I’m currently a little over 54k words into the rough draft of Children of the Starry Sea, the sequel to Star Wanderers and second book in the Outworld Trilogy. Most of my novels fall somewhere between 40k and 80k words, so if this was a typical WIP, I would be pretty close to finishing it. However, I expect that this novel will turn out to be somewhere north of 140k in the final draft, and the rough draft is already shaping up to be at least 160k. So I’ve still got a long way to go before this one is finished.
I was hoping to release this book by the end of the year, but I also want to release book 2 and book 3 within two months of each other, with book 3 already set up for preorder by the time I release book 2. That seems to be the best way to launch the later books in a trilogy, especially in conjunction with a price promotion on the first book. Launching book 2 without book 3 anywhere in sight, it’s much more difficult to make a splash. So I don’t want to publish Children of the Starry Sea until at least the rough draft of book 3 (which doesn’t even have a title yet, let alone an outline) is done.
So with all of that in mind, I’m looking at my publishing schedule for the rest of the year, and without Children of the Starry Sea and the yet unnamed book 3, it looks pretty sparse. I’ve got my fourth short story collection coming out in May, another short story later this month, two short stories sometime in the summer, a J.M. Wight short story that I’m workshopping through my writing group this month, and two more J.M. Wight projects that I haven’t even written yet. And that’s it.
I would like to publish at least one new title every month, preferably two if they’re both short. Also, I would like to have enough short stories in production so that I can keep them on submission for a while, preferably at least six months.
At this point, it seems that the best solution to this problem is to take some time off from my WIP to write short stories, fill up the publishing schedule from now to the end of the year, and go back to writing Children of the Starry Sea and its untitled sequel. To do that, I need to write ten short stories in addition to the two unfinished J.M. Wight works. One of those is going to be a novella, so I’ll probably have to take an extra couple of weeks for that, but I should be able to write about two short stories per week.
So my new goal is to write a dozen stories between now and Memorial Day. That will be more than enough to fill up the publishing schedule through the end of the year, especially if I have enough stories to bundle into another short story collection (which I almost certainly will). It’ll also give me something to blog about, which should be fun.
I wish I were the kind of writer who could write five secret novels on top of everything else I’m doing. Heck, I wish I were the kind of writer who could write three or four novels a year, instead of just one or two. Perhaps in time I’ll get to that point, but for now all I can do is strive to make incremental improvements, and I do think that writing more short stories will help me to be a better writer. And I’m not putting Children of the Starry Sea completely aside, just on the back burner for now. Hopefully that helps me to finish it faster when I do make it my primary WIP again.
