Heartbeat: September 2022

Welcome to the Sixth heartbeat of 2022. As promised, about every six weeks I update you on my progress. My goal is to finish the first four books of the Postal Marine Series by November 2022. This honors a commitment to myself I made after the 20 Books to 50K Vegas conference last year.

The Year’s Slog to Four Books

Success! On 6 September 2022, I finished the Imbroglio draft. This was the book concept that launched the entire series in the mid-2000s. I finished the earliest draft in 2007. The book came in a little lighter than I wanted, but I gather I write rather economically. All four are available on Amazon for pre-purchase. I’m currently doing the last round of edits.

Yak Shaving / Distractions. The Summer played host to significant yak-shaving. In June, I shifted from hosting this site statically using Hugo to a custom-built application using Rails. If I could reset my career, I would go back to the days where I was a developer and build applications. I miss it so much. But, “because I have people skills,” I ended up in the product/project management role. Coincidently, I’ve developed a rash when in the presence of Gantt charts. But, as you can see wit the heatmap above, I am not above measuring progress.

There is more to being an independent author than writing novels. That’s the easy part. The hard part is building an author’s platform, marketing, and managing the business. Authoring is the fuel that drives the rest of it.

Next Steps? By my next heartbeat (22 October), I will release the first three books. I’ll release the fourth book in early November…one week before 20 Books Vegas ‘22. I have a fair amount of clean-up with my public persona, etc. I should finish all of that in September. We’ll see how that turns out.

Longer term, I would like to finish the other 12 books in the Postal Marines series.