The year of 2019 was pretty much a total waste for me as I struggled with heath issues and so when I started to come out of the fog a few weeks before the holidays I decided that 2020 was going to be my year. I was going to find ways to be productive, stop being so hard on myself, and just do.
It’s time to stop focusing on the failure that was selling my first book and to look forward to the future. So what it didn’t sell, it was a memoir of a nobody, what did I expect? Time to buckle down and write something someone actually would want to read and get on with my life! Still, I really do want to earn an actual living income on writing someday so I’d have to come up with a game plan.
I read some articles and listened to some podcasts on novel writing and basically there seemed to be a golden threshold everyone kept mentioning – that once you reach twenty books you should be able to make a stable 50K a year because as they repeat over and over, “The best way to sell a book is to write another book!” Twenty books?? That seems like it’d take years. But then I decided I was looking at the big picture when what I needed to be doing was looking at the small picture.
Honoring Echo took me four agonizing months to write and the reason it took me that long was because much of the second half of it was personal and distressing, reliving trauma is not really the most healthy thing in the world. But with that being said four months still wasn’t bad for one book! If I could keep up that pace on other projects I could write three books in a year! And that’s a great start.
I knew that on “bad” writing days where I wrote something but not a lot, I tended to have around 2,000 words. So, I made a New Year’s Resolution to write 2,000 words on every day I didn’t have a migraine. If I succeed and write only 2,000 words each day, the potential to have enough raw material for ten novel length books is there at the end of a year!
The other reason I never finished another book aside from Honoring Echo was that I tend to have terrible writer’s block and burn out when I focus on only one project. So to alleviate this I decided that my 2,000 words didn’t have to be in one manuscript at a time. They could be part of any of the several manuscripts I have open, or a short story I can throw in a pile and string together in an anthology later, or even a novella or children’s book. Or I could count blog entries which are also useful in a completely different way. It doesn’t matter, just write.
And you know what? Since starting this I have done really well! It’s been one week and this how it panned out.
Wednesday: OK I totally spaced on the first day, have no idea what I wrote or how many words it was.
Thursday: Nothing. I had a migraine.
Friday – I wrote one random short story with 1,904 words
Saturday – I blogged 1,740 words and added 2,105 words to my manuscript Milking the Cat for a total of 3,845 words.
Sunday – I again focused on Milking the Cat adding 2,194 words
Monday – I started my day writing an 843-word entry in my Dream Log which may or may not be worth publishing once I get enough dreams written down. And then I had a very productive day with Milking the Cat adding 4,051 word for total of 4,894 words.
Tuesday – I ended my first week with 1,254 words in Milking the Cat and 580 in various blog entries.
The week’s final total was 14,671 words! I’m shocked and exhilarated because it was not as hard as I thought it would be it was just a matter of setting up the time and saying I was going to do it. Far from hitting writer’s block I have ideas racing through my mind as I put them on notes for use later. And I know I could have written more if I decided to. The reason I am focusing on Milking the Cat is because it’s a nonfiction about the funny animal stories that have resulted from my unusual life. As such it’s really easy to get into and just slam out – unlike fiction which takes more thought. Even so I look forward to that too!
So here we are – 2020 – it’s going to be the year I get back on my feet come hell or high water. Oh, and did I mention my second New Year’s resolution was to post a new Glen the Caterpillar comic every Wednesday? So far so good!
