You’ll notice that I haven’t written a lot about my writing this year. I’ve talked about the writing community and how disappointed I am in it, but my own work, not so much.
Mostly, that’s because I haven’t been doing it much this year. I have gotten 3 books written, which is a massive step down from the 8 that I completed last year, and I haven’t even completed 3 to be honest.
That’s changing though and this is how I did it.
As you may or may not know, I burned myself out last year. I went completely insane, pushed my way through 8 complete novels, close to a million finished words and I was looking forward to doing 9 or 10 books in 2022.
That was stupid.
The first book of the year, I hit a wall. I started it in January and I didn’t finish it until April. The second one didn’t get finished until June. The third, I burned out completely and didn’t quite finish it at all. The last three chapters are fragmentary at best. That was in August, which is the last time I wrote for the year.
Around Thanksgiving, I said the hell with it, I had to get back to work. I had enough books backlogged where it wasn’t a massive problem, but I was tired of being lazy. Right after Thanksgiving, I re-read the first book, these are all part of the same trilogy, because I didn’t remember what I’d done. That book was really good. It had gone to beta readers already and they’d liked it, but I didn’t remember the details.
The second book was mostly complete. There was one scene at the very end that I’d filled in some notes but hadn’t written. I didn’t remember having done that. That book was fantastic, I finished it in a day or two and it’s now sitting around 140k words.
The third one, I knew that was the problem child. I did not remotely finish the ending and I remember, vaguely, that I’d stopped because I didn’t know how to proceed. I started doing an editing read and… wow. Just wow. These books are amazing. I love the characters, I love the world and I’ve been left choked up many times. Sometimes you don’t know how these things come out of you until you revisit them. It’s hard to beleive I wrote it.
I’m now a week into the editing cycle and tomorrow, I get to the end where I’m going to have to add about 12,000-15,000 words and I can’t wait. I have literally had to force myself to stop reading every single day. Hopefully, by the end of next week, I can wrap it up and get two books off to beta, where I’m sure they’ve wondered what the hell happened to me.
Take it from me, if you want to get back to writing, read what you’ve written. I don’t know that I’ve been so jazzed about it in years.
I understand that this isn’t going to be effective for everyone. You have to have written things that are really good in the past. Now I’ve written tons of books. I’ve published a lot of them. I know that people like what I write and I’ve generally really enjoyed my own content when I’ve revisited it. I don’t know what it is about this series in particular but wow. I’m not saying that out of ego but out of surprise. This is the third trilogy in a four-trilogy series and to be honest, once I finish the last one, I’m going to read all 12 books straight through. That’s going to be about a million and a half words total. I can’t wait.
This isn’t ego, this is just hope. If you’ve been struggling to put words to paper, give this a try. It might not work for you but it absolutely worked for me. I haven’t been this excited in a long time. I’ve got a week off coming up and I’m going to spend that entire week planning my next book. First though, I need to read the first three books in that series, just to remember where I left off and I know I’m going to love doing it. I had my time off. Now it’s time to get back to it and while I’m not going to be crazy enough to do 8 books a year again, at least not any time soon, getting my hands on the keyboard is something I really want to get back to right away.
Best of luck to everyone who has struggled with this. Keep at it. You’ll find your own trigger that will get you back at it.
