First week of January 2026
I went off the rails a little for the holiday. I managed to finish a surprise project but everything else fell by the wayside.
I went off the rails a little for the holiday. I managed to finish a surprise project but everything else fell by the wayside.
This week's goals were:
Unfortunately, I didn't complete either. The super-secret project is still manageable but I may have to scale down some elements. There's two things impacting the audio production. The first part is that I can't produce the audio on my main computer because Audacity is having constant issues. The second part is personal stuff I couldn't have anticipated. Nothing truly bad, just a hectic week at the Barret household.
I've managed to squeeze a little writing time in this week and that makes me feel like a writer again. 😹
Big thing is the super-secret project.
This week's goals were:
This week's goals were:
Last week, I forgot to set any goals for this week. That meant that everything I got done this week was a huge success. 😹 Most of what I did this week is the kind of stuff that doesn't make me feel like a writer, though. I did a lot of promo work, trying to make the best of the holiday week for those of us in the U.S.
Smashwords (the vendor I use to get my books out to the places I don't have accounts with) has an upcoming deadline for anything that needs to be done / ready in time for the Christmas season. That means if I want to get book 2 published in time for the holidays, I need to prioritize finishing book two and getting the audio recorded.
Since I'm not 100% sure what I'm doing for book 3 yet, book 2 might not have the “next time on” section like Death In Transit has. I'm not so committed to the bit that I would delay the release of book 2 for that.
If I get any proper writing in, great. As long as I get those bits in too!
Last week, I mentioned needing to get my audiobook account and also publishing the book in all the places. Actually publishing the book turned out to be a lot more complicated than I expected. KDP took me two days. I ran into one teensy issue on KWL that took me five minutes to solve. And I'm pretty good at D2D for ebooks at least so I got KWL and D2D done on Wednesday.
Some of the vendors went through quickly. I'm technically waiting on some of the library systems to accept but, as of this moment, the ebook is available in most places where the ebook can be available.
I didn't set a wordcount goal for the week. Which is good because I don't think I wrote anything on The Novel.
I did a teensy bit development work on a book I'm giving the nickname Fallen Angels.
I ended up focusing more on my degree than writing this week. I also did a bit of writing on other projects. Progress on The Novel was just about 1500 words.
What I need to get done this coming week is the creation of my audiobook account and the formatting and uploading of the first ebook to KDP, KWL, and D2D.
This week has been difficult for me. I've got lots of stress. The money situation isn't hot. It's also been a relief. The better candidates won in my local election. For the most part, the elections that we saw this year have had a vibe to the winners. We're still in the midst of a shutdown, impacting not only government workers but people who rely on government services. A combination of extreme short-term thinking and grift in the tech sector mean that jobs are hard to come by and extremely unstable.
I don't really want to focus that much on politics here but politics have real world impacts and I'm a part of that real world impact.