Well, book V is finished. Not 100% finished, but done. It’s currently out with a Beta-Tester, my good friend Nick, who was read the first four books. Hopefully he’ll give me some good feedback, then I can make any changes to it, then have it on the digital shelves before October. It’s been work, but once I got into a good writing routine, it went quite quickly.
After having my old HP crash and I lost a substantial amount of work on Standish I decided to crack on with book V. Getting out of London also helped. I popped over to my parent’s place in France twice to help blow the cobwebs off. It helped.
I also found motivation from the film Trumbo, about Dalton Trumbo with Brian Cranston. A good film, but also an inspirational film for myself. I upped my daily word count to roughly 3k a day, and from there, knocking out the book was rather easy.
Right now, however, I’m not sure about the title for book V. Condition Zero is good, but might not fit into the story-line at this point. It’s something I need to think about. Tough decisions.
Other than that, It’s business as usual. I need to finish Standish as soon as possible, then edit, test etc.
The plan for the rest of 2017 is to get all my ducks in a row for 2018. 2018 is going to be the year where I put my foot down and try and write 5 books. No easy task. We’ll see how things go, but 450,000 is the target number of words I’d like to get down. The plan is to write a book in January, edit in February. Then repeat four more times. Take November and December off. We’ll see how things go, but at that rate, I’ll finish the Earth Saga and need a new project. Perhaps a few more spin-offs about The War of Succession or maybe a story about a time before the war. Perhaps a pre-war series on the Empire. Lots of options. Let’s see how early 2018 goes first.
