Writing Life: Shifting the Goal Posts

As I said yesterday, I’m changing things around to allow myself to work in blocks, and to release collections, earlier. These are the changes, with one caveat: I have applied to full-time work, an these goals will have to change if I am successful, and decide to accept the position. For now, everything remains in play.

Original Goals

• Publish Fortnightly: This goal is remaining, although you will notice that releases could occur at shorter intervals as I get my writing and publishing routine up to speed.
• Short Story/Month Goal: This goal remains the same. There will only be one short story individually published each month. There may, however, be more than one short story published in a month, depending on what short story collections are released, as a number of those will contain content exclusive to that collection, and the short works collection published for that year.
• Chapter Book/Month Goal: This goal remains the same, with the exception that I am currently planning on releasing more than one chapter book a month until the chapter-book collection challenge is nearing completion at the end of 2020.
• Novel/Quarter Goal: This remains the minimum, however, I am going to attempt to write a novel each month, starting with Mack ‘n’ Me: Origins in April.
• Publishing 12-Months Ahead Goal: I’m changing this goal to Publishing 3-Months Ahead, even though I hope to be writing and preparing releases further ahead. It depends on whether or not I decide to release more than one title a week.
• Finishing-Series-I-Have-Started Goal: This goal remains, with a deadline of December 2020. It includes the chapter book series in the challenge, and the known titles planned for the following novel series: Mack ‘n’ Me ‘n’ Odyssey (4 titles); Tales of the Five Kingdoms (5 titles); Aggie & Tams (4 titles); The Seasons Quartet (4 titles), and Freeman (6 titles).
• Finishing-Novels-Started-2017 Goal: Since this is part of the goal above, I’ll be removing it.

Anthology Challenge

The Anthology Challenge was originally to release one collection of short work each month in 2019. When I began this challenge, I had completed the content for four collections, but had to compile, cover, edit and upload any of them. I have decided I would rather have these completed collections released sooner, rather than later.

The original collections and their release schedules for 2019 were as follows: January—Short Work for 2017, Volume 1; February—Short Work for 2017, Volume 2; March—Tales from Odyssey; April—An Anthology of Bloodlines; May—Pixie-Dust Dreaming; June—The Story-Match Challenge 2015; July—The Story-A-Week Catch-Up Challenge 2016; August—Another Anthology of Dragons; September—Tales from When the Trolls Came; October—Stories from the Lizardine; November—Tales from Tallameera; and December—Another 366 Days of Poetry. I also had an extension option for this challenge: Another 366 Days of Flash Fiction.

I would rather see these collections released when their content is finalised than waiting… and I’m sure there are some readers who would prefer that option, too. As with the chapter-book collection challenge below, this offers readers a much cheaper option of buying short stories than purchasing them singly, with the cost for a 80,000-word short story collection being around the cost of two, complete short stories.

Chapter-Book-Collection Challenge

The Chapter-Book-Collection Challenge was originally to release one collection of chapter books each month in 2020. That goal is now to complete and release twelve collections by the end of 2020, by first releasing six individual titles, and then one collection of those titles.

Why? Because I write a lot of these, and reader feedback indicates that some would prefer a cheaper option of collecting them, so, now readers can have the choice of buying them as they come out, one at a time, or in a single four-to-six-book block that costs the same as buying one-and-a third single titles… or thereabouts.

The first series to be released this way will be The Tiger Letters, which is a compilation of all the titles appearing in the Letters Across Space/The Tiger Letters series. The fourth title of this series has just been put up on pre-order, and I am hoping to release the sixth title by the end of April. This means the collection should be out late May.

The second series will be The Rocky Collection, about a month after the sixth title has been released. This series already stands at five titles.

After that, I’m still deciding. The original series and release schedule for 2020 were as follows:

January—Wings; February—Rocky; March—Wheelchair Adventures; April—Granny Finds Adventures; May—Tag Man One; June—Long Hair Collected; July—Ribbondrake Riders; August—On Patrol Collection; September—Running with the Pack; October—Traveller’s Tales; November—Marcus Drain’s Collected Adventures; and December—The Dear Tiger Letters.

As you can see, that order has changed.