January 2025 Newsletter

2024 year in review

In 2024, I changed a lot of little things. I PCS-ed from one duty station to another. I wrote 645k words and got to one million words written overall. I read about 90 books. I ran over 200 miles.

What worked?

I chose my one-word theme for 2024 as being “Finish”. Finish a project, launch something, etc. I hadn’t really finished a book in a bit, and I had just been building up Nascent Soul Child. Measuring my daily word count really clicked. Everyday, I would write and then for the first few months, I just noted the amount without any judgement. Then I began to try to do a bit more. I ended up able to do about 2500 words a day on most days.

What lesson did I re-learn again (and again)?

I will not push another fiction without having a huge backlog. I did writeathon in April and then in November. It worked out then but yeah. I posted three chapters a week and wrote about seven, letting me get ahead of it.

Books I wrote:

Caravan of Blades

The idea of Caravan of blades was that it was a mash up of several things. Initially, I wanted it to be about gods summoning way too many heroes’ way too late into a cataclysm. I was thinking hundreds, but that was unwieldy. I settled on fourteen but didn’t name all of them well into book two or three. I got really into it and developed a new paradigm on writing.

This year two big books changed how I write. Those are “Writing into the Dark” and Chris Fox’s “5000 words per hour”. Those two made this year possible. I’ve written before about how changing to voice dictation for most of my writing has really affected my writing in a large way. I basically wouldn’t have been able to finish this in the time without it. I’m happy that I made it. I’m hoping that I can stick the ending. I’m launching a kickstarter for it soon to make some awesome foil hardcovers.

I wrote all four books of this series in 2024. I may add more to the ending and/or rework it but I’m going to let it sit for now. It will finish posting in a bit.

Nascent Soul Child

A therapist in an Xianxia? Sure, sign me up.

This was a unique take that I’m just now getting that resonates with a lot of people. I have a ton of engagement on this, it’s got a strong voice and it’s in first person POV. I think that first person has changed a lot. The last Xianxia fiction I wrote was in third person and it’s still waiting for me to fix it. This is in the same world, so similar rules but a different continent. There are Easter eggs for Sect Leader in there but they’re deep.

This was my first fiction where I started out intending to write three books in a series. I’m still working on the ending of book three on this actively but thanks to having a deep bench, it’s been working out.

I also re-tooled it from 4k chapters into 2-2.5k word chapters after writing it. That was a minor victory. Posting those chapters three times per week has been working so far. I would love to post five times per week, but I don’t know if that’s feasible unless I’m intentional. I am not planning on launching a new fiction until June-July this year.

Gamer Manager

This was another first person POV. I wrote this during November writathon and settled on 4k chapters twice a week. I’m almost done with the first book after writing it for two months. It’s critically acclaimed but I will be stopping at the end of book one and then doing a bit of a rewrite. At the end of Sect Leader I just felt like I wanted it to be over and I don’t want to sit on a fiction with that attitude. I want to let this breathe and I will probably do a re-launch when I go through and heavily edit it later.

At the time of this writing, I’ve got about five to ten scenes that I want to write before I finish it and set it down. I had a goal of finishing each series in one go without returning to it and I’m going to have to break that for this. I did that for Nascent Soul Child and I came back to the character stronger.

Bodega Cat (in a System Apocalypse)

I wrote four chapters of this in 2024. I’m not really anywhere near to posting it, but my beta readers like it.

Other fictions

I’ve written about 400 words for Red Mist in 2024. It’s on long term hiatus. I wrote 500 words for it yesterday to try and get back in. I kinda wrote myself into a point where I need to do a lot of world building. That is the same with Tales of the Riverfolk V2. They both kinda ended in the same school, just one year apart. I got writers block. Embedded Agents needs an ending. I know it. I’ve gone through it twice. I’m not ready to release it in full. I do have the cover art and that haunts me.

What I’m doing different in 2025 My single word theme for 2025 is Mastery. As in Master the craft, master the process, and masters degree. I’ll be working on language stuff for French and Korean and hopefully taking a course or two shortly on those. I’ve started a master’s degree in data science but I need to be a bit more consistent.

Daily I’m going to work and do a you tube short and post one. This is just to “start”. Right now they’re “hero support” where I go over short scripts based on my books.

Daily I’m going to work with Godot on designing a game and just learning how to make a simple game there. I don’t know if I’m going to turn this into anything or not. I would like to design a simple rogue lite with a small gameplay loop.

I am going to write more in the type of loop that I’ve learned to lean on. Let me explain…

The loop is Heist -> Aftermath -> Free Play. I’ll make an infographic eventually. I learned this from playing Blades in the dark. Oh, did I mention that Blades in the Dark inspired Nascent Soul Child? It did. Band of Blades inspired Caravan of Blades.

Weekly I’ll be posting System Analysis (LINK). So far, it’s been good though I need to get better about spreading the word. I made this because I could only really find two places where LITRPG was talked about by other media. Those being Saga Scribes newsletter and CritRPG the podcast. This might turn into a podcast but right now it’s litrpg craft focused. I’ve gotten some tips from Saga Scribe, and we’ll see what this turns into.

System analysis is hosted on beehiiv. I’m happy with it in terms of so far, I like it.

Monthly I’ll be posting newsletters, like this blog just for my superfans. I have my author newsletter hosted on kit, but I’m not 100% sold on it in general. I’m going to need to work with it more but it’s just not something that works on mobile which is a huge problem when I can’t do this at home.

Things that are up in the air.

I’ve had a business book that I’ve been writing that has been in development forever. I think the problem is that I haven’t personally had a best seller so I’m reluctant to release a book on “How to Write Progression Fantasy”. That said, it’s like 75% done so maybe after the kickstarter.

The Kickstarter itself!

I would be remiss if I didn’t advertise the heck out of this. My Kickstarter is in prelaunch and I’ve yet to complete the prep work.

I’m going through my checklist here but right now I’m trying to decide exactly what to put into it. I know that I’m going to make hardcovers and paper backs, but the other stuff is probably going to be a stretch goal. I need to make cards and therefore I need to get card artwork done. I’ve put a bunch of examples into the text itself but I’m going to need to get more than the one piece of cover art.