In Today’s Journal
* When a Plan Comes Together (Sort of)
* From My Hungarian Writer Friend
* I Did a Count
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
When a Plan Comes Together (Sort of)
It’s sweet when a plan comes together. (grin)
I posted yesterday’s issue of TNDJ right at 3 a.m., then checked my email again.
An email from my excellent first reader, Russ, popped up. He’d already read BO-50, annotated the PDF file to point out a few errors, and got it back to me. (I only sent it to him around noon the day before.)
I’d also already created the cover and the promo doc, so after I made the few corrections Russ suggested, I opened D2D, then Amazon, then my publisher website.
I pulled up the promo doc (from which I copy/paste all the info about the book), and went through each of those in the sequence above. I finished a little before 4 a.m. (Promo docs are invaluable. They cut down on typos and on typing the same information over and over.)
Then I remembered a suspected glitch I wanted to address in the novel. I glanced over it, and sure enough, the glitch was there. So I decided to spend what remained of yesterday cycling over the whole novel again. The character added 2138 words to the story.
Still, even with that final cycling pass, Blackwell Ops 50: Sam Granger | A Zero-Sum Game is available for preorder everywhere ebooks are sold for $5.99. Fulfillment will happen on Saturday, November 15.
It’s also available today, one day after I finished writing it, at my online discount store for only $5. But I kind’a recommend reading the other Sam Granger novels before you read that one.
Anyway, how incredibly cool is this new world of indie publishing?
Oh, and I’ll also probably start writing Blackwell Ops 51 today, but I also have to go to Sierra Vista today for a few hours.
Originally I was going to write BO-51 about another operative (Yates Briscoe), but I changed my mind. Mostly because BO-50 was a little strange.
For one thing, in most Blackwell Ops novels, a skilled, efficient operative deals with multiple company contacts in multiple locations to carry out multiple operations against multiple targets.
But in the extremely emotional BO-50, Sam deals with only one contact in one location (albeit in what he soon realizes is a zero-sum game) to carry out only three connected operations against a total of eight targets, all within the same group of bad guys.
And if that weren’t enough, there’s that glitch I mentioned earlier. Annoying.
So I’d really like to witness more of what’s happening in Sam Granger’s world. I checked in with Sam yesterday morning and he seems amenable, so….
From My Hungarian Writer Friend
Balázs Jámbor, about yesterday’s post…..
“Your quote made me think: ‘If you fail [at WITD,] what’s the worst that will happen? Nothing.’
“Might be only my opinion but there is no such thing in WITD as failing. If you didn’t create ‘successful’ stories … you had a good time trying and [you] have some stories.
“I thought about this a lot during the past weeks. My main goal is writing. And I am not so strong about storytelling but I am becoming better and better, slowly but steadily. The more time I spend in the writing chair, the better stories I tell and the better writer I become. My time is well-spent.”
I couldn’t agree more, Balázs. As Dean Wesley Smith wrote in a recent post, the only way to fail as a writer is to quit.
I Did a Count
Awhile back I mentioned I counted the words in the 22 volumes of the Wes Crowley saga. There are just over a million words in that saga, not counting the short stories: 1,001,015 words.
Yesterday morning out of curiosity, I decided to do the same for the 50 volumes now in the Blackwell Ops series. I was a little surprised the word count didn’t clear two million words, but it didn’t miss by much: 1,984,813.
So a little over 15,000 words remaining to get to two million words in that series. I’ll easily bump over that little hump while I’m writing the next novel. (grin)
So over three million words in those two sets of books. That doesn’t include all the short stories I’ve gotten out of those books or that are offshoots of them, and it doesn’t include any of my other series or sagas or one-off novels or novellas or short stories.
Pretty cool. And all of those words got there one letter and one word at a time. All it takes is showing up and doing your job. As an added benefit, you get to have a shipload of fun.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
How to Deepen Your Story With Motifs Just a friendly reminder, ‘motif’ is a critic’s word, not a writer’s word…. Read and absorb, but don’t think about this stuff while you’re writing.
The Numbers
The Journal………………….. 830
Mentorship Words…………….. 410
Total Nonfiction…………………. 1240
Writing of Blackwell Ops 51: Sam Granger | (To Be Determined)
Day 1…… XXXX words. To date………… XXXXX
Fiction for November……………………… 17061
Fiction for 2025…………………………… 679102
Nonfiction for November.………………… 5940
Nonfiction for 2025………………..……… 245410
2025 consumable words………………… 916943
2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 17
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 36
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 121
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 310
Short story collections……………………. 29