It’s been a tough few years. My grandfather died, followed by my wife’s grandfather, and then my mom. Grieving while sorting through complex reams of estate paperwork, overwhelmed by my mom’s thousands of collectibles filling up every corner of the house.
Then the house burned down, and we lost everything of both ours and my mom’s, and we were living in an apartment again on month-to-month lease fighting with the builders who couldn’t seem to figure out to make a house even pass a code inspection.
This year I had a minor surgery followed by a major complication, and I was in serious danger of dying or having massive brain damage (none of which came to pass, knock on wood-grained polymer composite). To top that off, I fell down a flight of wooden stairs over Christmas, breaking a 1.5″ thick piece of pressure treated lumber with my spine.
Thankfully over the last month things have slowed down enough that I can write for an hour a day, and that’s awesome. My feet are back on the ground. Literally. Take it from me, this is a lot better than having them up in the air, past your head, as you plummet ten feet down.
But now I am obsessed with writing productivity. Part of me is absolutely sure that I have lost three years of prime creative time, and I have to catch up some how. So I’ve been researching. Testing out theories. And last month I reached 54k words and finished the rough draft of a new 100+k book I’ve been working on since last August.
This pretty awesome, but I have a long way to go. A lot of successful selfpubbers produce 30-45k per week, which is about 4x what I’m at. Maybe I don’t need to keep up with them, but I feel the pressure to try.
Still, I’m proud. This is a big first step in the right direction. I’ve got tons of ideas I want to write, and now I’m not scared to invest the time in some of the stranger ones.
Let the novels fall like dominos!