A Ping.

That’s what I call a short update on the situation. It comes from Hunt for Red October, where Sean Connery, playing submarine commander Marko Ramius says to his XO, “One ping, Vassily, for range. One ping.” One tone from the sonar. [Note: what he’s actually doing is communicating with the American submarine, because in the water, everyone can hear everything. But that’s not important right now.] The sonar ping gives the bridge information about what’s in the water around them. That’s what this is.

The update is this: writing is going fairly well, but not as well as it once did. Here’s the deal: I have several books out now, and those take time to tend, time to promote, time to edit and do covers for and all that. I’m teaching a full load, and coaching a junior high and a high school mock trial team, and dealing with grant applications for the Libertas Institute, and so on. Yes, we all have troubles, and that is not an excuse. Just a reason. If I were as committed to doing the writing as hard as last year, I would be doing it as hard as last year. Simple as that.

I wrote 45,500 words in February. It was my first month in the last sixteen that I did not write 50k in a month. I’m a little sad about that, but I didn’t do the work, so there’s no one to blame but myself. I still write at least 1000 words a day (two days below that in the last four months), and the work progresses.

I’m also putting out most of the stories from my book Twelve Upon a Time as Kindle Singles. Three of them are up now: For All the Marbles,
been requested by Jolly Fish Press, and writing Long Slow Sweep of the Sky, a

steampunk sci-fi novel.

It is, therefore, not as if I’m not doing literary things. I’m just a bit off the pace of my writing (though, yeah, February being a short month, if it had been January or March, I’d have made the 50k, so the pace isn’t far from what it was). I love it, and things are good, if extremely packed with stuff to do.

More in a bit.