10/13/24 Writing Update and Some Background

First, I want to thank you all again for showing such fantastic support for the first book in this new pen name of mine -- far, far, far beyond what I hoped for.

Generally I'm going to try to post an update on progress once a week, usually on Sunday mornings, in addition to any extras or previews I post.

I'm working on several projects right now, which lets me divide my time up based on what I feel like writing at any given moment or, more accurately, which of the voices in my head manage to scream the loudest.

Warlock was something of an experiment for me, in that I decided back in August to take short-term leave from my day job and see what writing full-time would be like. I've been at that job for twenty-seven years, but it's become a hellhole over the last few years with management seeming to deliberately schedule projects so that they're a death march from day one.

My hope was that I wanted a 4+ star rating at the end of the first month and maybe 3-5 sales a day on average. Y'all blew that out of the water the first week, so there's now a 99.9999+% chance I'll be turning in my resignation on 11/4 and doing this full time ... and I can't thank you enough for helping to make that happen.

I'm a spreadsheet guy, so I track my writing production on a daily basis and shoot for certain metrics. When it was part-time I aimed for 1000 words/day, but bumped that to 2000 for full-time, and I'm using the 30-day running average to track that right now. Earlier this year I wasn't writing much due to the day-job demands, which is why the "daily average" is sub-1000.

 Most of my writing time right now is going into Warlock 2 and a new Kensington series tentatively called Grinder -- which may change that title depending on if I keep the litRPG elements or just make it reverse-Portal alone.

Warlock 2's at 105k of a projected 130k words, though I may bump that up again. I started at 100k as the target, but it's looking to become as long as book one. Which is saying a lot, since both of them were originally planned as one book. This genre writes a lot longer than milscifi, with all the world- and relationship-building, and I love that, because I love writing that kind of stuff.

Two's going to be spicier than one, but I'm trying to hold it to about 10% of the word count and I think I'm going to be setting a standard for this pen name that the spicy chapters are essentially stand-alone -- meaning a reader could safely skip them and not miss any of the larger story.

Grinder's at 33k of a projected 70k -- but maybe that gets bumped up too.

For release, the way my process works is first I get to words-complete, which is there's nothing new to write, the story is complete. Then I do revisions -- unlike most authors, I write pretty clean as far as story goes. There's no first-draft and rewritten second draft, my revisions are usually to add things -- enhance descriptions, clarify with more words, etc. There's usually two rounds of that, at which point I give it to my editors, then I do a final run through for last-minute revisions -- which are then reedited, because my wife is one of my editors and she hates it if I publish anything she wasn't the last to touch.

Still looking at Warlock 2 before the end of the year and maybe the Grinder title in first quarter.

See you next week!