I was going to title this post, “Mik Murdoch and the Power Within is Finished” but that really isn’t true. I still have to do a polishing edit before I send it to my publisher and editor. Once they have it, it will be edited/revised/re-edited to within an inch of its life. Then it will get a cover and layout followed by release as and ARC (Advanced Reader Copy) for review and finally it will be available for sale. That means we are still a few months away from it being generally available. The book ended up finishing at slightly more than 65,000 words, 29,000 of which I wrote during my vacation (which ended yesterday, unfortunately). What the final, published count […]
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Resetting Expectations
I’ve talked about setting goals before. I am a big fan of using goals to succeed in my writing. Sometimes, unfortunately, I lose sight of my goals. It could be because of just about anything. Recently, concerns about my job were…distracting me from my writing. When that happens, it can be hard to get the writing, or whatever project the goal is related to, back underway. When I find myself floundering too long, I try to set a line in the sand to force myself back on track. For example, we were planning vacation and I knew we would be doing a significant amount of driving. Since my wife prefers to do the actual driving while I navigate (don’t laugh, […]
Read moreA Change is as Good as a Rest
Okay, the above title is not always true. Sometimes a change can be very detrimental. Like, if you go from an employed state to unemployed. Still, I think the inherent meaning of the saying has a lot of truth. In essence, sometimes when you are stuck in a rut, doing something different can help you to move forward and start getting things done again. That is actually both the benefit and the disadvantage to having multiple projects on the go all the time. The benefit: when you get stuck on a piece of the project, you can move on to a different project. The disadvantage is, you can avoid the problem you have been dealing with. Take my WIP, Mik […]
Read moreThe Second Book in a Series
I was chatting with an author friend and we were comparing notes about writing the second book in a series. He talked about the pressure he is feeling while writing the next book in the series. As we were comparing notes, I realized that we both have been experiencing the same things even though our genres are quite different – he is writing Science Fiction and I am writing YA Adventure. So what exactly are these pressures that we are feeling? Well let me list them in no particular order. I’ve got to make the second book better than the first. You might think this silly because if that is a pressure with each book in a series, eventually you […]
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