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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
More than any other book I really want to finish Captive of the Falconstar<\/strong> 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,<\/em> will find immensely satisfying. So I really want to finish and publish this book this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.\u00a0The Soulbond and the Sling<\/strong>\u00a0is 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, while I continue to work on The Soulbond and the Sling,<\/em> I will also continue to work on book 2, The Soulbond and the Lady.<\/strong> 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 <\/em>this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If I can finish a third book, I would like it to be The Unknown Sea.<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One thing you may notice is that I haven’t included any of the Christopher Columbus<\/strong> 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2014in 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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… Continue reading Planning out the next year of writing<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1567,1605,1542,1626,1806,1838,1831,1830,1829],"tags":[2136,89,133,46,454],"class_list":["post-22554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-captive-of-the-falconstar","category-christopher-columbus-interstellar-explorer","category-falconstar-trilogy","category-lord-of-the-falconstar","category-sea-mage-cycle","category-the-soulbond-and-the-lady","category-the-soulbond-and-the-sling","category-the-soulbound-king","category-the-unknown-sea","tag-accountability","tag-career-decisions","tag-family","tag-goals-and-plans","tag-productivity","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-5RM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22554"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22638,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22554\/revisions\/22638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}