I tried. I really did. Then everything went wrong!

I said, back when I was tracking the last book, that I was planning on taking a well-deserved week-long vacation between Christmas and New Years. It seemed like the perfect time to do it. My wife would be home two of the five days anyhow (I was off the whole week) and I wasn’t going to get anything done regardless. Therefore, time to take it easy, right?

Yeah, not so much.

It all started to go wrong the week before Christmas. We’d gone to get our booster shots the Sunday before and, for some reason, this time knocked me on my ass. I’d never had any real reaction before, just some localized arm discomfort, but this time, it put me in bed for all of Monday, unable to move. In fact, the one time I remember getting up, I found myself flat on my back on the floor. Somehow, I’d just passed out and collapsed. In the fall, I did something to my knee and ankle so I could hardly walk. That meant I got no work at all done on Monday, writing or otherwise, and I was supposed to be finishing up editing book 2 in that last series. I was still exhausted on Tuesday and while I forced myself to get back to work, I only got through a couple of chapters. My edit didn’t get finished until Wednesday and I was trying desperately to get caught up, all the while hobbling around on a cane, so it was slow going.

Now, it was Thursday and I had to get to plotting the new book. My wife and I would be home on Friday so I had one day and that wasn’t going to happen. I at least got through all of the detail work, generating word count trackers and the like but I realized that getting this book plotted when I’d expected it to be, that just wasn’t going to work out.

Then, on Christmas Eve, my wife got sick with a bad cold. We were supposed to go down to her parent’s house on Christmas Day but that wasn’t going to happen either. I spent all weekend taking care of her and while, I suppose, I could have taken that down time to catch up, I didn’t because the house was too busy for me to concentrate. That pushed all of the planning off into the week of my vacation.

Oh well, I thought. Who needs a break anyhow? So I spent the three days when my wife was at work getting through it all and the rest of the time working around the house and by the end, I was just exhausted. I knew that I needed a break but my schedule said I started to work on the new book on January 3, that’s when I had to start, right?

Of course, I make the schedules, I can change them any time I want. I decided, arbitrarily, that my vacation would come the first week of January. It wouldn’t be a real vacation since I still had other work to do, but it was better than nothing and I could let my brain decompress. That’s really all that matters, right? So I took Monday through Wednesday off, but I really started to itch inside and by Thursday, as I’m writing this, I said screw it and got right back to work. Now, my official “start date” has been moved to the 10th, at which point I might have jury duty and screw it all up. This has not been a good couple of weeks.

I really don’t know what I’m doing this year either. I know that if I really push myself, I could write 9 books in 2022, but I don’t really want to. Last year, I started my first book at the beginning of February and I got through 8. Starting in January should make 9, right? I’m not sure that I even want to do 8 again. It was a good benchmark but there comes a time when you’re just producing too much material to realistically release. I ran a poll for people on my mailing list last year and they told me that 8 would be too much to release in a year. 6, which is what I’ve been doing, is just about perfect. Therefore, why write more? Well, because I can, that’s why. Because I can’t even make myself take a week off without working on my writing, how am I supposed to force myself to take months off at a stretch? I guess I’ll just start off with this first book, finish up the first week of February and see where things go from there.

The life of a production writer simply doesn’t stop, I’m afraid.