Supercomputer is still in editing. The missus is reading it over to see if I need to make any major changes. I have started the rough draft for the first book of a new series. This series is called The Traveler. The first book is tentatively named Desperate Action. The second book is tentatively named Alien Counter Attack. I’m already 2,300 words into the rough draft after two week-days of writing. I still have to hash out the names of the characters in the story. I have the protag nailed down, but I’ve been substituting X, Y, and Z for other names that I don’t have yet. I wasn’t too worried about it at first, but now it’s getting confusing (Who was “Y”? Oh, yeah, that was the sensors officer).

Future Stories

I have this list of ideas that I draw from. It’s pretty much endless. To make sure the hopper is always full, I’ve been playing a “what-if” game where I open an empty Word document and start thinking of things that could go wrong on the moon. Or what could happen in space? And so, on. So far I’ve got a few dozen prompts. Well, they’re more than just a one-sentence prompt. They’re more of short paragraphs that define what pops into my head for a story. For the Clavius Moon Base series, I might do a bunch of short stories as well as some novels. I haven’t made up my mind yet, but I managed to generate 9 more ideas today. If I were able to generate one idea per day, I’d have a massive cache of stories in no time. If I do them as short stories, I could crank out a lot of stories and bundle them into collections. Some of the ideas, however, seem to hint at a possible novel, with a few sub-plots intertwined.

Speaking of the Clavius series… I have one that just needs a quick edit. It’s only 18k words long. I wanted to expand it, but the story is the story and it’s complete, so I might just wrap it up and let it go. I’ve been sitting on that story for too long and I’m afraid that if I don’t let it go, then it’ll never get published.

Productivity

Last weekend was a 5-day weekend. I spent Saturday through Monday visiting family. That was a lot of fun. I worked on edits for Supercomputer on Friday and Tuesday and Wednesday were days I spent doing all the research stuff for Desperate Action. According to my database, I’ve produced 295k words this year. Not all of the words I produced are published, so they don’t all count against a pulp speed (which I’m only 1/3 pulp speed 1). I’m going to try to set a goal to double my word count for 2023. I should be able to do pulp speed 1, even with a full-time job. I’m not quite sure what that would look like, but hey, gotta have goals and I could be borderline crazy. Just doubling my output would be a big boost, so I’ll make that the goal and try to get ahead as much as possible. In order to achieve the goal, I’ll have to make sure I don’t waste any days just doing editing or I’ll have to put in more words per day to make up the difference.

Also, I need to keep up with the blog. There’s nothing worst than arriving at someone’s blog and wondering if the person dropped off the planet or if they just got busy and haven’t blogged in a while. My last post was a couple of weeks ago. I should set a day of the week when I’m going to do a post and do it regularly. That way, I don’t have to wonder if I’m posting enough content.

Artwork

Oh yeah, that reminds me. One other task that took me away from writing is my work with Blender. I’m working with some YouTube videos on how to do things in Blender. Trying to get the basics down. I’ve got a lot of the short-cut keys memorized now. That helps a lot. I used to be really good with AutoCAD, so Blender shouldn’t be that difficult for me to get down. I have a couple of uses for Blender. Covers and additional content. For the Daphne books, I have diagrams of her ship and the pirate’s lair. I wanted to use Blender to make these into 3D maps of the locations and give them away with the free stuff.

In addition to maps, I’d like to design my own ships so I don’t have to use the generic stuff that shows up on other book covers. I could easily do a ship design and then rotate and scale it to use it for covers. If I use spheres with texture maps for planets, I can get effects that are realistic. I can add lens flare and fog to make things look really good. In my mind, I’m going back and forth about covers. Do I outsource them or roll my own? I can afford to outsource them, but I’d like to have the flexibility to do an entire series of covers at once and generate my own ships. I used royalty-free images with Photoshop for the MacKenzie series of books. Also, the really good designers are expensive and to top it all off, it takes a couple of months to get a cover done. If I’m doing my own covers, I can crank them out faster (Cover designers probably have a backlog of customers to tend to, which is why they’re getting more expensive).

Another advantage to doing my own is that I can create extra content. Some of which I can use on the blog. This brings me to another idea I got from someplace else (I can’t remember where I saw this). Someone had set up a Wiki of their characters and other things in their book series. I thought that it would be a great idea to have a Wiki that had a list of the characters, some attributes about the as well as a list of ships and their capabilities. Maybe planets in their system as well as their government, etc.

Anyway, back to the grind…