Did I meet 2023’s writing goals and what are 2024’s writing goals?

2023 was a year that brought many challenges and changes, though I did end up meeting most of my writing goals.

First off, I would like to thank everyone who bought and read a book of mine this year! Thanks for coming along on the adventures of Gareth, Nadia, Caina, Jack March, and Rivah Half-Elven!

That said, I have to admit from February to about mid-July was a rather challenging patch. Everyone’s got their own difficulties so I won’t ramble on about mine, but I did get Covid pretty strongly in May and that messed things up for a while. Before May, I was doing three and a half mile runs on the treadmill two or three times a week. After Covid, I could barely do two minutes before the wheezing got too bad, and most of May and June is kind of a vague haze in my memory.

One amusing anecdote to illustrate that time: about halfway through June I spent most of a day watching a very energetic three-year-old. We walked to the park in the morning, but it eventually got too hot and he wanted to go back inside. When we went back, he discovered the house’s laundry chute, and once I stopped him from hurling various small and expensive items down the chute, we compromised on dropping one of his stuffed animals down it. This delighted him to no end, and it seemed like good harmless fun that would keep him out of trouble, so obviously I followed along as he did this to make sure he didn’t decide to lock himself in the dryer or fling his parents’ iPads down the chute or something.

So he dropped his stuffed animal down the chute on the second floor, hastened down to the basement to retrieve it, and then ran back upstairs to do it again.

Over and over and over and over and over and over…

As I followed him up the stairs for like the tenth time, I had the profound realization, deep in my bones, that I had gotten very, very out of shape. For a while I wondered if I was going to fall over, and if the three-year-old in question would empty out my pockets and drop my keys and wallet down the laundry chute (which, in fairness to him, would make a very cool noise), but fortunately I kept my feet. Eventually the three-year-old got bored with the laundry chute and decided he wanted to watch YouTube instead. Fun fact I did not know before that day: apparently there are people who make YouTube videos featuring action figures fighting each other, and to judge from the millions of views, apparently toddlers love this stuff.

Anyway, the next morning, when I got out of bed and stood up, every single muscle was eager to inform me that I had reeeeeeeeeeeally overdone it yesterday.

Once the muscle aches had subsided and I had driven home, I set about things systematically. The first week in July I made myself run 1 mile on the treadmill at the gym every day, and then the week after that I raised it to 1.1. The week after that, I pushed it up to 1.2.

I am pleased to report that this week I ran 3.2 miles on the treadmill every day, and I did lose nearly all of the weight I gained when I had Covid.

Many other problems in Real Life settled down around mid-July as well, which was a pleasant change. Things improved enough that I did twelve 10k word writing days after July. Compare that to 2022 when I only had one!

So I missed some of my writing goals for 2023, but reached some and even exceeded others.

Let’s see how I did! Then we’ll take a look at what I would like to do writing-wise in 2024.

2023’s WRITING GOALS

1.) Write as many words as possible, but try to publish one million new words.

I didn’t quite make this one. The last time I wrote over a million words in a single year was 2020, when I hit 1.27 million words. In 2022, I only did 814,000, but this year I did 929,000 words. So that was a significant improvement, and probably was helped a good deal by the twelve ten thousand word days I was able to do in 2023.

2.) Continue DRAGONSKULL.

Not only did I continue the DRAGONSKULL series, I finished it with DRAGONSKULL: CROWN OF THE GODS this summer! Additionally, thanks to the hard work of narrator Brad Wills, the entire series is also available in audiobook, which is the fastest I’ve ever got a complete series of audiobooks out. DRAGONSKULL was overall the strongest selling series of 2023, so I’m glad I was able to bring it to a satisfying conclusion.

3.) Continue CLOAK MAGE.

I did get two new CLOAK MAGE books out – CLOAK OF DRAGONFIRE and CLOAK OF EMBERS. Three would have been nice, but I didn’t quite get there.

4.) Continue SILENT ORDER.

I did that! Not only did I continue the SILENT ORDER series, I decided to push onward and finish it completely for a total of 14 books.

5.) Write in a new genre of fantasy.

I did that as well with SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION, which was LitRPG. It didn’t do as well as I hoped, but I’m about halfway through the sequel which I hope to put out in February 2024, so we’ll see how that does.

I also wrote HALF-ELVEN THIEF, which while not in a new genre of fantasy, did quite well out of the gate. Better than CREATION did, in fact.

So I did meet most of my 2023 writing goals, and even exceeded the “continue” goals for DRAGONSKULL and SILENT ORDER by finishing the series.

Let’s see what my writing goals will be for 2024. Bearing in mind, of course, wise words from some time ago:

Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”

With that in mind, here is what I would like to do next year.

2024’s WRITING GOALS

1.) Write as many words as possible while trying to hit one million new words.

I haven’t done that since 2020, but it would be nice if I could get over a million words again. We’ll see what happens!

2.) Start THE SHIELD WAR.

I want to start my new epic fantasy series THE SHIELD WAR, which will be set back in Andomhaim. I’m currently over 30,000 words into it, so hopefully the book will be on track to come out by the end of January 2024. Hopefully I can get one or two more out in the series before 2024 ends.

3.) Continue CLOAK MAGE.

I also want to continue the CLOAK MAGE series. The next up in the series will be CLOAK OF TITANS, which will be the eleventh book and which I think I will start in late spring. I’m not entirely sure how many books CLOAK MAGE will end up having, but I think it will be 15 or 16 in total.

4.) Continue GHOST ARMOR.

Next up in this series will be GHOST IN THE VEILS. I am really hoping to start writing this toward the end of February because I have a recording slot scheduled for it in the second half of April. But more on audiobooks below!

5.) Continue HALF-ELVEN THIEF.

HALF-ELVEN THIEF I basically started writing on impulse in April or so. For a while I’ve wanted to start writing shorter series that come out more quickly, and I thought about writing the entirety of HALF-ELVEN THIEF after DRAGONSKULL was done. But then I got sick in May and didn’t have the energy to anything but the bare minimum for a while, and so I set the book aside and didn’t think about it again until November, when I decided to come back to it and have it be the last book I would publish in 2023.

I’m glad I did – it had a strong response, and sold much better than the last two times I tried something really new. I’m about 3,000 words into the sequel, and will write it as a side project for a while.

6.) Continue SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE.

I almost walked away from the series, but I was persuaded to continue it. I’m about halfway through the second book, and I’m hoping that will come out in February 2023.

7.) New audiobooks for new books.

I think at this point I’m only going to do audiobooks for some of my new books as they come out. Like, I’ve done as many of my old books in audio as I think I want to do. FROSTBORN is completely in audio from Tantor and my ACX productions with Brad Wills, SEVENFOLD SWORD and DRAGONTIARNA from Podium Publishing, THE GHOSTS and GHOST EXILE through ACX with Hollis McCarthy. I could try to get SILENT ORDER, GHOST NIGHT, or DEMONSOULED in audio, but it would be massive amount of work that would take years to turn a profit.

Doing the DRAGONSKULL audiobooks so close to the ebooks worked pretty well, so I think I’m going to do that in the future. I have SHIELD OF STORMS and GHOST IN THE VEILS scheduled with Brad Wills and Hollis McCarthy next year, and hopefully I should have good news about SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE audiobooks soon. If HALF-ELVEN THIEF reaches a certain sales threshold in its first 30 days, I will consider doing audiobooks for that series as well.

So that is what I hope to do for writing in 2024!

As always, thanks for coming along and reading (and listening) to the books!

-JM