Forget the dance. Focus.

Time is always against us. We always think we have enough time, but it slips by and we barely notice until it's too late. I've been trying to design a masterplan for my novel rollout but to my chagrin, it has all proven to be "busy work".

my plan was always ambitious

I had these grand plans to write 20+ short stories and six novellas—each story crafted as part of my new science fiction universe—and functioning as a preamble to my debut novel, with the novel set for publication on October 21, 2026.

Despite my added hours every morning (6AM–11AM using Focusmate), the novel is still not getting done. So I decided it was time for some introspection to figure out why. It was pretty obvious—I had wanted to have the perfect publishing rollout and that involved far too many moving parts. To be done well, each story needed much more attention to be effective storytelling, i.e., well developed characters, good plot, memorable settings... it's hard to do that for even one story, let alone for 20+ stories.

All of these stories will still get written at some point, but not this years because they have ultimately become a distraction for the novel. In effect, this was my own Jerry Maguire epiphany—the solution is fewer works and more focus:

"If the tapdancing becomes less constant, less furious, less necessary, what will the result be? The result will be more honesty, more focus, fewer clients, but eventually the revenues will be the same."

this is my fir— uh, second draft

If I'm publishing the novel by October, I need a first draft ASAP to start revisions, and here's the irony... I've already written a first draft! I wrote it last year and parked it until I had planned out my series more. This ended up being a blessing because I chose to review all the story books I'd acquired over the last two decades. I can confidently say that my novel is poised to be immeasurably better than I had originally envisioned. I'm using my original draft as a base for this next "first" draft, which should help save me lots of time time. Combined with my new dictation workflow, it's possible to get at least 5K–10K words per day.

So here we go: one novel, done well. Release date: October 21, 2026.

Follow my journey as I push this first draft to the finish line by June 20, 2026: