Funeral Trip

I was out of town for a week, and was totally unprepared for the trip. It wasn't one I had been planning to take. After all, no one knows what day death will come to them, so there was no way to be prepared.

I went for my stepmother's funeral, which was nice, and I think she would have loved it.

It was also very hard, very emotional. It's so hard to say goodbye to anyone, even if they've lived to the ripe old age of 91. I'm going to really miss her. I guess, sooner or later, everyone will probably become an orphan. I lost my mom in 1990, my dad in 2019, and now my stepmom is gone too. The last one who would own up to being a parent for the likes of me. I guess it's time for me to be self-sufficient, eh? Hopefully, I've learned enough in my fifty years of life that I can manage from here on out. No backstop left anymore.

Speaking of being self-sufficient and in charge of my own self, I didn't write a dang thing the entire time I was on the trip. I even brought my keyboard with me, so that I could type stuff up on Google Docs. It was hectic and busy, and I used that as an excuse to take a vacation. Of course, as always happens when I do that, I don't feel like writing tonight either. I want to just keep drifting and slacking. I'll do my best not to let that take over. I've got goals for this year, and I gotta get going if I expect to achieve them. January is going to be a bad month, but I'll get going. Don't worry about me. I won't fall all the way off the wagon and find myself left behind and unable to catch up and jump back on.

Year Ender 2

Okay, 2024 came to an end. I gave myself the goal of writing 400,000 words in 2024. I had to put in some serious effort to make it there over the last two months. Did I make it? Well, here is my final tally:

Yeah, baby! I killed it.  At the end of October, when my birthday came along, I was at 316,095. Which meant I needed to write 83,905 words in the last two months of the year. That was basically 40,000 per month. I really pushed myself, and got 44,220 in November, which turned out to be my best month ever. Then, I pushed myself even harder in December. I wrote several stories in the month, and even published all of them as well, and I came in 16,645 words over my limit. I killed it.

The trouble is, now I have to top it. How will I manage that? My previous best year ever was 304,474. I topped that by getting to 381,054. So, I pushed to top that, and finished up at 416,645. How far can I push it in 2025? Well, I'm going to do it. I have the plan. If you want to hear about it, check out my Patreon Address. That should be coming up in a week or two over on my Patreon page. See you there.

A Christmas MIracle

This was Monday night, 12/23, after I finished writing:

That's right, folks! I made it. 400,000 for the year of 2024, and I still have a week to add to it.  Oh, and Merry Christmas to all.

Halfway Update

Yesterday was the 15th of November, and November is one of the months that has thirty days. So, we are officially halfway to the end.

At the start of this month, I told y'all about my plans for what's left of 2024. I adjusted my schedule from a birthday-to-birthday year to a calendar year. I had 316,095 words for the year so far, and I challenged myself to take it above and beyond anything I'd ever done before and make it to 400,000 by the time we were all singing "Auld Lang Syne."

That was going to take some Deadpool-style maximum effort on my part to achieve. I was a little more than 80,000 words short of that mark. With only two months left, I'd have to get 40,000 words in both of those months. I was determined, though, so I pulled on my boots and got to work.

First of all, I finished out the last four days of October with 4,934 words, taking me over the 320,000 mark. 80,000 would therefore be enough. I'd done 40,000 words a few times in the past year. In January, March, April, May, and June I'd achieved the 40,000 mark. It wasn't beyond my grasp. However, I was going to have to up my goal. In each of those months, my writing goal was at least 1,250 words. I had originally planned for my November goal to be just 1,000 words a day, but I was going to have to go beyond that.

So, I grabbed my lunch pail, and got to work. We're halfway through that month now...am I keeping up? Well, here's my chart for November so far.

Yup, I went above and beyond 1,250 every day...except one. That was the day I finished writing Lazerfist Saves Christmas and I didn't have anywhere to go with my writing to get the other 75 words I needed, so I just let it ride, and figured I'd make it up on other days.

And, at  the 50% mark for the month, I'm at 21,091 words. Double that, and I'll be at 42,000 by the end of the month. So, I'm in good shape to make it to my required level for this month. That's pretty exciting. 400,000 here I come!

Those Special Words

I just finished my most recent book the other day. I made it to those most special two words.

Right now, I'm calling it "Lazerfist Saves Christmas," although it may change to more of a subtitled thing, like The Adventures of Simon Lazerfist: Saving Christmas" or something like that. It's my second Lazerfist book (although the first one still needs a serious rewrite to be any good), so I suspect that it may be a series of tales before all is said and done.

It's always exciting to make it to the end of a novel. This one is really short. Only 58,893 words. So, it's very much like one of those old Louis L'Amour books that were itty-bitty things. I've heard from many self-published authors that short books is the way to go. That way you can keep publishing frequently, and never leave your audience alone long enough to forget about you. I don't know about that. I didn't try to make it short. That's just how it came out.

It's exciting, though. I finished another one. Now I'm going to go celebrate a little, and then get started figuring out just what the hell I'm going to write tomorrow.

All-Time Chart

I've been thinking about doing this for a while, but I always found better things to do. I should have kept it that way, but the other day, instead of doing worthwhile work, I spent hours compiling an all-time word count chart.  

It looked something like this:

Back in 2011, for the month of September, I pledged to write 500 words a day for the first time. While not achieving it perfectly, I did manage to at least keep up with it and I averaged 500 words a day.

I remember feeling really good about myself when it was over, and being really upset with myself later when I let it slip away and failed to make it a habit. Over the years of talking about wanting to be a writer, I held onto that success in my memory, and eventually, I started trying to reenact it.

The next time I put it to work was in February of 2017. Rish jumped in with me, and we both started developing some good habits. I upped my goal to 1,000 words a day in March, kept it going through April and a little bit into May. I was having my best year of writing ever. Then we moved, and I let circumstances get in the way and it slipped off, but the seeds had been planted. 

I flailed about, sometimes writing and sometimes doing nothing for while before once again, getting the daily word limit goal applied in October of 2019. I really caught on in 2020, and made that best year ever of 2017 look utterly insignificant. I still didn't quite have a handle on it, though, because I quit when I hit my goal, and couldn't manage to pick the torch back up.

This past October was the time when I feel like I made it happen for real. It's a lifelong habit now, I think. Not only that, but all of this progress has made it easier, and given me a lot of confidence. I think I'm getting pretty good at this.

So, back to the purpose of all of this. I've been tracking my word progress for a long time in one way or another. So, I decided to compile it all into one place. I made a section for every year that I have any idea of how many words I wrote. Many of them were just  that I'd written a story during that year, so I took its word count and added it to the bunch. Others was taking the charts that I'd made for the year and compiling them.

I suspect that to most people it would be totally lame, but for me it's kind of a visual representation of my progress that makes me smile. 

Another thing that I did that I find super interesting was to take all the stories that I've written, and label the dates that I worked on them. That's a bit of a walk down memory lane for me with each of them.

The most interesting part of all is the chart that compares the totals from each year and adds them up into a cumulative total. Check this out:

That is an interesting string of numbers to me. You can see the increase...it's bumpy, but it does keep going up. There were some really bad years, when I got as many words for the whole year as I get in a week now...then again, there's many years that are skipped altogether, because I didn't write a damned thing. 

Then there's that last number: 1,227,188. That's right, folks. I'm a damned millionaire...at least when it comes to words. I have a million of those to my name. A lot of people say that you have to write a million words of crap before you become a good writer, so I guess I've finally arrived at that level. Of course, that means that all the stuff I've been sharing with you for all these years is crap, so I don't know if I subscribe to that theory. I think even some of my old stuff is pretty good.

My goal for 2025 should thrust me above 1.5 million.  It neat to think about...at least for me. Y'all probably stopped reading a while ago, if you ever even clicked on the link in the first place, but at the very least, it gives me energy and excitement to keep at it. So, I guess I will.

Year Ender

I suppose, after all of the talk I've done for this year about my goal for writing, that I have to do a post about this. I'll be a little bit brief, because I will be talking about this in my Patreon Address this month, of course. 

I said last time, that everybody would get access to my Patreon Address just that one time and then it would be for Patreon subscribers only, but then archive.org went down, and that post never went out. So, I'm going to try it again, if I can. I still haven't been able to log into my archive.org account, so I don't think we can upload stuff to it yet. If that does become available again, then my Patreon Address will go out to everybody in a timely manner. If not, then I guess you gotta get on the Patreon to hear it.

Anyway, I'm not here to talk about archive.org or anything like that. I'm here, because my one year for my writing effort just passed. I made the goal on my birthday in 2023. My goal was to have my best year of writing ever. Up until this year, that would have been the year from birthday-to-birthday in 2019-2020. That gave me the goofy goal of getting 304,475 because my total for 2019-2020 was 304,474.

Maybe I don't need to talk about reaching the end of this year, because I already talked about beating that goal back in June. After that, I took a big, ill-advised break in July and August, and had to recommit myself to writing in September. I gave myself a new, augmented goal to attempt for the rest of the year until my birthday arrived in late October. Now, I was trying to hit 380,000 for the year.

How did that go? Well, here's my final word count for the whole 2023-2024 birthday-to-birthday year:

Yeah, I hit the 380 goal. I didn't have a lot of room to spare, but I managed. So, my new best year ever total is 381,054. If I want to improve, I have to beat that.

So, what am I doing now? Taking another break and disappearing for months on end? No!

Instead, I'm trying to up it just a little bit more. First of all, I'm doing something I probably should have done a while ago. I'm dumping this whole birthday-to-birthday thing. No more hyphenated years. I'm switching to a standard calendar. And I'll start with this year. I'm taking everything that I've written in 2024 so far, and continuing from there. So, my year looks like this right now:

You can zoom in and see the info on that if you want, but let me show you the important part.

Okay, that's my total for what we've had of 2024 so far. And, as you can see, I gave myself a new goal. I wanted to beat my best year ever, so I'm going to outdo 381,054. I won't do it stupidly this time around by setting my goal at 381,055 though. Instead, this time I'm taking it a a ways above that. I want to see if I can't manage to get to 400,000 for 2024.

As you can see, that means that I have 83,905 words to write in two months and four days. That means I've got to kick it up a notch. I wrote a thousand words a day...aside from my birthday, which I took a holiday from writing...in October. I'll only get a little over 30,000 words for the month doing that, however. What I'm going to need is 40,000 word months in November and December.

That is not out of the realms of possibility, though. If you look at the totals of the months from 2024, I got more than 40,000 words in January, March, April, May, and June.  I know I can do it. I've just got to work a little bit harder. In January, I set my word count goal to 1,250 per day. I think I'll have to do that again. And, of course, I'll have to do it every day of the month, no breaks, probably not even Christmas.

So, we're off. Can I get 80,000 words in the final two months of the year and set a new all-time high benchmark? It'll be tough. It'll be a stretch for me to achieve that, but it's definitely possible, and I believe in myself enough to say that I can do it.

Once I crush that goal, then we can look at what even-higher benchmark I can shoot for in 2025. 500,000? That sounds like insanity, but maybe...

My First Patreon Address Available Just This Once On The Regular Anklecast Feed

Okay, everybody, my first Patreon Address is now available to all...but just this once.

It's my first time doing a Patreon Address. Rish Outfield and Marshal Latham have been doing them for a while and I thought I ought to take their example and make a Patreon Address as well. In this, I talk about my goals for the year, month, and even day that I have set for myself, and how well I have achieved them. If that kind of stuff interests you, then check it out and see how it's going.

This one will be on the regular feed, because I want people who don't subscribe to Patreon will know that it exists, but from here on out, this will be a total Patreon exclusive. So, subscribe to the Patreon group and keep getting access to this podcast.

In the future, there will be more Patreon exclusive content. So, don't miss your chance to get it.

As always, thanks to Kevin McCleod at incompetech.com for the music.

So, you can find the episode on The Anklecast feed or you can download it by right-cllcking HERE. You could also just click the play button below. That'll work too.

My First Patreon Address

I just put up my first Patreon Address over on Patreon.

It's my first time doing this. Rish Outfield and Marshal Latham have been doing them for a while and I thought I ought to take their example and make a Patreon Address as well. In this, I talk about my goals for the year, month, and even day that I have set for myself, and how well I have achieved them. If that kind of stuff interests you, then check it out and see how it's going.

I'll put this first one onto the normal feed in a week so that people who don't subscribe to Patreon will know that it exists, but next time around, this will be a total Patreon exclusive.

As always, thanks to Kevin McCleod at incompetech.com for the music.

Check it out over on Patron!

To go along with it, I figure I ought to post my charts for the last month to give you a visual guide that you can follow along with while listening, if you want to. Here's my September writing totals:

 

Here's the total for the year to date:

Here's the charts for the year to date...I suspect you'll have to zoom in on those to see what anything on them says, but then again, maybe your eyes aren't as bad as mine have become in the last few years.

Maybe those pics were unnecessary, but I figured I'd include them if for nothing else than that I like to have records of everything on the blog for my future curiosity. Every now and then I like to go back and refresh my memory about when and how these things improved and so forth.

New Story, "Black Angel" Now Available

This is a story that I've never shared anywhere before. It's never been available in any way. It comes from many years ago, from the second time that Rish and I did a Broken Mirror event together. The premise on this was, "A person is given a revenge crystal, only to discover that it works all too well..."

I think the story that came out of it is pretty good. I really like it, and I think you will too. Or, to put it another way, YOU NEED THIS STORY IN YOUR LIFE!!! Or at least, you'll enjoy having the story in your life. It'll entertain you for the time it takes to read it. In fact, you should head over to Amazon right now and grab it. It's available for the low, low price...I mean, it's as low as Amazon will allow, because I want y'all to give it a go...of $2.99. Check it out.

Working On The Goals

The last time I talked about how my break was over and it was time to get back to work on my goals, I mentioned that I'd written a bunch of them out, but needed to go through and plan them so that they weren't just pie-in-the-sky ideas. Most of the goals were big ones like "get all my stuff published on audio". That's the overarching goal, but to achieve it, I needed to break it down into smaller chunks. So, I sat down and started working on that.

I figured I'd share that with you here, and if you have any suggestions or comments, I'd love to hear them. Maybe I could change things according to your suggestions if they seem better than my own plan (which probably couldn't be too hard. I'm not really a planner. This whole thing is kind of new to me).

Goal 1:

Publish everything by Oct 2025:

Sep: Black Angel
Sep: Digital Wizards
Sep: Pre-owned
Oct: Angels and Wizards Collection
Oct: Sunny and Gray 1
Nov: Sunny and Gray 2
Dec: The Gauntlet
Jan: A Fire in the Center of a Million Universes
Feb: Caught Up In Christmas
Mar: Irresistible Invader
Apr: Lazerfist

From what I understand, the most important thing for an author is to have a bunch of things for people to buy. That way, if they read one of your books and like it, they can then go to your catalog and buy a second one. Then a third, and so on. So, goal one is to get all of my stuff published this year. I put Oct 2025 as the finish line, but scheduled everything to come sooner. I think I can probably hit those numbers, but I may be wildly off. I don't know. Some of the books are basically ready to go, others will need some rewriting before they are ready. So, we'll see how feasible this time line is. Getting all the formats, from eBook to paperback to hardcover might be a little much in that time frame.

Goal 2:

Do Audio for everything by Dec 31, 2025

Sep-Oct: Three Vampire Weekend
Nov-Dec: Angels and Wizards
Jan-Feb: Sunny and Gray 1
Mar-Apr: Sunny and Gray 2
May-Jun: The Gauntlet
Jul-Aug: A Fire in the Center of a Million Universes
Sep-Oct: Caught Up In Christmas
Nov-Dec: Irresistible Invader
Jan-Feb: Lazerfist

This is a sort of extension of the last goal. I want to publish everything. Doing the print versions is one thing, but doing the audio is very much another thing. It involves a whole different work pattern, so I made it it's own goal. Not only that, but it's probably going to take longer than just creating the eBooks and paperbacks, etc.

I suspect that I'm going to have to make a calendar with the hours of the day assigned out to what task I will be working on. Every Tuesday at 8:30 AM, I'll record for an hour, and then at 9:30 AM I'll work on the print book, then at 10:30 AM I'll write or something like that. That's the next step in my planning. Once I've got these goals completely hammered out, I have to take my free time and piece meal it out toward achieving the goals.

Goal 3:

Write Daily

This is kind of a two part thing. First of all, I'm going to switch over from measuring my year in birthday to birthday years to regular calendar years. No more of the October to October reckoning. It's goofy and confusing. I'm the only one who can follow along. I'll stop that now and switch to regular calendar years. So, my writing goal for this birthday to birthday year was 304,475. I hit that back in June. I'm beyond that now. I'm up to 326,447 on year now. And, as we continue through to my birthday, that will continue to increase. If I get about 30,000 words per month, then it will be somewhere around 380,000 in the end.

My word count for 2024 so far is 261,488. I want to outdo my birthday to birthday year's word count with my 2024 word count. I can't make a concrete goal, though, because the birthday to birthday year isn't over yet. I've got four months left in the year in 2024 instead of just two in the birthday to birthday year...but two of the months are the same months as the birthday to birthday year gets, so the only real difference is November and December.

So, as I said, I suspect that my birthday to birthday year will be 380,000 words. Meaning that I have to eclipse that with my calendar year goal. I'm going to shoot for around 40,000 words per month in November and December. If I mange that, I should be right around 400,000 words for 2024.

Then my next goal is to beat that total in 2025.

So, let me list them out:

Birthday to birthday year goal of 380,000
2024 goal of 400,000
2025 goal of 400,000+

I'll come back and make more specific numbers for the goal once I find out how October finishes out.

How do I accomplish these lofty goals? Well, I made a little word per day chart of what I will be shooting for over the next year and change. Here's what I've got:

Oct: Write 1,000 daily
Nov: Write 1,000 daily
Dec: Write 1,250 daily
Jan: Write 1,250 daily
Feb: Write 1,500 daily
Mar: Write 1,500 daily
Apr: Write 1,750 daily
May: Write 1,750 daily
Jun: Write 2,000 daily
Jul: Write 2,000 daily
Aug: Write 2,000 daily
Sep: Write 2,000 daily
Oct: Write 2,000 daily
Nov: Write 2,000 daily
Dec: Write 2,000 daily

That's a pretty intense thing to be shooting for, really. I've almost never written 2,000 words in a day. I've done it maybe five times ever. I want to get to that level, however, and it seems like the best way is to build up with a slow increase every month until I'm there. Hopefully, it'll be kind of like weight lifting. You lift ten pounds every day, and in a while, that seems easy, so you take it up to fifteen...and so on and so on until you're lifting more than a hundred pounds.

Those are all of the very specific goals, I think. The rest are more one time things. Here are a few of those:

Construct a website for BD Anklevich with a store to buy eBooks, signed paper books, etc.
Get an email list going on the website and start a monthly newsletter.
Do some advertising with the money that I make from the podcast and the sales of books.
Get a group of first readers.
Plug myself on the podcast monthly, and ask for reviews as well.
Get the podcast on all the big podcast platforms to increase the audience
Republish the old Dunesteef episodes with my stories on the Anklecast

And maybe there should be others. I was thinking of trying to hit up Abbie Hilton and ask her what she thought I ought to work on as I continue trying to build this stuff up. What should a beginning writer be putting his effort into? What will be worth my time and what is a waste of time?

Many of those goals there involve me figuring out just what the best way to do things is. How do I make my website? What email service to I use for my mailing list? How do I get my podcast listed on Spotify? How do I get it on Google Podcasts...or whatever they're called now? Things I've got to investigate and work out. That will be the process to achieving those goals. I don't even know what they are yet, so I can't make itemized to-do lists with those goals. But I will set aside time to work toward them as well this year.

So, there you have it. That's what I'm working toward by the end of 2025. What do you think? Is there something I missed? Should I add something to the list? Is something that I'm trying to do a complete waste of time? Let me know what you think.

Okay, Break's Over

Hey, folks. I bet that the two of you who follow this blog regularly are wondering what happened to my writing over the last while. Back in June, I reached my goal of 304,475 words for the year. Then on July 3rd, I posted my last this month in the books post talking about how the writing had gone in June. Since then, I haven't made a peep about writing. Not only that, but I've barely talked about publishing or making covers or doing audiobooks or any of the other things I was going on about so frequently this past year.

Yeah, I pretty much took an extended vacation. I said I was going to keep going on things. In fact, here's my exact words from that post:

Now, what am I going to do next month? Well, if it’s going to be my vacation month from writing with no specific goals, then I guess I’ll do the same for audio. Now, that doesn’t mean that I’m going to do nothing. I’m already 30% of the way into Three Vampire Weekend, so I will do my best to get as much of that done as I can. I think I can probably get all of the book minus the big novella done this month. The novella, “The Elephant in the Room,” is going to take a month to finish all on its own, so that will likely be my goal for August, when it comes rolling around.

Boy was that a load of BS. I didn't do a single thing. I stopped writing for a little while, but along with that went everything else. The only thing I managed to do was get Undo published, and that was just because I had to work my way through that to edit Rish's reading for The Anklecast. 

What I claimed that I was going to do while not writing was to work on the preproduction outline of my next book, The Skeleton Crew, but I certainly didn't. I don't think I spent more than ten minutes even  thinking about it at all.

In doing this stuff, I discovered a little something about myself. It looks like writing every day is the base line that I have to stick to. If I let that slip away, then all the rest of my productivity goes with it. I don't know if it will always be that way, but for now, at least, I see that it is

After being a layabout for a while, it started to feel wrong to me. September was growing closer, and the opportunity to get going with the start of a new month kept calling to me. I pulled up a fresh document on Google Docs, and started listing off things that could be my goals for the next while, and with each addition, I felt more energized and inspired.

The line from the Sting song called "St. Augustine in Hell" kept coming to mind. I found a version of it on YouTube that you can play here:

That's right, break's over. Time to get back to it. I don't think that I ever felt better about myself than I have for the last year. The only time that comes close was the last time when I did pretty much the same thing in 2019-20. Only that time, I wasn't quite as productive as I was this year. I need to get back to doing the stuff so that I can feel good about myself again.

So, starting on September 1st, I began writing every day again. What is my goal for month? 500 words? 1,000 words? 1,250 words? 1,333 words? I'm not going to make a word count for now. This is going to be another first month of the year like I had in November last year. The real goal is just to make sure that I write every day. That's what I'm shooting for. I suspect that I'll get at least 500 words a day, but if I don't, I'm not going to beat myself up.

Next month, I'll give myself a big word count goal, and then we'll go onward and upward from there.

So, I guess the point of this is that I'm back. For the last three days, I've been writing on my story for Marshal Latham's contest over at the Journey Into... Podcast. I believe the contest was called the Journey Into Journey 2 or something like that. Oh, wait, Journey Into Journey: Illustrated Edition. While I work on that, I'll see if I can't get The Skeleton Crew planned out, so that I can jump into it once I finish Marshal's story.

I'll be back on here soon enough with a post about the goals that I started setting out. I think I need to ponder them a little bit, and also plan them out step by step to see if I can't manage to achieve them all. That's a pretty important thing. You can hit big goals as long as you break them up into smaller goals that you can keep up with day after day and week after week.

So, I'll see you with more of that stuff then.

June In The Books

It almost feels as though this monthly roundup isn't necessary after posting my writing total every day for most of the month leading up to my eventual eclipsing of my goal for the year as well as posting my audiobook progress every day until I made it to the end of that goal as well. I guess I still should, though. The month kept going after that. Let’s see, here’s the yearly total so far:

So, that’s where my totals stand now, and, as I said at the start and in my blog post from earlier this month, I surpassed my goal of 304,475 words for the year. That makes this officially my best year ever as a writer…at least word count-wise.

I kept going after I hit my goal, of course, and here is what my total sits at with June’s final tally included:

So, I’m another 10,000 words beyond my goal. Something pretty crazy is that I went through and added up just the words that I wrote this year, excluding the words from October, November, and December of last year, and I hit almost exactly 250,000 words. If I wrote 205,000 words in the first half of 2024, I could conceivably get 500,000 for the year. 

I’m tempted to start working toward that goal right now…except that I don’t want to. I am a little bit burned out, to tell you the truth. For the last while it has been difficult to even hit my goal from day to day.  If you look at June a little closer, you’ll see that I missed the mark on three separate occasions.

The second time it happened was mostly because things were out of my control. It was a hugely busy day, and I just didn’t have time to finish what I was doing. In fact, I ended the day’s writing in the middle of a sentence, because I was interrupted and never was able to go back and finish up. However, the other two days that I fell short were because I just plain wasn’t feeling it. Not that I wasn’t feeling very into the story I was working on, but that I was just not feeling like writing.

I may have overdone it a little or something. I may need to start scheduling some time off or something. People take vacations from work. They give themselves a break so that they can return and get back into things with renewed vigor, maybe I need to do that as well. I do this every single day. I don’t even give myself a weekend. Is that necessary? I don’t know if it is.

I have to admit that I am very worried that if I give myself a break, I’m afraid that I’ll go back to my old habits of doing absolutely nothing. I’ve done it before, so I could see myself doing it again. But I might do it anyway if I don’t give myself a break. One day I may just spit out a bunch of curse words and quit, turning my back on the whole effort.

I guess that’s something that I’m going to mess around with this month. I’m not going to give myself any kind of a goal, because I may well take a bit of a vacation from writing for a time. I haven't decided for sure what that will be, but it’s okay…after all, I already passed my goal. I’ve got nothing to prove anymore.

Beyond that, I want to change the way I work up a little bit too. These past few months have been really difficult, because I felt like I wasn’t prepared for what I was writing. I hadn’t gone through and outlined my book out. I just wrote it with a very scant idea of what I wanted. Unfortunately, I think it showed. I don’t think I produced something that was very worthwhile. I want to change that, which means I’ll have to change up my process, and work on putting time into outlining as well as writing.

How to do that? I don’t know. Are you a writer? What is your process? Comment below, please.

I was thinking of either taking a week or two or three off of writing on anything while I spend my normal writing time planning out and outlining the books…or I could lower my word count and spend half of my time outlining the next project while writing on the current one. Something like that, anyway. I’m going to try something out this month.

Presently, I’m writing a story about a haunted car thanks to a push from Rish Outfield. He may write his own version of the same tale. It could be another one of our Broken Mirror stories. Someday, we ought to publish a collection that includes a bunch of those stories together or something. Would such a thing interest you? Comment below, please.

Anyway, moving on to my other goal for the month. I’d fallen a little short on my efforts to finish half of the remainder of the audiobook for A Battalion of Ideas] in May. So, I scaled back my goals and made finishing the audiobook my only other goal. I pushed forward with the recording, slamming it all out really quickly, then jumped on the editing. I had that crap finished by June 21st. I kicked its ass so hard that I was able to go through and write new author’s notes for all of the stories, record them, edit them, and add them to the book as well…all before the month ended.

I submitted the book for review on Saturday, and now I’m just waiting for notice that it’s available. When that happens, I’ll make a post about it. Should probably be a few days.

Now, what am I going to do next month? Well, if it’s going to be my vacation month from writing with no specific goals, then I guess I’ll do the same for audio. Now, that doesn’t mean that I’m going to do nothing. I’m already 30% of the way into Three Vampire Weekend, so I will do my best to get as much of that done as I can. I think I can probably get all of the book minus the big novella done this month. The novella, “The Elephant in the Room,” is going to take a month to finish all on its own, so that will likely be my goal for August, when it comes rolling around.

So, I guess I have no list of goals for you, because I’m not pushing for anything this month. I’m just going to do my best, take a little bit of time off, and see what I can do to figure out how to proceed with outlining future projects. I’ll let you know how it went on August 1st or so. Talk to you then.

Writing Progress 6/21

Okay, y'all, I did it! I decided to just put the pedal to the metal this morning and get there. After yesterday, I only had 1,640 words to reach my goal. My daily goal is 1,333, which meant that I could stretch it out into two days if I wanted to. In fact, I got to 1,385 and looked at what I had left, and considered it, but then said, "No way."

I went on to write a bunch more words. I finished off the day with 1,991, and I am now 351 words over my goal for the year! I did it!

100.12% folks! The great part is that I still have 128 days in the year. I started this on the day after my birthday, and we're not particularly close to my next birthday. Yet I'm already done. That's pretty great.

Of course, I'm not done. Hitting the goal wasn't the point. That was just a milestone along the way. In this particular case, I'm like a Knight Radiant from Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive. The journey is the destination. What matters is the habits that I made along the way. If I go back to writing nothing all day long, day after day, then I didn't succeed at all.

So, I'm not going to do that. Now, we will just see how mcuh I can get done in the next 128 days. I should be able to write another 128,000 words or so. That will make it much harder to beat my all-time best year in the future.

I also am keen to work on pre-production stuff, outlining, making sure that I have the best possible story to write before I start writing it. That will be my immediate goal. I think I may even skip a few days of writing in that process. I'll have to see what I can do. As long as I'm working every day, that's what matters the most. Work toward the goal every day, and eventually I'll get there.

Writing Progress 6/20

1,391 words for today. And this is what my total sits at now:

That's just over a day's worth of writing for me to hit that goal. I might be able to get it tomorrow if I buckle down and go hard, but I'm not sure what to write. I'm at the end of the goal, but I'm also at the end of the author's notes that I've been doing. What do I move on to? I had an idea strike me the other day, and then I remembered it again yesterday morning and thought, "Maybe that's what I should write next...yes, I will." Except, now, I can't for the life of me remember what the idea was. It just refuses to return for another lap. Hopefully it will come back soon.

Writing Progress 6/19

Happy Juneteenth! I wrote another 1,409 words today, and inched ever so much closer to my final goal. Here's where I stand today:

99%! As Chandler would say, "Could I be more close?" Only 3,031 words left. If I stretched just a little, I could do that in two days. I've been getting 1,400 words or so a day recently. I could probably get 1,500. Maybe as early as the 21st, but for sure by the 22nd, we'll all be smoking fat Cuban cigars in celebration of my championship!

Writing Progress 6/18

Okay, another 1,403 words today. I'm inching ever so close. Here's what the total is now:

I'm over 300,000! In 2020, that was my final goal. I would have already made it if I was sticking with that, but, of course, I've got to get beyond my last high water mark, so there's still 4,440 words to go. I'm 98.54%. That's so frigging close. 

Writing Progress 6/17

I wrote my words early today. Already got my 1,473 words on paper this morning...well, on the computer anyway. On paper is just an expression.

And I'm now done with all of the author's notes for A Battalion of Ideas. Next, I'll get them for all the stories in Three Vampire Weekend.

Here's what I'm at as far as the progress toward the goal goes:

So very, very close. the number is down in the five thousands...that's pretty exciting. I'm now over 98%!

Writing Progress 6/16

Another 1,575 words today. I feel like I'm cheating doing author's notes like this for so long, but it's the project I'm working on, I guess. Author's notes are something that Rish and I both love, and we used it as a cornerstone of the podcast back when we first started. It was something that set us apart from the other shows out there before we became the first show to do full-cast productions for every show, so I feel like a bit of a cheat for putting out A Battalion of Ideas and Three Vampire Weekend without author's notes attached. That will be remedied soon. If you bought either of these books before I added the author's notes, and would like to read them, let me know, and I'll send you a PDF that includes them free of charge.

Anyway, here's my word count at this moment:

I can't believe how close I am to the finish line. So f@#$ing close. It's going to be in the rear-view mirror so very soon.

Writing Progress 6/15

Okay, I wrote another 1,476 words today, and my total now stands at:

Woo doggy! 97%! That's getting really, really close. We're down to less than 10,000 words, down to just four figures instead of five. Pretty soon, it'll only be a weeks worth away...wait, according to math, I already am. It's a week or less away. I can taste it.