A writer with delusions of adequacy
This sounds really simple, but a lot of challenges sound (or look) really simple when they’re thrown down. But here it is.
If I write 5,000 words a week, 48 weeks a year (because, in this challenge, I’m allowing myself four weeks holiday a year), I would be able to produce two 100,000-word novels a year.
The unuttered part of the challenge is what will I write about, in those two novels a year? I’m going to give myself the next week to get my head around that.
In my quest to produce a video ‘commercial’ for Tempest, I discovered it’s possible to save a whizzy PowerPoint deck as a video file. So that’s what I did. Actually… it’s not whizzy at all, but as an experiment it’s a first run at something I want to take further. Let me know what you think:
The lovely folk over at Readers Magnet have graciously given some of their space over for a one-sided discussion about Tempest.
You could visit them, read it, and tell them I sent you!
It’s all been happening in the last few months (and straight away, if you know me and if you know what I usually get up to, you’re probably being cynical and thinking ‘Yeah, I bet it hasn’t’, but you’d be wrong).
When I haven’t been walking the dogs (and believe me, there has been a lot of dogwalking going on) I have been scheming, plotting, writing, and planning.
First of all the scheming. In a few weeks’ time, early January 2024, I am going to unpublish Tempest (this is a thing you can do these days). A couple of days later, when all the unpublishing dust has settled, I will republish the book. The reason for this in- and outing is I’m changing Tempest’s ISBN. I’m switching from Amazon’s free (but generic) ISBN to one of a series that I own, an ISBN that is registered to, and identifies, brennigjones.com as the publisher.
A few days after these two Tempest changes, the second novel in the series (titled: Storm) will be published in paperback and Kindle. Storm will be published under another ISBN registered to me. I’m planning the audiobook edition of Storm for mid-summer, but getting the narration logistics right is challenging.
Now the plotting and writing. Over the last few months I’ve been working on the outline, plot devices, and characters for the third novel in the series. A fortnight ago I started writing it for real. I reckon it’s going to take about five more months to finish the third novel. This will take me up to the end of May 2024, if I don’t hit any bumps in the road. If the normal production timelines don’t shift, the third novel in the series could be ready for publication around August 2024. But… I may hang on to it and opt for a January 2025 publication date. This would keep the publication schedule consistent with the two previous books in the series.
When I began planning this project, I knew it was going to be a trilogy. But now I’m thinking it might be a Douglas Adams trilogy (if you know the story behind the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy books, you’ll know what I mean). I’m going to stop at four books in this trilogy. I really am. Four. Definitely.