Words and Works
At some point this summer my grand total of published words of fiction will crack 100,000. That's not including the words you find here in the pages of Schlock Mercenary, which I'm guesstimating number around 300,000. And of course I'm not playing the "a picture paints a thousand words" card because, in point of fact, I'm not painting. But hey, 100,000 is a cool number! Six figures!
One of my goals for this year is to write 150,000 words. With the year 25% gone, I'd like to be able to announce that 37,500 of those words have been written, but I'm afraid I've only taken care of about 15,000 of them. I've done plenty of other things, though, and as I review my 2014 Project Management Spreadsheet I can see that I'm almost 1% ahead on the budgeted time, as balanced against the remaining projects.
This year's projects include, of course, 52 weeks of Schlock Mercenary. In that realm I also need to write the Bonus Story for Book 11, and create the 2015 calendar images. Oh, and we'll be putting the tenth book, Longshoreman of the Apocalypse, up for pre-order sometime in the next month or two. It's already off to the printer. There's also the Schlock Mercenary Role-Playing Game, which will require a bunch of encyclopedic writing on my part so that the source-book has some fresh source. And then there's merchandise to design, conventions to attend, and countless, tiny, Schlock-related tasks to be forbidden from falling through any of the cracks.
Most of the other projects are writing-related. I have about 100,000 words of fiction under contract (read: someone has already agreed to buy these words) and I'd love to wring another 40,000 words out of my schedule "on spec." And if that sounds a little vague, it's because I'm under one NDA and at least two commitments not to over-promise anything. My readers have become so accustomed to the clockwork perfection by which illustrated entertainments appear on this site it simply would not do to let them see me not delivering something.
So... enough blogging. Time for delivering. I have stories to tell, and simply having a story is an entire world's worth of labor short of telling it.