Writing Goals For 2022

As we plunge headlong into 2022, let’s take a look at my writing goals for the coming year!

This year I have eight.

1.) Write one million words of fiction.

I usually do this, but in 2021 I only made it to about 976,000, which was my lowest output in like five years. I would like to be more productive in 2022. Writing a million new words would be a good benchmark!

2.) Continue the DRAGONSKULL series.

This will be easy, at least at the beginning, as DRAGONSKULL: SHIELD OF THE KNIGHT is currently out. I’m not sure how long DRAGONSKULL is going to be, but I know it will be either eight or nine books. I keep dithering about whether or not I want to begin the very long process of making the series available in audio, but if I decide to do audiobooks, it will be nine books in anticipation of future bundles. If I choose not to do audiobooks for this series, it will be eight books. Either way, I hope to get between 4 to 6 of them written in 2022, but we’ll see.

3.) Continue the CLOAK MAGE series.

That one is underway as well – I’m 50k words into CLOAK OF IRON. I would like to get between 2 to 4 new CLOAK MAGE books out in 2022. I have exciting (well, for the readers, not so much for her) things planned for Nadia and company in the upcoming books!

4.) Write a third CORMAC ROGAN mystery.

I’m about a quarter of the way into CORRUPTING FIRE, the third Cormac Rogan mystery book. Once I have three, I’ll be able to advertise the series, and how those ads perform will determine if I write any more of them. I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to advertise it profitably – I tried advertising the series as an experiment when there was just one book, and it went surprisingly well – but we’ll see when I get there.

5.) Write the eleventh SILENT ORDER book, SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND.

I will start on that once CORRUPTING FIRE is out. I would really like to write more than one SILENT ORDER book a year, but they’re one of my weaker sellers – in December 2021, for example, SILENT ORDER only sold like 44% of what CLOAK GAMES did (and 32% of FROSTBORN), and at that point SILENT ORDER had a new book released more recently than CLOAK GAMES. So it makes sense to write CLOAK GAMES faster than SILENT ORDER.

6.) Finish FROSTBORN in audio.

People have been asking for this for years, and I think 2022 is the year we shall finally do it! Only two more books left to record in the series – FROSTBORN: THE DRAGON KNIGHT and FROSTBORN: THE SHADOW PRISON. Since the final DRAGONTIARNA book came out on January 4th, once the final two FROSTBORN books are recorded, the entire FROSTBORN/SEVENFOLD SWORD/DRAGONTIARNA series will be in audio for something like 350 hours of listening from beginning to end. That would be about 14 and a half full 24 hour days of listening!

7.) Finish GHOST EXILE in audio.

I had planned to do more CLOAK MAGE audiobooks in 2021, but because I was writing so slowly, that didn’t work out, so we did more GHOST EXILE. There’s only like three and a half more books to record, so I think we’ll do that in 2022 instead of CLOAK MAGE. So if all goes well the GHOST EXILE series will be finished as well. I think once GHOSTS and GHOST EXILE are done it will end up at a combined length of like 220 plus hours.

8.) Lose one pound.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again! I wanted to lose one pound in 2021, but ended up gaining two. (Though to be fair, if the calendar year ended in August I would have ended 2021 fifteen pounds heavier instead of just two.) I put on waaaaay too much weight in the 18 months from March 2020 to September 2021 and I really need to do something about it because I have much less energy and am writing a lot slower due to the resultant brain fog (see above). So we’ll see how it goes this year.

So those are my eight writing goals for 2022. Time to get cracking on them! 🙂

-JM