My writing plans for 2026

In 2025, my basic writing plan was to post a story each month on my website, one each month on one of my blogs, and one each quarter on my Ko-fi page.  That works out to seven stories every three months.  Not all of these stories were new, but still it turned out to be a lot.  I ended up missing a few months from general writing burnout, as well as stress from my personal life as well as the general collapse of society.  So for 2026, I’m going to make a bit of a change.  The first is I’m stopping doing a story each month on my website, and instead will only do one each quarter.  I’ll also only do a story each quarter on one of my blogs as well as on Ko-fi.  I’m also planning on trying to do a story each quarter on my Buy Me A Coffee page.  I set this up years ago, but never did anything with it.  But on the off chance I might make a few bucks off it, I figured I’d try it out.  So instead of working on seven stories each three months, I’ll only have to do four.  Hopefully, this will lead to better quality as well as less stress.  As well as more time for me to work on other projects.

One of my goals for 2025 was to finish up my Lunar Dreams project, which is essays on how we could colonize the moon.  I, unfortunately, didn’t get much done with this.  Besides all the drama of a collapsing society, there was also the point that I originally planned to release it on Amazon.  But in the last few years, it seems fewer people are buying books from Amazon.  I understand that, but it also sucks because that’s were all my books are.  I need to diversify, and I have checked out Draft2Digital, but I’d like to test the waters a bit before launching a big project there.  So my plan for 2026 is to self-publish two stories on Draft2Digital and see how they go before deciding if I want to do Lunar Dreams there.  These two stories I wrote years ago, but there are some clunky bits I need to hammer out before I post them. 

Those are my plans for 2026.  Hopefully, by the end of the year we’ll have stopped our slide into darkness.  I don’t want my plans for 2027 to just be to survive.

To scheme, or to write?

I spent a decade or so sloooowly building up a miniscule following on Twitter.  Now, Twitter had issues before Musk bought it, but he didn’t fix the issues I had with it, and he made more.  So I left Twitter for Mastodon.  Is it better?  Well, probably everyone I’ve interacted with on Mastodon Musk would claim is “woke,” so yeah.

The main way I used Twitter, is I had two accounts, one for writing and one for everything else.  But I would post about my ebooks every day, alternating accounts.  The way I worked it, is in one month one account would post only about The Most Powerful Man in the World and other stories, while the other would only post about The Future is Coming, so I could see which account I got more sales from.  Of course, in all likelihood, the only sale I’d have that month would be for Duty, and I’d have no idea how that person found it.

Even with my “audience” on Twitter, my sales weren’t that great.  And then I started over from scratch on Mastodon.  But I didn’t want to just redo what I did on Twitter, where constantly trying to sell your books was … normal.  So on Mastodon I’m trying to just be an interesting person, who only occasionally mentions their books, so maybe someone will be curious enough to check them out.  But that’s a lot of goddamn work, especially for someone as introverted as me.

This has led to a bit of a conundrum: do I spend my time writing new books in the hope that people will somehow find out about them, or do I spend my time scheming ways to sell the books I already have?  Ideally, I’d do both, but as is, I already need an extra day or two a week just to catch up with all the other non-writing stuff I need to do.  Of course, this has led me to thinking of greater and greater schemes trying to come up with a simple act that would have a measurable impact on my book sales.  And while such thoughts did lead to this blog post and my short story “Scheming,” all the time spent on them is less time spent talking to readers or writing.

I know that’s not a very satisfactory way to end a blog, but I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place with no clear direction forward.  If I ever find an answer, I’ll do another blog post.  Don’t hold your breath.

The Uncapped Pen, at last!

 

Over a decade ago, I had the idea of putting together a collection of stories dealing with writing: authors arguing with their muse, or struggling with having too many ideas, or too few, or whatever.  But for reasons, I set it aside, until a few years ago when I figured I’d finish it.  Well, it took longer than expected, and just as I was about to put the final polish on, there was a writer’s strike.  While I’m not a member of the Writers Guild of America, it felt wrong to publish a book about writing during their strike.  But since the strike is over, I’ve now published The Uncapped Pen.  You can find it on Kindle for $3.99, or equivalent.

Writing Newsletter Fourth Quarter 2021

 

In the past three months I’ve republished 3 of my stories.  They are: “Rest in Peace,” “In the Victor’s Footsteps,” and “Memories.”

I also published the short story “A Christmas Miracle?”

Things are a bit less hectic, and I have managed to do some more writing.  Not as much as I want, but more is better.

I think the only news item is that yesterday I posted my writing goals for 2022.

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Image from Pixabay.

Random Writing Tips – blog mining

 

It seems that if you want to sell your books – especially if you self-publish – you need to find and engage with an audience.  That’s great an all, if you’re someone who can hold a conversation.  One time in college, I was walking somewhere with a woman and she said, “So, tell me about yourself.” I thought for a bit and replied, “I was born.” She laughed, and then started talking about something else.  I’m not an engager.  (Not to brag, but years later a different woman said that, while I was smart and funny, talking with me was “mentally and emotionally draining.”)  Ideally, I’d publish a book and then just have it be magically found.  But we don’t live in a world of magic – dammit – so if I want to find an audience, I need to do something.

One of the things I’m trying is publishing more blogs – with titles like Random Writing Tips – in the hope that someone might stumble upon this and be funneled to my books.  Of course, over the years I’ve written numerous blogs.  While many of them are comments on – at the time – current events, some of them are still relevant and I recently went back through my blogs and found all these posts.  Some deal with things I can expand on, but others I can use as is.  For example, over the years I’ve posted short stories or poems dealing with some holiday, like Halloween.  So now every October I can just tweet out a link to this story for the season. 

And that’s the basic idea of blog mining.  You’ve spent hours and hours writing blogs that – in all likelihood – get swallowed up in the internet quicksand in less than a day.  Why let all the work go to waste when all it takes is a tweet to bring it back to the surface. 

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Image from Pixabay.

My writing goals for 2021

 Last year I posted a blog of my writing goals for 2020.  I had four goals and I met two-and-a-half of them.  One goal was that every four years I go through my ebooks and fix any typos and outdated information.  I forget exactly when I finished my 2020 revisions, but it was around April.  After I finished that, I got to work on my collection Useless Cogs, which I published in October. 

The one goal from last year I didn’t meet – and will be carried over – was finishing a rough draft on The Pathfinder Saga, Volume 1.  Basically, it’s this super long, fantasy epic thing.  (See last year’s post for more details.)  I got some work done on it, but not much.  I’m trying to set aside two days a week to work on it, so hopefully I’ll be able to finish the rough draft this year. 

My main goal for 2021 is publishing The Uncapped Pen.  This is a collection of fifty stories covering various aspects of writing: author’s arguing with their muse, antics at writers group meetings, stuff like that.  It’s been on the back burner for a decade, but I’m finally going to finish it.  It was part of last year’s goal of working on other collections, so this is the “half” of a goal met. 

And my general goal this year is to write more.  Part of that will be working on other collections, but I’ve also been meaning to finish some stories and send them out to magazines.  That’s something I haven’t done much of for the last few years, and I’m hoping to get back into that.

So you’ll have to come back next year and see how I do.

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Image from Pixabay.

Writing Newsletter Fourth Quarter 2020

Way back in 2006, I began making a quarterly newsletter for my writing news.  At first, I emailed it to my friends, but part way through the year I switched over to putting monthly updates on my website.  It was a way to let people know what – if anything – of mine had been published, random updates, and I usually added a short story or haiku or something.  I continued for several years (I moved the posts to an old blog), but in mid-2013 I stopped.  And I don’t remember why.  My guess is that things were hectic at the time and I felt bogged down, and I took a break and just never got back to it.  Until now.   

I had been thinking of doing a year end wrap up blog, but it was rather depressing thinking of how little I did this year.  The only big thing happened in October, and after thinking for a bit I came back to the idea of a quarterly newsletter.  It will cover any writing news I have, or feel like sharing, and maybe a story or haiku or something.  I’m going to try to keep this version simple, so there’s less chance I’ll feel bogged down.

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In October, I self-published Useless Cogs.

It is a collection of forty, science fiction stories.  The stories range from only a few dozen words to a few thousand and are filled with time travelers, AIs, clones, aliens, even sexbots, although not often as you would imagine.  As examples, there’s a time traveler that’s always a step behind, an AI that’s late on rent, and a sexbot with bad software.  Some of the stories are humorous, some horrifying, and some … depend on your point of view. 

It can be found on Amazon for $1.99.

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In the last three months, I’ve also republished my short stories “For the People?” and “The Horror.” Over the years several of the sites my stories have been on have gone under, or the stories are still online, just on an old blog that nobody follows.  So I’ll occasionally repost them to keep them alive.

I also published a new “Christmas” story, “Too Good to be True.”

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I didn’t get around to writing a story for this quarter.  Maybe next year.

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Image from Pixabay.

My writing goals for 2020

About two and a half years ago, I posted a blog about my writing goals for the following year.  A little over a year later, I looked back at what I had done, and what I hoped to do in the following year.  They were great ideas, but since I did them in the middle of the year, I kind of forgot about them.  The second one I posted in July of 2018, and it was about the end of July 2019 that I remembered it.  At first I thought about scrambling to get out an updated post, but then I realized I should just wait until the beginning of the New Year when these things are usually done.  That decided, I again kind of forgot about the whole thing until late December.  But here are my goals for this year.

My 2020 Revisions

I published my collection of political stories, Political Pies, just before the 2012 Election.  In mid-2016, I realized that with all the political news, some people might find it, so I decided I should go through and fix a few typos and other such problems.  But once I figured I should do it for that book, I realized I should do it for all of my books.  I also figured I should set a schedule since – even though you can read a story a thousand times – there always seem to be typos.  So I figured I should revise my books every four years.  Now, in 2016 I realized this about the middle of the year and it was a struggle to get everything done before the end of the year.  But this time I’ve already started.  Also, in 2016 I read through everything twice, but this year I’m only going through once.  So I’m hoping I can get everything polished up by the summer.

Publishing Useless Cogs

For the last few years, I’ve been “working” on several Untitled Scifi Collections.  I’ve now put them all together into one collection, which I’m calling “Useless Cogs.” The current plan is to have forty-five stories.  Thirty of them will have been previously published – but have long since vanished in the internet sea – and fifteen will be new.  Of the fifteen, roughly a third are done, a third are half-done, and the rest I need to write.  I’m hoping to work on it between my revisions and have it out in late summer or early fall.

Rough Draft of The Pathfinder Saga, Volume I

A couple of years ago, I started what was to be a standalone fantasy novella I eventually titled “Scars of the Blood Fire Valley.” I was just about done with the first draft when I realized that – if I added something in at the end – I could turn it into a series.  So Scars became Book I of The Pathfinder Saga.  I started writing Book II “What is Found in the Wilderness” and I’m two-thirds done with it.  At first I was thinking of publishing them separately, but for reasons it would take too long to explain, I’ve decided that it would be better to put Scars, Wilderness and a short story “The Longest Night” (which I’ve just made some notes for) together as Volume I.  So my hope for 2020 is to finish Wilderness and maybe Night so I can spend 2021 polishing everything up.  (I also need to do a lot of reediting in Scars because I didn’t write it expecting it to be part of a series.) Maybe my goal for 2022 will be to finally publish the damn thing.

Work on Other Collections

There are several other story collections I’ve started and shelved over the years.  There’s Amongst Us, which has stories of aliens here on Earth, The Uncapped Pen, which are stories about writers, and Travels Beyond Imagination, which are stories set on the moon.  I also have ideas for a collection of haiku and extremely short stories.  I’m not planning on publishing any of them this year, but maybe I can start working on them so I can get them out in 2021.

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So, that’s my plan.  Come back next year to see how I do.

My ebook goals for the next year

In May of 2017, I put up a post about My ebook goals for the next year.  The idea was to let people know what I was working on, and to be a reminder for me to actually get to work on them.  So I wouldn’t forget about them, I put a link to it on my webpage.

My hope was to get three ebooks out in a year.  But thanks to life be complicated, I didn’t get any done.  I recently put out the first on my list, “Seventh Story Stockpile,” but it was about … seven months later than I had planned. 

The second ebook on last year’s list is “Travels Beyond Imagination,” and I have a hard deadline for that.  It contains stories set on the moon, and next July will be the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, which is kind of an ideal point to have such an ebook out.  My plan is to have a rough draft of it done by the end of this year.  The main reason is that if I don’t have it by then, then I’ll really have to get my ass in gear to finish it in time.

The last ebook from my list last year was Book I of my Pathfinder Saga, “Scars of the Blood Fire Valley.” I’m putting that on hold, for a bit.  I have a rough draft of it done, but it needs a lot of revising.  Especially since the original version was a standalone fantasy story which I didn’t decide to make a part of a series until I was pretty much done with it.  So there’s a lot that I need to rejigger.  I’m about a third of the way through Book II, “What is Found in the Wilderness,” and my current plan is that once I have them both done, I’ll put out “Scars” and then a month later put out “Wilderness.” Hopefully, there will be some excitement to get me working on Book III, “First Steps.”

The only new ebook I’m adding to this year’s list is a so far untitled collection of scifi stories.  I have a few stories I’ve submitted to a couple of places, but none have taken them.  I also have a bunch of stories I’ve self-published that have been pretty well lost on the internet.  It’s probably something I could whip together in a month or so, but I’m going to leave it on a back burner to focus on “Travels.” So depending on how quickly I get “Travels” done, we’ll see when I get around to this project. 

Stay tuned to see how I do.