Despite not releasing anything in 2023, I did write quite a few words and get some stuff done last year. Here’s the recap!

For my next book, The Gray Shift, I wrote 88,324 words of actual text drafts.

For the book after that, The Rotten Core, I wrote 65,139 words total across 3 drafts of the outline.

That gives me a total of 153,463 words for this year. What’s interesting is that this year was all front loaded for me. All of The Gray Shift writing happened between Jan-Feb, so that was 44k words in 2 months. The Rotten Core writing was all between May-June for 32k words/month.

My goal this year is to write more consistently and try to be less full on / full off like I have been. To do this I am aiming for at least 2,000 words per weekday. That’s about 1 hour of editing or 2 hours of writing from scratch per weekday. I’m setting this goal under my normal writing rate on purpose so I can catch up if I miss a day instead of getting frustrated I didn’t do things perfectly the entire time.

The Gray Shift is going to be about ~80,000 words long so assuming the 2nd and 3rd pass edits go faster than the first, it’ll probably take me about 160 hours to rewrite it and send it out for beta 2.0 and the 2nd round of edits. At 2hrs/day, that should be done in March. Since the storyline is good, I’m hoping that will be last the big set of changes for that book and then I can launch it this summer!

While The Gray Shift is out for editing, I’ll switch over to revising the outline for The Rotten Core, which will pretty much need to get blown up and massively reworked since I’m changing the main character. If I can get the outline finalized (as final as the outline for an unwritten book can be) then I should be able to start on the full text draft of that one in the 2nd half of this year.

Here we go!