Before I make up a whole new list of things to forget about this month, how did I do with last month’s list?

• Release The Chaos Nexus! (The cover is ready, the manuscript is off with the proofreader…  I should really get the pre-order set up today.) DONE!
• Finish the draft of All Gremlins Great and Small. DONE!
• Continue editing and loading episodes of Fighting Fate to Kindle Vella. DONE!
• Write a short story / newsletter bonus. I made a list of five stories (linked to various books) to write, and I’d like to get at least one of them done this month. Wrote 1, and finishing the second today.
• Work on the book that comes after All Gremlins. (This is my “If I run out of things to do” goal.) I worked on the outline. In fact, I got to the point where I realized “Hey, this really needs an antagonist!”, which is about 50k words earlier than I usually have that thought. See how much I’m improving as a writer!

Clearly I did a great job accomplishing my goals. As much as I want to claim I just worked extra hard, I think this can be explained by having fairly easy goals. (It’s related to a trick I figured out in grade school — throw the first test so it looks like you’re improving for the rest of the quarter.) So now, on to the goals for this month!

April Goals

• Get feedback on All Gremlins (book 1) and make a plan for editing.
• Add 30k words to All Rocs (book 2). I’m hoping to cannibalize some of these from an earlier draft, but I haven’t looked at it yet. That might slow me down. (This is my Camp NaNoWriMo goal.)
• Edit the short story I wrote in March and send it to my newsletter subscribers.
• Finish writing/editing the second short story. (It will probably go out in the newsletter next month.)
• Update the website:
  • Add a page with free short stories (if you sign up to the newsletter).
  • Make the newsletter signup call to action more obvious.
  • Add a page for the Vella serials.
  • Add some info about my Patreon to the home page.
• Stretch goal: write a bonus epilog for All Gremlins to convince people to sign up for my newsletter. (Yes, I have decided to focus on increasing my newsletter subscribers. You probably noticed.)

Anyhow, that’s the plan for April.

Obligatory Pet Picture

Georgie would like you to explain why you’re lying on the grass mid-walk.

(As a side note, I haven’t written the year as 2202 yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Please tell me I’m not the only person having this problem…)

In contrast to January, I (mostly) stuck to the script last month. (That mostly is doing a fair amount of work, but this is me we’re talking about.)

• Finish the rough draft of All Gremlins Great and Small. Well, no. I still have a bunch to do. But I have a deadline of the 12th to get it to my critique partners, so it will be done before then.
• Publish Dragon Freehold. DONE! It’s a fun, easy read. I hope everyone enjoys it as much as I do!
• Finish setting up the Patreon and get into the habit of posting things that I’ve promised to all the levels, even if I don’t have people signed up for it yet. I set up the levels so I don’t need to do much I wasn’t already going to do. That was a good idea.
• Continue editing and loading episodes of Fighting Fate to Kindle Vella. (I’m dropping one episode every day, so that’s not an insignificant amount of work.) Did this.
• Finish structural edits on The Chaos Nexus. I’ll probably get into the final editing stages in March. Sent it off to my proofreader two days ago!
• Play around with cover ideas for All Gremlins Great and Small as part of Thingadailies. Did this and reworked the cover for a newsletter magnet (Guile Awaits) at the same time. Plus I learned a lot about GIMP and InDesign, which was the main goal.

I’m giving myself a grade of “A”, mostly because I sat down and did The Chaos Nexus edits like a champ.

March Goals

• Release The Chaos Nexus! (The cover is ready, the manuscript is off with the proofreader…  I should really get the pre-order set up today.)
• Finish the draft of All Gremlins Great and Small.
• Continue editing and loading episodes of Fighting Fate to Kindle Vella.
• Write a short story / newsletter bonus. I made a list of five stories (linked to various books) to write, and I’d like to get at least one of them done this month.
• Work on the book that comes after All Gremlins. (This is my “If I run out of things to do” goal.)

I think those goals are reasonable. Will I do them or get distracted again? Meet here next month and we’ll find out!

I’ll be honest here. I did a terrible job of sticking to the script in January. (This isn’t a huge surprise — that’s pretty much the story of my life.) But I did actually get a lot done, so I’ll evaluate the goals I had, and then list the things I did.

• Write the first draft (or at least 50k) of the series reader magnet. I’m not sure how long this will turn out to be — I would be fine if it expanded into a full-length novel, but I don’t have that much plot for it yet. (I have characters, a beginning, an end, a theme, and an inciting incident. Who needs more than that? Ha ha ha…)  The draft is currently at 27k. I think it’s going to go another 10-15k.
• I wrote episodes for two different serials last month, so if I need to take a break and work on something other than the reader magnet, I’ll add some episodes to those. No pressure on this, though. I did not write any new episodes from scratch.
• Get the next few chapters of Ghostwriter out to the YWC critique group. Woohoo! I did this.

So I did 1.5 out of 3 things. I had an honors physics class in college where the median grade on one test was 7/100 (I got 9/100 so I was doing great!), but in most classes 50% would not be passing. However, it’s my life, so I’m giving myself a provisional grade of B.

On the other hand, here’s the other stuff I did:

• Did a read-aloud pass of Dragon Freehold in preparation for releasing it in February. I can’t emphasize enough how much work that is, but it also makes the language so much stronger. It’s necessary.
• Pulled an old novel out of storage and started editing it and feeding it to Vella. I’m not sure Fighting Fate will ever be anywhere other than Vella. It’s SF romance, which doesn’t quite fit with the other things I’m publishing at the moment. But it’s a fun novel, and if Amazon is going to pay me bonuses, I might as well put it out there.
• Started working on edits for The Chaos Nexus, which is the third Jackpot Drift novel. I also have a slot in the cover designer’s schedule this month.
• Started setting up my Patreon. I still need to do some integration to finish making it all work, but if anyone wants to support me financially, it’s almost up and running. (Can you still be a fan without contributing to the Patreon? Absolutely! Talking to your friends, writing reviews, buying books, or even convincing your library to buy books are all great ways to support an author! But for those people with a bit of extra cash who want to throw some my way, Patreon makes it easy.)

February Goals

Can I do a better job of planning February? Let’s find out!

• Finish the rough draft of All Gremlins Great and Small.
• Publish Dragon Freehold.
• Finish setting up the Patreon and get into the habit of posting things that I’ve promised to all the levels, even if I don’t have people signed up for it yet.
• Continue editing and loading episodes of Fighting Fate to Kindle Vella. (I’m dropping one episode every day, so that’s not an insignificant amount of work.)
• Finish structural edits on The Chaos Nexus. I’ll probably get into the final editing stages in March.
• Play around with cover ideas for All Gremlins Great and Small as part of Thingadailies.

Fingers crossed I don’t head off piste during February…

Obligatory Pet Picture

Somebody is very sad the box is empty…

Well. 2021 certainly was a year, wasn’t it? I have big plans for 2022, but first a look back at my December goals…

• Finish the rough draft of the third Jackpot Drift book, do the first round of edits, and then send it off to my critique partners. (Overall I’m happy with how things are going, but there are some things that need to be moved around so the first act isn’t too long.) This felt like it took forever, but I finally sent it to my critique partners. I’ll hear what they think of it in a few weeks.
• Write the final episodes for the Vella serial Dragon Freehold. I bumped up the release frequency to three times per week, so the final episodes should be available by the end of December. That means I can bundle it together into book form 30 days later for people who would rather read everything at one time. The last five episodes went to the proofreader yesterday. The long form book should be available mid-February.
• Play around with some short structural and “universal fantasy” exercises which will probably end up on Vella. There are some things I want to try out and it’s easier to convince myself I’m not wasting my time if I do them as serials.

My December goals were not super ambitious, but that turned out to be a good thing as I needed a little break. I’ll give myself a solid A because I’m an easy grader and I did what I set out to do.

January Goals

New year, new series! This year I’d like to work on building my newsletter and writing a new series (science fiction? fantasy? Let’s call it science fantasy for now) with the knowledge I’ve gained over the last year. Hopefully this one resonates with people, but if not, I’m sure I’ll learn something new. (Yes, very likely the first thing I will learn is the importance of writing for an existing market instead of writing the stuff I want to write. We’ll take that as a given.)

• Write the first draft (or at least 50k) of the series reader magnet. I’m not sure how long this will turn out to be — I would be fine if it expanded into a full-length novel, but I don’t have that much plot for it yet. (I have characters, a beginning, an end, a theme, and an inciting incident. Who needs more than that? Ha ha ha…)
• I wrote episodes for two different serials last month, so if I need to take a break and work on something other than the reader magnet, I’ll add some episodes to those. No pressure on this, though.
• Get the next few chapters of Ghostwriter out to the YWC critique group.

That’s more than enough, really.

Obligatory Pet Picture

Georgie is here to remind you that spring will eventually arrive.

How did November go? Let’s see…

• Draft the third book in the Jackpot Drift series. I’m aiming for 75-80k, but I have yet to hit the target I’m aiming for. The manuscript is currently at 67k and I think it has about 10k left to go. I’ll finish the rough draft in the next few days.
• Publish the holiday novella Death Trims the Tree. DONE!
• Apply for a BBFD for the first Penelope Standing book. Depending on how they do the page count, Death Walks a Dog might be too short for BookBub, but you never know. I scheduled a RobinReads promotion for December 21st (which… many people don’t bother scheduling promotions during December because everyone is frantically doing holiday things, so this may be a mistake, but when has that stopped me before?)

All in all, November went pretty well. I would have liked to have finished the manuscript just to say I did the whole thing in one month, but that’s okay. That can be a goal for NaNoWriMo 2022.

December Goals

• Finish the rough draft of the third Jackpot Drift book, do the first round of edits, and then send it off to my critique partners. (Overall I’m happy with how things are going, but there are some things that need to be moved around so the first act isn’t too long.)
• Write the final episodes for the Vella serial Dragon Freehold. I bumped up the release frequency to three times per week, so the final episodes should be available by the end of December. That means I can bundle it together into book form 30 days later for people who would rather read everything at one time.
• Play around with some short structural and “universal fantasy” exercises which will probably end up on Vella. There are some things I want to try out and it’s easier to convince myself I’m not wasting my time if I do them as serials.

That should be more than enough to work on!

Obligatory Pet Picture

This picture of the geezer brigade is from earlier in the year, but it has a nice cozy winter feel to it. I hope your December brings joy and warmth!

As always, it’s time to grade myself on how I did the month before. I did sort of change my plans in the middle of the month, so this may not be pretty…

• Do the read-aloud and grammar-checking pass of Penelope Standing #3 (Title: Death Sniffs a Rose, unless I change it), and send it off for proofreading.
• Get at least another six episodes of Dragon Freehold edited, proofread, and loaded so I don’t have to worry about that during November. (I have another 14 already written, so this shouldn’t be too hard.) They just returned from the proofreader a couple of days ago, so I still need to load them.
• Firm up the Jackpot Drift #3 outline and start drafting. I’ll be using 50k of that as my NaNoWriMo novel, but it should end up around 80k and it needs to be ready to send to my critique group on the 9th of December. So… Doing the math on that, I should probably be about 20k into the book before November starts. This was one of the things I changed my mind on. I decided to go with the spirit of NaNoWriMo and draft the whole book in November. (I have what I think is a good outline — 2500 words per day is not really a stretch when I don’t have a day job.)
• Work on the outline for the prequel to the next series — it’s set in current times, except moving portals (“curtains”) open semi-randomly and allow passage to alternate versions of earth — until they disappear again. The main character is a veterinarian, dealing with new species and the changes that come when society is disrupted in this way. Anyhow, it will be a ton of fun to rewrite this series and get it out there, but I also need to change a whole lot. I did not look at this at all.
• Redo the keywords on the remaining books. I think I might have done one book, but I definitely didn’t finish this.
• Send out the newsletter with the cozy short story.
• Write another Jackpot Drift short story as a newsletter bonus. Didn’t do it.
• Finish up the Penelope Standing Christmas novella (Death Trims the Tree) and send it to my critique partners.

So… I think I did reasonably well. Maybe a B, if I’m being generous. But I also wrote a 15-episode Kindle Vella story to test some things, so there’s an extra 20k in there. (It’s under a pen name in a different genre. It’s probably better if I don’t get into it here. My mom could read this.)

And I published the third Penelope Standing mystery — Death Smells a Rose! (But wow, I need to start planning my book launches…)

November 2021 Goals

• Draft the third book in the Jackpot Drift series. I’m aiming for 75-80k, but I have yet to hit the target I’m aiming for.
• Publish the holiday novella Death Trims the Tree.
• Apply for a BBFD for the first Penelope Standing book. Depending on how they do the page count, Death Walks a Dog might be too short for BookBub, but you never know.

Oof. That’s probably more than enough to get through this month. I’ll likely add on some other things as time permits, but drafting the book will be my main goal.

Obligatory Pet Picture

It rained. Somebody was not amused…

How did I do on the September goals?

• Publish The Chaos Connection (Jackpot Drift #2). This is a fairly easy one. I need to write the acknowledgements and update the other back matter, but once it comes back from the final proof, it will take less than an hour to format. Then it’s just a matter of loading it everywhere. Yes!
• Finish the first draft of the cozy. Penelope Standing #3 doesn’t have a title yet (Death Digs a Garden? Death Sniffs a Rose?), but I think I’m about 15-20k away from having the initial draft finished. Yes! It is ready for a final round of edits before being sent off to the proofreader.
• Redo the keywords for the books already published. One book done. I learned a lot (and hopefully most of what I learned is correct…) so the rest should be easier.
• Send the Dragon Freehold episodes that are already written off to be proofread and load them into Vella. Loaded & scheduled episodes to last almost until the end of November.
• Outline the next Jackpot Drift novel. I’m still working on figuring out an outlining technique that works for me, but planning the serial has helped with that. I have faith that this may get easier someday. I have an outline, but it still needs more work. I added something to it yesterday that made it more interesting and exciting and I can’t wait to write this book.

I also wrote most of a Penelope Standing Christmas novella, which I hadn’t even planned on last month. (Have I mentioned how much trouble I have sticking to plans? Because I do…) And I wrote a Penelope Standing short story that will go out to my newsletter subscribers this  month. (Have you subscribed? It’s free!)

Anyhow, I am giving myself an A for all the work I got done, even if some of it wasn’t on the plan.

October Goals

• Do the read-aloud and grammar-checking pass of Penelope Standing #3 (Title: Death Sniffs a Rose, unless I change it), and send it off for proofreading.
• Get at least another six episodes of Dragon Freehold edited, proofread, and loaded so I don’t have to worry about that during November. (I have another 14 already written, so this shouldn’t be too hard.)
• Firm up the Jackpot Drift #3 outline and start drafting. I’ll be using 50k of that as my NaNoWriMo novel, but it should end up around 80k and it needs to be ready to send to my critique group on the 9th of December. So… Doing the math on that, I should probably be about 20k into the book before November starts.
• Work on the outline for the prequel to the next series — it’s set in current times, except moving portals (“curtains”) open semi-randomly and allow passage to alternate versions of earth — until they disappear again. The main character is a veterinarian, dealing with new species and the changes that come when society is disrupted in this way. Anyhow, it will be a ton of fun to rewrite this series and get it out there, but I also need to change a whole lot.
• Redo the keywords on the remaining books.
• Send out the newsletter with the cozy short story.
• Write another Jackpot Drift short story as a newsletter bonus.
• Finish up the Penelope Standing Christmas novella (Death Trims the Tree) and send it to my critique partners.

Obligatory Pet Picture

Whew, that seems like a huge list. I’m going to take a break with this handsome fellow.

I’m liking this series.  It has a sort of Dr Who feel to it, where there’s danger but you know it’s not going to devolve into a war movie.

— my brother Eric, who has a lifetime of sibling rivalry to conquer, so you know his compliments are genuine

In just a few hours, The Chaos Connection will be available! (Cue the fireworks!)

This is the second book set on the small terraformed colony of Jackpot Drift (“five gates from civilization”, as one character would have you believe).

In the first book, The Chaos Job, Sil Tailingstown — our intrepid nanotech turned sheep farmer who has a tiny problem controlling the god of chaos hiding inside her — accidentally foiled a conspiracy to manifest the god of rogue AIs and saved the universe.

This time Sil has her chaos (more-or-less) under control and her partner by her side, but the official god of the colony is starting to make noise. Is it complaining about Sil and her chaos? Or are the rogue AIs at it again?

Enjoy your latest trip to Jackpot Drift!

August Recap

• Write another 30k on the serial (Dragon Freehold). I think this ended up somewhere around 20k
• Edit the serial episodes not yet loaded and send them off to the very patient proofreader. Done!
• Get the next 30k drafted for the cozy. Done!
• Update the website. Getting it to do what I want using WordPress has been a challenge, but I think I’m almost there. Done!
• Writing Fiction Sales Copy class. There is an assignment due today, and one next week. I can do this. Done!
• Redo the keywords for the books already published. The goal is to make it so people who might be looking for my books can find them. I still have a lot to learn. Um. I didn’t even start on this.
• Depending on feedback from my critique partners, move The Chaos Connection to the next stage of edits. Just sent it off to the proofreader an hour ago!

Since I have serial episodes loaded that won’t get released until October, I switched my writing time to concentrate on the cozy. Then I worked my butt off to get The Chaos Connection in shape for release next month. All in all it was a very productive month.

September Goals

• Publish The Chaos Connection (Jackpot Drift #2). This is a fairly easy one. I need to write the acknowledgements and update the other back matter, but once it comes back from the final proof, it will take less than an hour to format. Then it’s just a matter of loading it everywhere.
• Finish the first draft of the cozy. Penelope Standing #3 doesn’t have a title yet (Death Digs a Garden? Death Sniffs a Rose?), but I think I’m about 15-20k away from having the initial draft finished.
• Redo the keywords for the books already published.
• Send the Dragon Freehold episodes that are already written off to be proofread and load them into Vella.
• Outline the next Jackpot Drift novel. I’m still working on figuring out an outlining technique that works for me, but planning the serial has helped with that. I have faith that this may get easier someday.

My Writing Buddies