J.R. Murdock

Hello!

Well, a week has gone by and I’ve been writing like a madman. Well, okay. Not really. I’ve been putting things off, working later, doing laundry, taking my favorite daughter places she needs to go, watching TV, reading books.

PLAYING CANDY CRUSH!

I’ve now uninstalled Candy Crush. Again. It was eating into my reading and writing time.

So, how have I done so far? Well, I’m about to sit and write, so I won’t count today, but since 1/6 here are the numbers…

1/6 – 2467

1/7 – 1358

1/8 – 1110

1/9 – 1736

1/10 – 1230

1/11 – 1056

1/12 – 1557

1/13 – 1186

for a grand total of 11,700 words. I’m pretty happy with that. I’m also happy with a streak of days over 1000 words. Makes me happy. It also puts me at 28,000 words into the first book of the Giant Robot Planetary Competition. I’m 30,000 words in and I’ve introduced the world, gotten the crew together, and they’re about to start practice before the competition. The first half will be preparation. The second half will be the actual competition. I’m excited and the book is taking a small twist I didn’t see coming, but should have. I love it when that happens in a story.

Once I get this book written, it’ll be Asteroid Bunnies, then Astel 2 (some people have been waiting for the sequel), the Life of List. Then I’ll reassess where I’m at and see what I’ll be writing next. I’m thinking it’ll be either Golden West 3, or Of Gnomes and Dwarves 2.

Hopefully by that time, Mike Plested and I will be diving into Jack Kane 2. I’m excited about it coming out later this year and can’t  wait to see what happens next for those books. It’ll be a blast!

After spending a couple of months down, it feels real good to sit and type once again. I’m very happy. Things are looking up for 2014 to be even better than 2013. I’ll get into a lot of that in a later post. I’ll also talk about some things I did in 2013 that you may have missed as I was rather quiet during the end of 2013 and some things slipped my mind. I’m terribly sorry about that.

I’d sit here and ramble, but my writing time is disappearing. I just wanted to make sure I drop a post each Tuesday. That’s going to be a firm commitment for 2014. Next week I hope to start a short podcast just keeping you up to date on my thoughts, my progress, things like that. It’ll be a free form ramble that may repeat a lot of things I’ll post here as many have time to listen to me for 5-10 minutes, but don’t have the time to read the blog. I understand.

Alright, I’m rambling…a lot.

Until Next Time!

WOO WOO!

The holidays have a tendency to throw everything off. Couple that with major life stress, recovering from major life stress, family obligations, and having far too much time off from actually writing, and getting back on the horse yet again isn’t as easy as it seems. Yes, I’ve been in this situation before. Yes, I’ve gotten back on the horse before. It’s just something that needs to be done if I’m ever going to get back to this writing business…again.

As I said in my last post, last year took a bite out of me and I only managed 172,000 words of my 365,000 word goal. Almost half-way, which isn’t too shabby. I can’t be sad and given my average word count per day, I’m also quite pleased with the overall result. I have pretty much the same goal for this year. 365,000 words. Hopefully this year will be a little more stable and far less in the surprise department.

The past week (since New Year’s Eve) I’ve been having crushing sinus pain. Just intensely painful at times, dizzying at other times, and overall wearing me down. For that reason it’s been difficult enough to just sit at the computer for work. I haven’t wanted to write one word. Even reading has been difficult. I’ve been taking NyQuil at night with a couple Sudafed and nasal spray. Regardless I still wake up in the morning unable to breathe through my nose. I’m so done with medicine head. It makes everything far more difficult than it needs to be.

Even so, last night I decided it was time to sit down and write. I read through the last three chapters I’d written in the Giant Robot Planetary Competition. I did lots of editing as I went (wow I type badly when I type quickly) and remembered where I was going with a scene that I’d stopped writing in mid-sentence.  I typed 99 words and stopped. I focused on the screen and started typing again. Got another 115 words down and stopped once more. It was akin to kicking off the rust and getting an old machine moving. One the third try I got 500 words in before ending that chapter and trying to figure out what to do with the next chapter.

I got up, walked away from the computer for a few minutes. Tried not to cry from the damn pain in my skull. Sat back down and started typing. When all was said and done, I’d gotten to a total of 2500 words and just couldn’t do it any more. The pain in my skull was just far too much. I took my NyQuil, my Sudafed, my nasal spray, and went to bed.

I’ll be trying to do the same again today. I’ll write, I’m just not sure how much will actually get done. I’d like to keep this pace up for a few days. It’d be nice to knock out GRPC before the end of the month and at a pace of 2500 words a day, that’s very doable. I plan on doing far more writing than anything else this year. If you read Dean Wesley Smith’s blog, you know what he says. Spend 85% of your writing time creating new fiction. The other 15% is for editing, publishing, and book covers. I plan on following that.

Another thing I need to do is get caught up on all my correspondences from the end of last year. I’m slacking off badly and with everything that happened at the end of last year, I hope all those waiting on a reply for me understand.

That’s all I’ve got for today.

Oh, wait! I’m wrong. I’ve posted on twitter, if you buy any one of my titles (from any ebook seller) and email me your receipt, I will email you all my other titles FREE! What are you waiting for? Go grab one!

Okay, that’s really it. I need to go take some sinus medicine.

Until Next Time!

WOO WOO!

http://www.deanwesleysmith.com

WoW! What a year 2013 turned out to be. Talk about a roller coaster ride. There were several ups and just as many downs. I started out the year looking to publish 28 books over 24 months. I’m sure you’re wondering how I did, if I’m on track, and all those other thoughts.

Well, I was able to get 9 titles out during 2013. I was hoping to hit 14, but I’ll get to why I didn’t in a little bit and I’ll also touch on why I won’t hit the 28 book mark either. I’ll also, finally, update the links for V&A Shipping II so it’ll be easier to find if you’d like to purchase a copy.

2013 started out as a big bundle of stress and anxiety and did its best to not let up throughout the year. We had difficulties at work with an application we’d developed and planned to deploy in late April. Something changed on the back end that required several meetings, a lot of late nights and working though the weekend. Work took over my life and I was only able to bash out a little over 5000 words during that month and publishing a couple of titles.

During February and March I managed to crank out a good number of words and it was toward the end of March I got notified by my landlord that he was selling his place. Oh, yeah. Moving. This was the second stressful and was not to be the last. Fortunately my landlord was himself renting a place and needed to move out into a place he was wanting to purchase. So things needed to happen just right. He needed to sell the place I was renting and moving into the place he was buying. He made arrangements with his landlord so I could move in there. I needed to be out before July 1st or I’d be paying rent at two locations.

Of course everything went smoothly. My landlord moved out on June 29th and I had June 30th to get everything moved. <sigh>

April to July saw little writing and July wasn’t much better as there was the constant getting settled in.Once things settled down, I did get back on track and cranked out a lot more words. A couple large projects at work ate into my personal time (that happens and is expected). It wasn’t until November that I was set to really crank up the word count and had written nearly 12,000 words during the first few days of November. I had planned on trying to write 150,000 words during November and December. I was even on track to do just that. It was looking good. I was settled in. No major projects on the horizon. It was going to be smooth sailing.

Then I got notification that my job had been shipped offshore and I needed to look for a new position within the company.

Let me talk a moment about stress here and what this signified to me. I’ve never been involuntarily unemployed. I’ve been working since I was 15 and I’ve had a steady job. I’ve only been fired once and I had a job the following day. I spent a year after i got out of the Navy adjusting to civilian life, but that was a choice. I spent a year looking for a job when I moved from Colorado to California. Again, it was a choice. For nearly 30 years I’ve been gainfully employed.

Getting told I may lose my job didn’t sit well with me and I had nightmares, difficultly sleeping, and I couldn’t focus on much of anything. My entire purpose became talking to everyone I’d ever worked with, getting my resume in shape, and applying for jobs inside the company. After being with the same company or 17 years, I didn’t want to start looking outside unless I really needed to. I did not want to start all over. So November and December were lost to stress and focus on other things entirely.

Yes, I did secure a position around December 18th. I still couldn’t focus on much of anything and decided that, since i had the rest of the year off from work, I’d just relax as much as possible and do as little as possible. I read a few books, bought a lot more, watched more TV in two weeks than I have the entire rest of the year. I let all the stress of the year flow away and just did what I could to get my head back into shape to focus on 2014.

At the end of December I also signed a contract along with my writing partner, Mike Plested, for our book, Jack Kane and the Statue of Liberty. It will be out sometime next year. I’m excited to now be a ‘hybrid’ author. I’m also excited that Jack Kane will be seeing print (much more on this as the year progresses).

So what were my totals for 2013? I feel I really missed the mark, but with all the stresses hitting me at various times during the year, it’s not totally unexpected. I’ve always said that if I come close to hitting my goals, I’d feel happy with my output. Well, I didn’t even come close this year, but I still knocked out a good chunk of words. I’m even happy with my daily average for the number of days I was actually able to write.

107 – days writing
258 – days not writing
172700 – words for 2013
1614 – average words per day on writing days

As I said, I plan on hitting the ground running in 2014. I didn’t write yesterday (time spent with family and friends), but I will get words written today and I plan on trying to hit a nice streak of words for the year.

All I can say is that to me, my word count for 2013 is dismal to me. Some would look at my productivity and be quite happy with that so I’m not entirely disappointed. I’d planned on writing 365,000 during the year, but life does have a tendency to happen.

I also plan on being on twitter and facebook a little more often. We’ll see how that goes. I’m off to go make things happen!

Until Next Time!

WOO WOO

Next week I will write up a ‘year in review’ post. Today it’s just a “Hey, where’ve I been the past couple of months” post.

Well, my plan when I last posted was to write fast and furious(ly). Sadly, that didn’t happen. I got about 8,000 words written over two days and BAM! Life hit me like a sledge.

I was informed that my entire workgroup’s responsibilities were being shifted off-shore and I had until the end of January to find myself a new job. Let’s just say I was not prepared for this to happen. It wasn’t even anything I was thinking about. Normally there are rumors of cuts or an announcement of a 10% or 20% cut coming. Something. This was a quick, sweeping cut that affected 189 people including my boss, his boss, everyone. To say it was shocking is an understatement.

I could go on and on about how I feel about this decision, but from the person’s level that made the cut, it makes sense. I don’t think that person will realize just what a terrible mistake they’ve made until it’s far too late and will likely not care nor will there be any repercussions for this cut.

I have secured a new position within the company. Thankfully I do work for a company that does try and look out for its employees even if people in levels of power don’t appear to really care about the little people (from time to time). The group I’m moving into, I won’t be doing web design any more. I will be working in a ‘growth’ area. The job appears to be very secure. I’m excited for a new chapter in my working career.

So I’m safe for now. So are many that were affected, but there are still quite a large number out there looking to find something else. We even had a few take an early retirement, so at least some people had options. At 44 with 17 years with the company, I did not want to leave and start over somewhere else. Thankfully, I won’t have to.

Needless to say, it’s amazing just how much stress like this can shut down the old brain. I tried to write. I did some editing (and got V&A Shipping II publishing, a post on that later). I could do little but stare at my screen and wait for someone to ask me a question while I looked and asked for a job. I didn’t sleep well. I struggled just to leave the house. I kept up a brave face and projected a positive attitude even though I felt like I’d been hit repeatedly in the gut for no apparent reason.

So needless to say, very few words have happened in the time since I started looking for a new job. That makes me sad. I had high hopes for this year, but there’s always next year and it brings with it a lot of its own challenges. I’ll get to those in another post as well.

I didn’t post anything here while I was stressing out and told only a handful of people anything was wrong. I want attention on me and what I do. I didn’t want pity or sympathy. I needed to focus on what I was doing and make sure I secured a position. I’m sorry if I’ve been distant, but I hope you understand why.

I’ve got news aplenty that occurred while I was away. Be sure to look for more blog posts from me. I’ll also get out there and update the blog to get V&A Shipping II announced and clickable to you can purchase a copy.

I plan on blogging a couple of times per week just to keep my head clear, my direction focused, and my goals out there. I allowed life to collapse all my goals in on themselves when I should have tried to stay focused. 2014 will be much different!

Watch for future announcements!

Until Next Time!

WOO WOO!

Yes, it’s NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month where writers try to write 50,000 words in a month). Yes, I will write a lot this month (probably more than 50,000 words). No, I’m not actively participating this year. I have my reasons. Mainly I need to focus and write as much as possible with as few distractions as I can handle.

But here’s the issue. I’m not really feeling it at the moment. I took last week off (7 full days) from writing and I read a LOT! I finished 5 books, 2 short story anthologies, and a couple novellas. When I want to, I read rather quickly. Something happened in the middle of all that reading. I checked my sales for the year, the hits on my blog, and the numbers of reads over at wattpad.

Sales are pretty much flat. 3-5 books a month. Wattpad, I think I’ve had a total of 500 reads across all the stories I posted (V&A Shipping had 100 parts so 300 of those would be 3 readers.). The blog? Well, I did cross 10,000 page views, but again, we’re still around an average of 3-5 hits per day and many of those look like they fell on the page rather than came here to see who I am and what I’m doing.

So as I was typing away and finished off Golden West Season 2 and started into Asteroid Bunnies (something I put on hold for a bit but will jump back in once I re-plot the entire story) I took a long hard look at my body of work and the works I was reading. Books and stories by people I admire. Some were freaking awesome, some were fair, one was just not my cuppa tea.

Regardless of what I read or how I read it, I couldn’t shake that feeling that I must be doing something wrong. I felt like a fake, a fraud, a poser, a wannabe, someone who was just going to crank out garbage for a long time and never really write something worthwhile. I, for a moment, lost the desire to write at all. I honestly thought about just tossing in the hat and saying “screw it, why bother any more?”

I know, I know. It’s a long hard road to get the attention of readers. It’s never an easy thing. It’s difficult to finish writing a book. It’s harder to edit that book and make it something you want other people to read. It’s soul sucking to put something out there and seeing so few people even interested.

So I fell into a funk.

But, today was a pull myself up by my bootstraps kind of day. I’ve already put down 1600 words and I aim to put down at least another 2000. Being that I had recently watched Pacific Rim and Real Steel, I felt the need to jump back into my giant robot story. I spent two days with 300 words per day as I re-read, cleaned up, and prepared to move forward. I’m excited about the story once again and I can’t wait to jump in and get this one going in the direction I want it to go. I’ll probably sit down tonight and start mapping out the chapters (something I should have done prior to NaNoWriMo). I’ll get 5-10 ahead and start writing. It’d be nice to knock out another 2000 tonight and actually be getting caught up to that 50,000 words.

My favorite daughter has an off period from volleyball and that will give me some much needed time to actually sit and write and not worry about jumping up in a few minutes to take her somewhere. I’ll be able to define a period of ‘office hours’ that are my time to sit and write.

And no, I won’t be writing like a madman just to write 50,000 words. I know many look at NaNoWriMo as pressure to write 50,000 words and to some people that feels like a lot of words. If I’d stayed on track this year (instead of losing over 6 months of writing time due to many life issues) I would have written over 300,000 words thus far. As it stands, I’ve only written 168,000. I’m still happy with that number and I know I’ll easily break 200,000 words on the year and I’ll be on track to make great progress next year.

Yes, I had feeling of doubt, self-pity, regret for all those lost days. I felt as if I’d let people down. I’d not put out books when I said they’d be out. This made me feel terrible, and I’ve now moved past that. I will be getting those books out as soon as possible. I will be getting a LOT of words written before the end of the year. I will do all these things and try to get myself back on track. It’s an exciting time. For a moment I lost the excitement, but I’ve regained it and it’s time to put the pedal to the metal and see just how fast I can really type.

I will still be quiet. Sorry, but I need time to get my mind back on things. I do have one announcement that will be coming out later this week about an anthology I’m in. I’ll probably put that up tomorrow. I’ve already read all the stories in the anthology and if you found me because of the anthology, WELCOME! Sorry this post was a drag. I’ll be more upbeat in my subsequent posts.

Well, I’ve got words to write. If you want a free ebook (one I’ve written 😉 ), email me what you’d like and I’ll send it in the format of your choice.

Until Next Time!

WOO WOO!

HEY! How are you? Really? That’s great. I’m doing awesome as well. This has been a wonderful year filled with amazement and adventure. It’s also been filled with challenges, unexpected complications, a little bit of stress, and lots of joy.

I recently finished blogging Paradise Palms. I hope you enjoyed that. I also recently finished wattpading V&A Shipping. Today I was supposed to have V&A Shipping II available for you. Yeah. About that. Things got a little crazy and that’s not happening today. It will happen very very soon, that I promise you. Hopefully it’ll be in your hot little hands next week.

This week I’m wrapping up Golden West Season 2. I had a conversation with my writing partner, Michell Plested, and he’s working on his next Action Pack Adventure. We’ll get that out to you just as soon as we’re able. I will have ebook and print editions available prior to the podcast in case you can’t wait to see what happens next.

But as the title of this blog post suggests, I’m going dark. You won’t see me on social media much. I’ll be on twitter once in a while, a post here and there on facebook, but for the most part, I want to write as much as possible before the end of the year. Yes, NaNoWriMo is coming up and I won’t be an active participant. Yes, I could probably win this year, but I have other things on my plate. Here’s what I’ve got planned for the rest of the year.

1) Finish Golden West Season 2

2) Write My Teacher is a Witch

3) Write My Teacher is a Ghost

4) Write Astel 2

5) Write Asteroid Bunnies.

6) Publish V&A Shipping II

7) Publish Golden West Season 2

8) Publish My Teacher is a Witch

9) Publish My Teacher is a Ghost

10) Publish Of Gnomes and Dwarves Book 1 – Chance Encounters.

As you can see, my plate will be quite full. That means I won’t be putting anything else on wattpad for now. I won’t be blogging any novels for now. I will next year, but I want to try and end this year with a bang.

I’m way WAY behind my annual goal and I know it’s not going to happen unless I can write 3000 or more words per day. I’m currently sitting on 160,000 words for the year and I should be at 290,000. Yeah, just a little bit behind schedule. So I’ve already committed to this year being a miss in terms of my writing goal, and I’m fine with that. Given all that’s happened, it’s understandable. Moving and getting settled into a new house, the pressure of work and the extra hours, volleyball, there were just too many things in life happening to commit to writing as much as I would have liked.

I will, however, be hitting next year hard and furious. I’ve done some rearranging of titles and hope to do a good run on certain titles. I want to write more Supernatural Learning (My Teacher is a … ), I plan to start Unnatural Wars, I want to write the third book for Astel and complete that trilogy, I want to write at least one more Asteroid Bunnies.

Those are just the shorter books. I also want to complete To Fall From the Sky, Almost-Super Heroes, A Life of Lists, and Of Gnomes and Dwarves book 2 – Mount Astoon. Perhaps I’ll even get back into my giant robot story (after seeing Pacific Rim and Real Steel, I’m excited to get back into this universe). I’ve got a LOT of words I want to write. I’ve got graphs, charts, plots, and a calendar to set up the time I need to get these stories written. As I keep saying, it’s an exciting time to be a writer.

I do want to keep doing the “Authors You Should Be Reading” series. I’ll be doing J. Daniel Sawyer and Paul E. Cooley next. Then I’ll look at other closer, personal friends to abuse. I also need to make a graphic for that page and make it a little more interesting. I’m going to have fun with that one.

Well, like I said, I’m going dark. I’ll be very quiet, but I’ll be producing a LOT of content. Next year I will be reaching out to people with blogs and podcasts to talk about my 28 novels in 24 months. I’m having a blast getting stories out there and hopefully people are enjoying reading them.

Speaking of writing, I’d better get at that.

Until Next Time!

WOO WOO!