The past few years–the last 18 months in particular–have been a blur of books. On one hand that is a great thing. On the other… most of those books were not my own. Between my authors books that I’ve edited, things I’ve published for Pen and Kink and, to a lesser extent, anthologies, I haven’t had a whole lot of time to work on my own writing. It’s time for that to change 🙂
I’m not ditching my authors or Pen and Kink Publishing by any means, but I am making time to spend on my own writing. In part that means taking on fewer editing projects, and publishing fewer new works through P&K, but in part it also means actually scheduling in time to write and establishing deadlines for myself rather than attempting to ‘fit it in’ where I can.
Between now and the end of next year my plans look something like this:
Pen and Kink Publishing
Transformed, edited by Charlie Watson (July 2018)
INKomplete series by Mara Malins (November 2018)
Haunted, edited by Trysh Thompson (2019)
Top Sekkrit Anthology, edited by me (2019)
My own works
Editing
INKomplete series
Top Sekkrit Anthology
Up to two WWP Titles
Writing
The Switch
She’s on the Bottom Bundle
Prairie Magic #3
Prairie Magic #4
Running on Empty #2
Paranormal Circus #1 (Ben and Maggie)
Paranormal Circles #2 (The one with the monkeys)
Paranormal Circles #3
Escapades #1 — The Manor
With Eyes to See #1
Gunpowder Girls #1
That looks like a lot, because it is a lot, but it’s not too much. At least, not if I stay focused, organised and feeling accountable.
The editing won’t take very long in actual work hours… the anthology might, because it’ll be open submissions, but it shouldn’t be too bad. And when it comes to publishing and promoting the P&K titles, Elesha and I have a pretty good system going now.
Writing will take up the bulk of my time, as it should, but all of those stories I’m planning to write are closer to novella length than novel, so in theory I should be able to write them pretty quickly once I get everything sorted in my head and actually get my butt in the chair to do them.
So, to help with that I’ve installed a handy dandy little widget. It’s called “My Book Progress” and you can see it on the left hand side of my blog… or here:
[mybookprogress simplesubscribe=”true”]
Dun da da duh!
I can use this to set deadlines and track my progress and you can follow along with me. Best of all, if you see that I’ve fallen behind on a deadline or you want me to speed up, you can press that ‘Nudge’ button and it will let me know that you’re feeling impatient and I should get my butt in gear.
I fully admit this is totally a toy, but I think it’ll be a helpful tool as well 🙂
I haven’t set all the deadlines yet–I have to sit down with some calendars and markers and do that sooner rather than later, but I’m starting to get things together and it feels pretty good. Pretty good, indeed.
