2/15/23 --- Words, words, words

 Omg you guys, I am grinding so hard to get this fricken Cowmelot book done. My god. I'm so close to the end of the book that it's killing me to not have it done yet, but at the same time, I just can't write for hours on end right now. I've been burning the candle at both ends a lot lately, to the tune of being up at 7am and going to bed past 1am. I know if I push it much further than that, I'm gonna hit burnout so hard that I'll be down for a month and that's not an option. I'm doing my best to find a little bit of balance and reign myself in.

The good news is that burnout usually doesn't hit me when I'm feeling super motivated, and I'm definitely motivated right now. Thanks to the success of Alpha's Rejection and my impending vacation (only two days of work left) I feel like I could take on the world right now. And I fully intend to if I'm being honest.

Today I took pictures of all my notes on my 4ftx8ft whiteboard and erased it all. Then I spent some time this afternoon planning the next couple of romance series that I want to write, all of them about shifters of course. It looks like I'll have several projects all going on at once, which is a lot of fun for me. My plan is to finish out the current series I'm working on first, then probably drop 2-3 books in the next series at the same time. Then, while I'm writing in that series, I'll be doing ANOTHER series in the background for 2-3 books and will repeat the process. 

That might sound a little confusing, but it's a technique called "rapid release" and it can really drive sales and readthrough up when successful. I've never had a chance to try it before, so I wanted to give it a go. If it seems like it doesn't matter, then I'll just release one book at a time and call it good.

However, I did some math for my word count goals for the year and it looks like I'll be able to publish a lot more books than I originally intended. My goal for the year is 500,000 words (approx 1370 written per day). However, it's fairly easy for me to go 50k-150k over on that goal, so hitting 600k should be simple. That being said, my books average around 55k for romance. So instead of doing 6 books this year like I thought, I might be able to do something more along the lines of 8-10. That's an obscene amount of books to write in a single year, but I'm also SO down with giving it a shot! I routinely publish 6 in fantasy and those are much longer. So doing 8 in a shorter genre should be just as easy to pull off I think :)

Anyway, I've been rambling a bit, but I'm pretty excited about the prospect of all this! I think, once I get to 6 romance books out, going full-time will be an easy next step. But, gotta build up that nest egg first before I make the plunge. I know I can do it :)

-Blake