Well… Day 36 of my Q4 Challenge has officially come to a close. At least in terms of production. And I met my target. Exceeded it, in fact, but only by about sixty words or so.

And the best part is that I’m okay with that.

All of the thinking and evaluation and navel-gazing that went into producing my immediately previous post helped me to take some of the pressure off of myself.

Yes, it would be absolutely awesome to have one thousand titles to my name, but that’s not a healthy goal or desire for me. So, I’ve dropped it. Paraphrasing what I wrote earlier, I’d much rather be like Max Brand and write 4,000 words a day for decades than push myself to achieve higher numbers and only do so in a very irregular fashion.

I also want to slow down my typing.

And, no… typing isn’t writing. I don’t know if it’s just today, but I started feeling it a little in my hands as I finished off today’s words. While I do indeed want to teach myself to dictate, I’d rather not be medically forced to do so.

That doesn’t sound like fun times to me.

If you’ve followed these posts from the start of my challenge (or even before), thanks for sticking with me. If you’re new, welcome aboard. I will start adding different more content in the future (that doesn’t even involve writing!) as I expand my list of personal projects… once The Fall of Skullkeep and Tempus are out in the wild. I don’t feel as much pressure with Tempus as I do Skullkeep, but I don’t like that it’s been so long with either of them.

Once I publish these two novels, I will move to a more immediate write-and-publish model. That is… once a story completes my quality control process, I’ll publish it. I’ve decided to do away with the idea of stockpiling stories, too. It’s a great idea, and I still like it (by and large)… but I much prefer the simplicty of ‘write it, blurb it, cover it, proof it, publish it.’

For anyone who might not be familiar with publishing jargon, ‘blurb it’ in this case means writing the book description that is also very often the back cover copy… which is why ‘blurb it’ preceded ‘cover it’ in the statement above.

This evolution of business philosophy also means that the story I publish may or may not be in the same series as whatever I published just before it. I’ll try to go at least three stories into a new series before I let my fiction wanderlust take over, but I make no promises.

Which also means that my stories from here on out will be much more episodic in nature. I will still write series, and they will still build on each one that came before… but they won’t be as tightly cohesive as Histories of Drakmoor or Cole & Srexx. The Primogenitor Saga is already a minor step away from that tight cohesiveness.

So… that’s where I am. These decisions–or perhaps this realization or evolution–feel good to me. I’ll sleep on it to be absolutely sure it’s the direction I want to go, but I also feel like I’ve been slowly meandering toward this for a little while.

Okay. Enough of a rambling update… let’s get to the data!

Daily Word Count: 3,637
Weekly Word Count: 3,637
Remaining Words to 25,000: 21,363