Welp, I had high hopes for starting out this year. I wanted to hit the ground running with The Radiant Tomb (The Circle and the Shadow Book 2) and really make great progress through the book In January. But when the very first workday arrived, I came down with some sort of Respiratory virus, which basically ate a week and a half of my productivity.
But there’s the thing: This wasn’t a disaster. I have a pretty solid and regular writing and publishing schedule, yes, but I did not create that schedule assuming I would be working at max capacity. I kind of made it based on me meeting my medium capacity. 40,000 words a month, ten weeks on, two weeks off. Breaks in March, June, September, and December.
This gives me the capacity to produce, just meeting minimum goals, 200,000 words every six months. This book is not going to be 200,000 words (or at least I really hope not). It was planned to be around 120,000, and I’m making such quick progress through scenes that my current estimate is that it will end up being 80-100,000 words. This is a book 2, so there’s not as much worldbuilding setup that must happen. Everything major is already established. So, even though I only wrote 25,000 words in January, I will still be done with this book in early May, when my actual deadline is June 15th. There is slack built into the system, and I’m happy I gave that gift to myself.
If I do finish early, I plan to slot in a short novella (I mean it this time) called Stars Without End, which will be a coda to the Broken Stars series. That series ended with Beneath the Silent Stars, last year, and I’m happy with where I left things but there were a few loose threads I would like to tie up, just as a gift to the readers who made it to the end of that series. But that’s a ‘would be nice,’ not a ‘have to.’ I can literally write that coda whenever else I have extra time.
The one thing I did not do this month was get super mad at myself for not meeting my initial goal. I didn’t push through being sick, which probably would have prolonged my illness. This is because I planned things with extra time. It’s important when we make publishing goals, that we don’t make them assuming we can work at max capacity all the time. I see many indie authors fall into this trap. They come up with a schedule, announce that schedule, and then run into problems and have to amend it, or otherwise break their promises to readers. I don’t want to do that to myself. Sometimes, authors even end up canceling preorders they’ve already set up, which has consequences from Amazon and other self-publishing platforms.
I’m dedicated to not setting up preorders until the A/B draft of a book is complete, and I give myself six months to edit and format. Currently, I have two active preorders: Valley of Storms (Ascension Apocalypse Book 2) dropping April 2, and The Calculus of Hope (standalone sci fi romance) dropping July 2. Both books are written, and I am currently working on the final proofread for Valley of Storms.
So, that’s where things are right now. I’m actually super happy with the progress I made in January and am looking forward to nailing all the goals for the next couple of months before taking two weeks off at the end of March. I’m thrilled with how The Radiant Tomb is turning out and very proud of all the books I have in the pipeline.