A little while ago, I finished a chapter in the book I'm writing, and that put me over a million words for the year for the 15th straight year. I never set out to do that, but as the years piled up, I kept thinking, well, one more won't hurt anything . . .
15 is a good number to stop on, though, especially since for most of the year I didn't believe I'd be able to do it this time, what with all the real life stuff going on. I honestly thought the streak was going to come to an end at 14 years, which, by the way, wouldn't have been anything to sneeze at. But I had a very productive October, November, and December, and so here we are.
Next year, I have approximately 750,000 words worth of work lined up. That's a pace I maintained for years and years before I ever started this million words nonsense. I'd like to try that again for a year or two and then maybe ease off even more, down to half a million, say. I think I could keep that up for a long time yet. But we'll see. You never know in this business. Some project might come along next year that I can't turn down. I've lived by the creed of the freelancer--"Sure, I can do that"--for too long now to turn my back on it. So I'll be interested to see how things turn out.
And no matter how they do, I'll probably be here yammering about them.
In the meantime, thank you so much to Livia, Shayna, Joanna, and all the editors, agents, and publishers who have helped make this possible.
2 comments:
Wonderful, James. It’s amazing you can do that year after year, with quality.
Congrats, buddy!
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