high as I’m willing to price them (in this case, $9.99), then gradually lower them over the course of several weeks to see where sales reach an equilibrium. My gut tells me that this is a bad idea, though, at least for now.

The other way is to run a survey, which is what I’m doing below. There are only two questions. If you could, I’d greatly appreciate it.

Republish all single Star Wanderers novellas

This one goes back to what was probably my biggest mistake in 2016: unpublishing all the individual Star Wanderers novellas. It’s great to have them available in the omnibus editions, but the singles were still selling, and unpublishing them really didn’t accomplish anything useful. So you can expect them to make a comeback soon.

What I will probably do is price all the novellas at $2.99 and the omnibuses at $6.99. I’m also toying with the idea of free-pulsing them all over the course of the next year. But that would be really crazy.

Be a more active blogger

I’ve really neglected this blog, especially over the last few months. I’ve also been really bad about connecting with other bloggers, checking them out, leaving comments, and sending readers their way. So in 2017, I’d really like to be better about that.

That’s just about all for now. I’m not quite sure how many of these ideas I’m going to run with, but if you’ve any thoughts of your own, I’d like to hear them. Thanks!

My next impossible dream

If I keep doing what I’m doing, writing and publishing my books, and building a steadily growing readership, eventually I’m going to come into some money. My readership will reach a critical mass, one of my books will hit the market in just the right way, and I’ll find myself riding the rocket to career heights that were previously unthinkable. Writing is very much a feast or famine thing, and the feast years will come if I keep at it long enough.

When the money comes, I will invest it in something more stable, like a rental property. Provo is a college town with a high demand for student housing, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find a couple properties and improve them myself. The DIY aspect is crucial, because everything that comes next will build on it.

Once I’ve got a couple rental properties that are producing a steady income stream, I’ll use that money to buy some cheap land. This land will be deep in the mountains a couple of hours southeast of here, far enough to be in the middle of nowhere, but close enough to grow in value as the cities along the Wasatch Front expand. The land will be pretty much useless for anything except future development, which will actually make it fairly valuable in fifty or so years, so long as things go well.

If things don’t go well—if the economy collapses and the country falls apart, our runaway national debt catches up to us, a fascist tyrant comes to power, a war devastates us, cyber-terrorists take down the electical grid, or a massive pandemic breaks out—if any of these things happen, this property will be an ideal place for a bug out location. That’s important. When crap hits the fan, I want to be like the father in Farnham’s Freehold, with a cool-headed plan. I want to be able to rebuild civilization with my family if I have to.

Of course, in the event that things don’t get that bad, it will still be really great to have a vacation home way up in the mountains. This home will also double as a cabin for writing retreats and weekend getaways. When I die, my kids can either keep it in the family or sell it for a tidy profit, after all the improvements I intend to make.

The first year, I plan to build a small hangar shed and dig a well. I’ll install a thousand gallon tank, which I’ll use for storing water until I can build a proper cystern (at which point I’ll probably convert the tank into a septic tank). I’ll plant several fruit and nut trees, since the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago (but the second best time is today). I’ll build a modular watering system and plant at least ten trees each year thereafter.

In either the first or second year, I’ll buy some heavy earthmoving equipment and keep it in the shed. I’ll use that equipment to start improving the property, laying the foundation for things to come.

The first thing will be a tiny house, maybe 200 or 300 square feet, with solar power, a composting toilet, a small water tower hooked up to the well, and another tower for cellular internet. This house will have a loft for mom and dad, roll-out cots for the kids, a living/kitchen/everything room, and shelves built into the walls for food storage. In a lot of ways, it will basically be the dream house I wrote about here.

There will be several garden plots, though they will probably lay fallow unless crap hits the fan and we have to move in permanently. If I can afford it, though, it would be really cool to set up some self-regulating aquaponics systems, with computer monitoring that can alert me remotely if anything goes wrong. The property will be close enough for a weekend visit, so it won’t be hard to make a trip up if I have to. However, the idea is to design it in such a way that it can be mothballed until needed.

When the tiny house is complete, my dream will be mostly realized. However, I don’t plan to stop there. With the skills I’ve learned from improving the rental properties, and with help from some of my contractor plans, I’ll use the heavy equipment to build a proper house. This house will be off-grid just like the tiny house, with solar powers, well-water and rainwater collection, a root cellar, a greenhouse, a couple of freezers full of game meat, etc. etc. It will be the ideal mountain cabin, serving not only as a bug out location, but as a place for weekend getaways, writing retreats, long family vacations, and perhaps even a retirement home.

I plan to be as self-sufficient as possible on this property. Everything will be designed with self-reliance in mind. Rainwater collection, greywater reclamation systems, solar power, a wood-fired oven and furnace—it will be rustic and self-sufficient, satisfying all of my family’s needs.

I don’t know how bad it’s going to be when crap hits the fan. There are some scenarios (Yellowstone caldera) that kill everyone pretty much instantly. Others are so long and drawn out that the sheltered elites may deny that it’s even happening (sounds like the Great Recession, eh?). Regardless, it will be good to have a castle that I can retreat to, along with my family.

That’s the dream right now: to make it big enough to get the ball rolling on this project. It’s going to take decades to reach full maturity, but even after just a few years, it will start to bear fruit.

And who knows what will happen in future? If you’d told me fifteen years ago that I’d be where I am today, writing for a living and selling books all over the world, I’d get all bug-eyed just thinking about it. A lot can happen in ten to fifteen years.

Whatever else happens, I’ll still be writing.

General update and new short story goals

I may not have blogged much in the past couple of weeks, but I have been busy.

First of all, I’ve renewed work on The Sword Keeper, and this time I’m going to finish the damn thing. Too much time has passed already, and the story is too good to let it languish on my hard drive(s) any longer. As of now, the goal is to finish the 1.0 draft by the end of April. I haven’t put up a progress bar yet, but I will in the next few days.

Second, I’ve been busy writing some new short stories. On Monday, I finished “Lizzie-99XT,” a hard military SF piece about a starfighter pilot whose intelligence merges with the AI of her starfighter, giving her a very different perspective on space, time, and the heavens. And yesterday, I finished “Time and Space in Amish Country,” an Amish Sci-Fi Time Travel Romance that’s been sitting unfinished on my hard drive for a long, long time.

I’ve been thinking a lot ever since writing that post about making a living as a short story writer. While long-form fiction is still my bread and butter, I would like to work on my short form and make that an important part of what I do. Towards that end, I’ve set some new goals.

My biggest goal at this point is to write a new short story every week, on top of my other writing. If I can keep that up for a year, that’s 50 short stories that I didn’t have the year before. Even if most of them aren’t any good, the exercise will help to make me a better writer.

Writing short stories takes a slightly different skill set than writing novels and novellas, but there’s enough of an overlap that the two can feed into each other. In my experience, it’s a little bit like the difference between driving a car and riding a motorcycle. In some ways, they’re very different, but fundamentally they’re both driving. In a similar way, writing short stories and novels is still just storytelling.

My other goal is to read at least one short story every day. I didn’t realize this until recently, but almost every major SF magazine publishes all of their stories in full online (except for the two oldest ‘zines, Analog and Asimov’s—go figure). It takes only half an hour at most to read a short story, and because there are so many available online for free, I can read them on my phone from just about anywhere.

So that’s the plan. I’ll probably review a couple of short stories from time to time, as I find the really good ones. Should be something interesting to blog about, which is something else I need to be better about. Expect to see more posts in the near future.

On the way to 10k

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how I plan to achieve my writing goal of hitting 10k words of fiction in a single day. The steps I laid out to getting there were:

  1. Write first thing every day.
  2. Write in timed, focused sessions.
  3. Strive to achieve 2k words per hour.
  4. Strive to hit at least 6 writing sessions.
  5. Pre-write each day for the next day.

I’m happy to report that the writing has been coming along very well! Ever since I started timing my sessions and keeping track of how much and how fast I write, it’s been as if someone turned on a switch inside my brain. The words are flowing, the story is coming along very well, and I’m a lot happier and more productive than I was only a month ago.

The main thing that does it is, ironically, forcing myself to stop every half hour or so. When I wake up in the morning and thing of how much I want to write that day, it can be a little daunting. By writing in short bursts, it helps to break the big goal down into parts. When you think too much about all the writing you want to achieve, it’s very easy to get caught up in the procrastination trap. But when you think of it as just a half-hour session of 400-600 words, it seems a lot more doable. And it is!

So things are coming along very well with Gunslinger to the Stars. My goal is to finish the first draft by February 6th and send it out to my first readers shortly thereafter. If things keep going the way they have been, I may actually finish it sooner.

As for reaching 10k words, I’m still a ways off but headed in the right direction. For now, I’m laying the foundation for it: building good habits and hitting a consistent stride. Once I’ve got that laid out, I’ll start to stretch myself, pushing the limits further and further until I’m ready to make the final approach to the summit. No sense in pushing too hard and burning out along the way.

In other news, I’ve sent Captives in Obscurity (Sons of the Starfarers: Book V) off to my editor, and should be getting it back in early February. The cover art should be ready around the same time. If all goes well, the book should be up for pre-order by the end of February, with a release date of May 15th.

I’m not sure when Patriots in Retreat (Book VI) will come out, since I’m still writing it, but as of right now I’m tentatively planning for a release sometime in August. After I’ve finished with Gunslinger to the Stars, I’ll move on to Patriots and see if I can’t knock that out before the end of February. If so, I might actually push the release date up to July.

As for other WIPs I intend to tackle, The Sword Keeper and Edenfall are on the top of the list. The free month for Genesis Earth went a lot better than I had expected, leading me to believe that there’s enough potential to make finishing the trilogy worthwhile. Besides, Edenfall is already plotted out, so if I can keep up the 10k pace it should be a cinch to write. Same with The Sword Keeper.

That just about does it for this post. I intended to write another Self-Sufficient Writer post responding to some of the craziness going on in the world right now, but that will have to hold off until next week. I’ve also got another trope post planned for Monday, so that should be interesting.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this video about how many twinkies it would take to power the Death Star. Take care!