Category: Goals (Page 4 of 5)

Well, the world made it into 2022. Not that there’s any doubt the planet would make it. As to humanity, we made it as well, with the hopes this year will be better than 2021. Travel still seems to be the lottery I mentioned last time, and I decided to hold off any decisions to see what governments did after January 1st. At the time of writing they’ve done nothing so in the next week or so, I’ll get onto the airline sites and see what they have available.

I have decided to go with the tripling my annual count of usable words. That’s usable fiction, non-fiction, and this blog. For anyone counting that’s going to be about 500,000 words for 2022. It’s a long way from the two-million plus Dean Wesley-Smith is targeting, but maybe I’ll go for that next year, or in 2024. Assuming I make it, that will be ten or more items toward that magical twenty number I talked about in early-December.

As of today, I’m about 1,500 words behind. I’m not worried about it because yesterday was spent in a lot of preparation and establishing my 2022 tracking items. Today I made a start on a short story, and have a hard copy of Death at a Wedding beside me. I’ll look through that hard copy to remind myself where I was, and get my head back into ancient Babylon. I’m not working with the day job for the next week, so I expect to make good progress.

I’m also planning to write here more regularly in 2022, so stay tuned and I’ll report on progress next week.

I hope everyone made it safely through the holiday season and into 2021. 

I usually use the period between Christmas and New Year to think about the past year and develop goals and plans for what I want to achieve in the following year.

When I look back at 2020, I completed twenty short stories and didn’t get to the additional three novels I wanted to publish. However, I did get Thieves in the Temple completed and published wide, and I have a lot more confidence in my ability to format and publish eBooks wide. Paperbacks are a different issue as there’s much more to the cover design, so that has to be a 2021 challenge. 

I did make a start to the second Jacob novel, Death at a Wedding, and I’m just under ten percent of the way through it. I don’t know who the murderer is yet, but in the first two chapters there are enough suspects to keep Jacob busy. I have a timeline for when I want Death to be published, and I’ll let you know when, if, I make it.

The publishing challenge is coming along slowly. Including Thieves, there were two pieces published in December (fifty to go). I have several short stories ready to be uploaded, but I need to write the sales copy for them. I’ve learned it’s best to do several at a time so you get into the rhythm. That’s how I completed six or seven of the Jacob stories. I just need to put some time aside to write the copy and find appropriate cover images.

The plan for 2021 is just about there, and I’ll share the highlights in the next post. 

November could easily be a cut-and-paste from the October recap because most of it was spent on the edits to Thieves in the Temple, which went on sale on Amazon, Kobo, Apple etc., on December 5^th. 

I added a couple of chapters, and combined a couple more and by the time I finished the last read through, I think I could probably read the story aloud from memory.

One of the most valuable tools during this editing exercise, apart from the inevitable editorial red pen has been the application Pro-Writing Aid. It does a much better job of spell-checking than Word, and also flags the correct spellings in the wrong context – form instead of from – that sort of thing.

Most importantly for me though is the long term block I have when it comes to using commas. No matter how much I study the rules and correct application, they still appear in the wrong place. Pro-Writing Aid is excellent for catching those mistakes. A word to the wise, though. Word has a different view on the correct application of commas, and will “argue” with the changes you make in Pro-Writing Aid.

November finished up with a lot of thought about what comes after Thieves in the Temple. If you’ve browsed the rest of this site, you’ll have an idea :). The next novel is Death at a Wedding, and that will be followed by Murder of a Dead Man. 

I’ll keep you posted on progress

October was spent mostly on edits for Thieves in the Temple. It’s been a bigger and longer task than I expected it to be, but it’s also been a huge learning experience.

The editing process has also made me stop and think about historical accuracy, and that has led down some very deep internet rat-holes. The most recent was a reference I made to lace in the story. When I checked online, the first historical references to lace are in a will by the Milanese Storza family in 1493, and disputed by the Flemish pointing to a 1485 painting by Hans Mernling.

Either way, the chances of lace being on garments during the Exile, would be a stretch. Fortunately, it wasn’t a big change to make in the manuscript and nothing in the plot hung on the lace.

A bigger gap was the realization I’d reached the end of the story and never explained how the crime was committed. That needed a little more work, including adding a couple of scenes.

I’m planning to get Thieves in the Temple available in early December. There’s also been a lot of thinking around the sequel – or rather sequels. I was looking through some notes a couple of weeks ago and had ideas for two Jacob and Miriam stories. Not sure where they’ll fit into the planning, but I’m sure that will become clearer as I get deeper into the next story – Death at a Wedding during November and December.

September is usually quite eventful with family birthdays at the beginning and end of the month.

As I look back though, nothing really stands out as memorable. Yes, there were things that happened: we went away for a few days at the beginning of September, and I managed to get the copies of Alfred Hitchcock’s Magazine featuring my story Family Harmony ready to send back to family in England, but of course that got delayed until October!

The rest of the month just seems to be a blur, and while I’m sure Covid played a part in that, I don’t know why didn’t it affect me so much in July or August. 

One suggestion from a friend, was that having pushed to finish Thieves in the Temple by the end of August and get it to the editor I was in what they called a recharge period. It’s not that I didn’t write anything. I did, and the stories are very different from Jacob and Miriam, but maybe that’s what was meant.

For various reasons, Thieves didn’t come back from the editor until the end of September. More on that in a future post, meanwhile it’s back to tightening up the story, and making sure Thieves stands alone and isn’t dependent on having read the short stories.

My last monthly recap was back in early June, which covered May. I don’t know if it was Covid, a new day job project, or something else, but June and July, from a writing perspective were very dry months. I wrote fewer new words in those two months than I have since early 2019. 

August was better, and I finally completed the first Babylon mystery, mainly by committing to an editorial date and forcing myself to meet it. I haven’t looked at the manuscript since I sent it off on September 1, but will open the covers next week and see what I actually have. The title has changed several times, but seems to have settled as Thieves in the Temple. 

I already know the broad outline for the second book, and need to do some final research before making a start on that. It’s not deep research, just refreshing my thoughts on some of the Babylonian customs around marriage.

Talking of research, if you write any historical fiction, I would strongly recommend academia.edu. It’s free to sign up, although there is a paid option. Once you enter your search criteria, and download some papers, the engine sends you recommendations. 

I spent some time yesterday clearing out my in-box of recommendations. Glancing through the summaries as I downloaded the papers triggered some new ideas, and the realization that even though I’m writing about a place and time nearly three thousand years ago, humanity hasn’t changed that much in the intervening years. 

I’m still trying to work out if that’s a good or bad thing!