Writing Goals For 2021
Now that 2020 is behind us, and 2021 looms before us like a mountain in a cloudbank, it’s time to set some writing goals for the New Year!
God willing, this is what I hope to do writing-wise in 2021.
1.) Finish DRAGONTIARNA.
The DRAGONTIARNA series will be ten books long, and I’m editing #8 right now. If all goes well, I will finish all ten books sometime around the midpoint of 2021.
2.) Finish GHOST NIGHT.
I’m working on the eighth book of GHOST NIGHT right now, and like DRAGONTIARNA, GHOST NIGHT will be a total of ten books. I am hoping to finish the series in mid-2021 around the time that DRAGONTIARNA wraps up.
3.) Continue CLOAK MAGE.
The next CLOAK MAGE book will be called CLOAK OF BLADES, and once DRAGONTIARNA and GHOST NIGHT are finished, I will write more CLOAK MAGE books.
4.) Write a million words of new fiction, preferably more.
Once again, I want to write a million words (or more) of new fiction in 2020. Meeting the above goals will definitely help with that! But barring any major health issues or other problems, I should be able to do that.
5.) Update paperbacks.
I want to update my paperback books so they have nicer interiors, and the covers are consistent with the ebooks. When I started doing paperbacks seven years ago, I used the default Createspace templates, which were good enough. But Createspace doesn’t exist any more, and I can now use Vellum to make much nicer interiors for the ebooks than what the standard Createspace templates allowed. Additionally, I’ve updated the covers for many of my ebooks, some of them several times, and I would like them to match the paperbacks.
I would like to have updated the paperbacks of the FROSTBORN series by the end of 2021, with more as time permits.
6.) Two hardbacks.
I would like to have at least two of my books available in hardback. This goal was originally one, but MALISON: THE COMPLETE SERIES is now available in hardback, though just on Amazon at the moment. I’ve just started doing hardbacks, so hopefully I will have more hardcover books available by the end of 2021.
7.) Two more self-published audiobooks.
I want to have at least two more self-published audiobooks by the end of 2021, bringing me to a total for 46 audio titles.
I haven’t decided how to proceed with audio after that. Previously, I was happy to go exclusive with Audible/Amazon/Apple, but ACX has been struggling all year. Additionally, there are a lot more sales opportunities for audio outside of ACX than there were even two years ago. So I will need to give it some thought.
8.) Healthier lifestyle and fitness.
I gained too much weight in 2020, and I’m feeling it in my back and knees, especially my back. So I need some healthier lifestyle choices. I’m counting this as a writing goal because it’s a lot easier to write when I can sit comfortably.
People making ridiculous health resolutions for New Year’s and failing spectacularly is a cliché, so I will set a more modest and achievable goal. If I am one pound lighter on January 1, 2022 than I am on January 1, 2021, I will count this goal as successfully achieved.
9.) Write a book about how to write a novel.
This isn’t a stretch goal, it’s going to happen. I’m already about halfway through it. I think the book will be called STORYTELLING: HOW TO WRITE A NOVEL, and will focus on story structure in novels. This way when people ask me for writing advice, I can point them to this book.
I’ve already written about five of the ten chapters. It won’t be terribly long, about 25,000 or 30,000 to words, but that will cover the topic. That’s one of the nice things about self-publishing – you can write a book about a nonfiction topic that a publisher wouldn’t touch because it’s too short. Like, have you ever read a nonfiction book that could have covered the topic in half the pages, but the author obviously needed to pad the length? My LINUX COMMAND LINE guide is only 30,000 words, but it covers the topic and it’s a frequent bestseller in its category.
The book about writing a novel will also include CLOAK GAMES: THIEF TRAP. Before every chapter of THIEF TRAP, I’ll have annotations explaining how I followed story structure in the specific chapter and why I made some of the storytelling choices that I did.
10.) Start a new series.
DRAGONTIARNA and GHOST NIGHT should conclude within a month of one another, and after that, I haven’t 100% decided what I’m going to do next.
I’m coming to a sort of crossroads, I think. When April comes around, I will have been self-publishing for ten years, and I will have self-published around 120 novels. So what do I want to do next? I don’t mean that in a “reevaluate my life” sort of way, but in that I want to seriously think about what I want to work on next before I commit to writing it.
I will definitely continue CLOAK MAGE. I might do a new Caina series – ever since she married Kylon, Kylon’s spent a lot of time watching her back and reacting to what Caina does, so it might be fun to flip that on its head and have Caina have to watch Kylon’s back and react to what he does. Or I might continue SILENT ORDER. Or I might decide to try something completely different – a new scifi series, or maybe even a straight up modern mystery book.
All that said, I suspect I will probably start a new epic fantasy series set in the world of Andomhaim. It’s a big complicated setting, with room for lots of stories beyond the protagonists we’ve already met.
No crossovers, though. 
