January always gets lost in a whirlwind of yearly admin tasks. Tax papers start to flood the mailbox, but what’s worse now is that they’re invading my email as more and more companies push to go paperless. I mean, I get that they save money, but my heavens if it isn’t hard to find that email with a generic title and vague link after it’s been flooded out by three weeks of emails.

Anyway, on the good news side, I spent the first two weeks of January re-reading the first half of The Star of Storms that I wrote last fall before falling into a pre-mid-terms news coma and general malaise. That immediately put me behind in my production schedule.

I was sorely tempted to flip the desk and say FORGET IT ALL, but I really, really liked what I had written (it’s still a first draft and mildly problematic) so much so that I reached the mid-point where I had stopped writing and went to flip to the next chapter asking (OUT LOUD) “Ooooh, I wonder what happens next?”

Only, I’m the writer and I HAD STOPPED THERE so now it was up to me to determine WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

I was so mad at myself.

So, instead of abandoning all hope and deciding that January 2020 would be as good a time as any to start a writing career, I ran the numbers and determined that I could catch up on production if I wrote 2000 words per day.

That’s a not impossible goal most days, so I dove in and started writing. On days that I was tempted to do other things (well, hello there Sims 4) I forced myself to write first just so I could mark that one thing off my mental to-do list.

I’m pleased to say that I am almost fully caught up and will likely be fully caught up by Friday. Like, I was only 500 words off goal last Friday night.

That felt really, really good.

The downside is that I just don’t have the mental bandwidth to edit and write at the same time. I reached the point in book two, The Star of Fire, that I needed to do some pretty extensive re-writing and I had to call it quits on that momentarily. The plan now (subject to change at the whims of the writer) is to finish knocking SOS and then edit SOF while also plotting the first in a new series.

And yeah, SOS won’t be the last in the series, but it will give me three books and a natural pause in the story. I decided to break there for a beat and write another book in another genre, because well, money. I can always come back to the SOT world as a fun project (and I imagine Mr. Quinn will push for it as he really likes these books), but I need to see some sell-through to know it’s worth it to keep pounding away at this. I know my fellow authors will hear that one.

So that’s where I am.

As a side note, I also got some mad little tasks off my lingering list of things that need to be done that I don’t wanna do. That felt good too.