Year 11 of My 5-10 Year Overnight Success Plan

by | Jul 11, 2024 | Checking in | 0 comments

Some of you (the clever ones), may note a Curious Math Situation right in the title of this year’s update. The cynics among you will further observe that my beginning-of-year update is coming in April.

But we’ll start right off with the elephant in the room, and I don’t mean Grosstet from Black Ocean: Passage of Time. It’s been eleven years since my first published book. Not even just ten. I’m clearly over my proscribed limit. The plan has failed.

OR HAS IT?

I’m not much of a soccer/fútbol guy, but there’s a concept from the world’s most popular sport that I think I can leverage here. So, um… GOOOOOAL!

That concept is Injury Time.

Players go down. Game pauses. Clock keeps moving. At the end of the match, the referees ballpark how much time was lost and secretly assign a mystery amount of additional time (can’t have any transparency and oversight, right?) to compensate.

Well, back in good old 2020, society took a pretty big hit. Others came out far worse than me, but it’s impossible to argue there wasn’t an effect on everyone. The exact scope of the impact on my writing career is impossible to measure. Luckily for us, we don’t need to.
Injury Time.

Time has expired, but play continues. For how much longer, who can say? I don’t know that the referees even really decide in advance, and I don’t think I’m going to say.

We write on! 

And a Yellow Card (bookmark?) to anyone who objects!

In newsier news, 2023 was a year of head-down production. I finished writing Black Ocean: Mirth and Mayhem, even if the last books didn’t manage to get through editing and audio before the end of the year.

Part of my recovery from career malaise that it was hard to even recognize, except in retrospect, was a reexamination of my workflow.

No more random workdays in and around other activities. More regimented keepout zones free from other household and social tasks.
Some tweaks to my office environment.

More caffeine (sorry/not sorry). It helps me concentrate and keeps my mornings from being “randomly scrolling the news.”

It doesn’t SOUND like much changed, just reading it. But it’s resulted in a lot more words per day and a lot more books per year. Kristin and I were able to pull in our publishing schedule by a couple months once we determined that it would be sustainable.

So… what does 2024 hold?

Black Ocean: Passage of Time, missions 5-16 will come out this year. Be on the lookout for dates in the near future.

I’ll be starting a new project after that. One of the benefits of writing books a bit quicker is little more flexibility in going outside the Black Ocean universe while still providing my core fans a steady stream of space hijinks along the way.

Options include:

  • One of the screenplay ideas I’ve got knocking around (I already have a spec script for Galaxy Outlaws… I don’t need another presently)
  • More Project Transhuman – a future-future series set centuries down the road
  • Something one-off and literary just for a change of pace.
  • A Tiffany series (never said it couldn’t be Black Ocean)
  • A new idea that swoops in and grabs hold of me

I don’t think I’m putting it up to a vote, either. A known quantity will always come out ahead, and if I can come up with something novel (pun intended…), I’d like to give that the benefit of the doubt.

SIDE NOTE: it is safe to assume that the pun is intended unless told otherwise.

Last year I suggested just moving the goalposts of this project to 20 years. I think leaving the goalposts alone and bribing the ref for extra time on the original 10-year game is a cleaner solution 😉

Anyone who is interested in this whole 5-10 Year Plan for Overnight Success can check out earlier entries to see the journey unfold.

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