I’m choosing to start the year full of hope. As in, hopefully everything I’ve written in my planner will be accomplished by the end of the year. It’s ambitious, as usual. As much as my goal is to be a human being, not a human doing, striving seems to be hard-wired into my DNA. It’s the year of the horse though, so maybe I’ll get a boost from that. One can hope…

January marks the fruition of several projects that took up most of my year. A new 6-book Post Apocalyptic series will launch (I’m just finishing book 4, and my task after sending this out is to outline book five. Outlining is very helpful, I can’t deny it, but every time I have to do one, helpless laughter burbles out first. It’s the hardest creative thing I do and often involves weeping after the laughing and being pulled to clean behind the refrigerator, or reorganize the pantry, literally anything, anything other than grinding it out.) There’s also a big 6-book omnibus of my first PA series, Nowhere to Turn, publishing in January and the biggest thing, the audio books for that series that yours truly performed. It took me six months of recording in my closet, one chapter a day with occasional breaks. I found it much more strenuous than I’d imagined, but enjoyable all the same, except for the parts where I had Native American characters speaking Navajo in it, because writing Navajo accurately is one thing, but pronouncing it correctly is something else entirely. I did my best, and I’m sorry.

The goals this year, beyond finishing the PA series, are to get three more books in my sweet small-town romance series written and published, narrate two more series, and start on the next post-apocalyptic series for 2027. Also, writing these blogs and sending out monthly newsletters for both my Fantasy/Adventure/PA peeps and my Romance readers. That’s… a lot of words, which is why I’m choosing to be hopeful. It’s really the only mindset that works for me.

I’ve been asked how I keep pumping out books, and it’s such a boring answer, I hate to tell you, but here goes. I get up, drink coffee and futz around on my phone, eat a hearty breakfast and read a bit of a book, then I strap into my writing chair. I use circle writing, which means I’ll read over what I’ve done the day before, or if starting a new chapter, I’ll go back to the last one that had that main character’s voice, and start there. It’s an easing into the work like one does a freezing cold ocean. There’re always several places to say something better, so by the time I hit the blank section, the place where all the new words need to go, I’m feeling warmed up, and that I’ve accomplished something already… I feel hopeful. And off I go. The one thing I’ve gotten good at with twenty-six books under my belt is being okay with dreadful writing on the first pass. I have confidence that when I circle back around, I’ll make it better. I leave little ampersands like this (&&) when I need to insert a name that I’ve forgotten, or something I need to look up, like the distance between Washington DC and Cheyenne Mountain for example (1,648 miles) and just keep going until I have my word count for the day, which is around three thousand words, or roughly twelve pages of book. It takes me anywhere from three hours to eight of them if I’m in a tricky bit.

If I haven’t hit all of those words by one pm, I stop anyway and go for a walk or a swim or to get the groceries and run errands. I have to force myself to stick to that one pm get up and go, or I’d just stay in, my body eventually conforming to the shape of my writing chair while I churn away trying to make something that resonates, entertains, or in the very best moments, can make a reader feel like perhaps they’re not alone.

The afternoons when I return from my time away are much harder for getting the words out, usually a lost cause if I’m being honest, as by then all sorts of worries and troubles have begun to worm their way in and interrupt the flow, but I try anyway. I’ll use sprints of twenty-two minutes of non-stop typing to trick myself into finishing the count. That’s when things like “put a smart retort here” will pop into the manuscript, or perhaps, “look up how someone’s skin looks if they have frostbite here.” I’m better served (and likely my readers are, too) if I let myself off the hook and do something else for the business end of things in the afternoon, like write this blog, or pull together my author newsletter*, or revamp back matter, or lord help me, make a FB ad in Canva, hold my breath, and let the algorithm spend the entirety of my daily ad spend in three point eight seconds in the hope it finds me some new readers.

Once five pm hits, I’m pretty done emotionally and mentally wrung out. I’ll make dinner, or maybe take a hot shower to divorce myself from the writing. Evenings are for rehearsals if I’m in a play, perhaps dinner with friends, but mostly, I’m numbly watching television or a movie. At bedtime I read until I pass out.

I always have at least two books going, more often three, because I never quite know what I’ll feel like reading. I try to always be reading a really good one by a superb author, like Fredrik Backman, whose prose and way of the world captivates me, makes me pause at the end of a thought like this; “Art is a fragile enough light as it is. It can be blown out by a single sigh. Art needs friends, with our bodies against the wind and our hands cupped around the flame, until it’s strong enough to burn brightly with its own power. Until it’s an inferno. Unstoppable.” Or this one: “In life we might be enemies, but when faced with death, we see the truth: we are one species, all we have is each other, and where you go, I shall follow.” Those are from his latest book, My Friends. I aspire to maybe have one or two sentences like that in each of my books. I’ve gotten close a couple of times, but he effortlessly puts them on every page.

I also enjoy genre reads — a romance, thriller, or mystery. They’re not perfect most of the time, but they’ve been published and put in libraries all the same, so good for them, yay other writers, and I mean it. Those books at the very least take me out of myself, if only to frown and think I could’ve done that bit better. Which is also hopeful, if you think about it. The third option will be one I’ve read before, a Jenny Colgan, perhaps, or a Nora Roberts, or Stephen King. It’s like visiting an old friend, those reads. Comfort reads. I know what’s coming, and for the most part that it will be a happily-ever-after, or at the very least a happy-for-now ending. Well, not the Stephen King ones, obviously. He threads hope through them all the same, and perhaps that’s what I’m really after, dashes of hope through my day.

Aside from determining an overarching theme for everything I write, from broken and blended families being mirrored by earthquakes in Nowhere To Turn, to hubris and vaulting ambition and what it leads to reflected by fires in Dawn of Ruin, to examining loneliness and isolation in my current WIP, peppering the day with hope is what keeps me turning up and strapping myself in to the writing chair to weave something that hopefully might help a reader find some hope of their own, or a connection, or perhaps, to think with a slight frown and quirk of the lips, I could’ve done it better. If it’s the third thing, please go for it. I truly look forward to reading your words and the gift of your hope.

*If you’d like to get either of these newsletters, go to https://www.eatwriteplay.com and pick a free book. There’s a sign-up sheet attached to the book you choose.

The photo is of dawn rising over the Sea of Cortez in Loreto, Mexico, where I went for my swim holiday with friends this year.