Reflections

Well, I’ve been busy.

I’ve taken basically the entirety of December off work, as I had a little surgery at the beginning of the month, and I was going to use that time productively. I wanted to edit both the Rock Mesa books and get them into a state where I could feel more confident querying the first book, and send the second book off to my editor.

Instead, I’ve written about half of an entirely new book.

I like it a lot, I’m having a ton of fun, and writing a book that’s explicitly for adults has been a massive change of pace from writing and planning young adult books for the last year and change. My next project was also going to be a YA book, so the fact that this snuck in there was kinda weird.

While I was backing up all my old files, I took the time to look at my own history. I don’t have a fixed office or place to write from, and I’ve been accustomed to writing in all kinds of unusual situations. I’ve written chunks of my books on four different computers and two phones, so I’m more or less forced to use a cloud-based way of accessing my files, otherwise there’s no way I could keep track of everything.

But you can’t trust the cloud, so this morning I was downloading everything back onto a local hard drive, when I decided to take a look back.

I’ve been writing on and off my entire life, but it really turned on for me around April of 2018, according to my records. Since then, I’ve written about 169 “things”. A “thing” is very loosely defined here. It could be a book, a poem, a short story, a chunk of an aborted novel, even some non-fiction stuff that I’ve tried my hand at.

That’s an average of about one thing every ten days. Now I’m sure that’s inflated, because I think some of these things are pieces of novels, like chapters or other snippets, that I sent to alpha readers. But on the other hand, six of these things are 200 pages long, so there’s a trade-off there.

I was surprised by how many things there were in that folder. I didn’t realize how much stuff I’ve written.

Here’s to a happy, healthy, and productive 2022!