Welcome to the start of a brand new year with the Merchants of the Void!  This is the time when we look at the year we enjoyed (or survived) and set expectations for the one to come.  We set our eyes on the horizon and promise to improve our lives in some way. Usually by losing weight or dropping bad habits.

Here at the Merchants of the Void, I’ve been running a 12 week goal setting schedule instead of a full year.  January 8th marked the end of my second set, so I felt it would be a good idea to embrace the New Year’s spirit and reflect on my progress since starting the blog.  So, how have I done this last year and where do I hope to go in the next?

A New Year for My Novel

If you have been following the blog you will know that I have been tracking my progress on my first novel every week.  For the full history of the story, be sure to check out The Story of My Story.

The Last Year

This last year I picked up my story after years of it collecting dust.  I put my steak in the ground and vowed to finally finish it after all this time.

I scanned over my outline, chunking it up into rough chapters, to see roughly how much I had left.  Next, I set up a spreadsheet to calculate the average word count for the chapters I had already written.  Lastly, using my estimate of the remaining chapters, the average length of my precious ones, and a little rounding I came to a conclusion.  I would need to write 50,000 words by New Year’s Day to finish it in 2019.

So what happened?  In 2019, or more specifically the last 24 weeks, I have written a grand total of 42,589 words.  Not only did I come up 7,411 words short, but the story would not have wrapped up in my initial estimate anyway.  In other words, not only did I fail to meet my goal, I was doomed from the start. I have crashed and burned, time to pack it up and go home…

Hold on now!  Before we break camp and go home, let’s look at the big picture.  In the last 6 months I have managed to write 42,589 words, which comes to about 7,100 per month.  Compared to my previous average of 725 per month, that’s 879% increase! If this were baseball, I would have hit the ball so far out of the park that a fan in another stadium would have caught it.  The crazy part? I’m a little bummed out I didn’t do better.

The New Year

Now that I have worked past my ridiculous feeling of failure, where should I go from here?  By my estimations I have a measly 9 chapters left. My average is at 4,500 words per chapter, but a couple of them are going to be long ones, plus I have to finish the current chapter.

Let’s be pessimistic and increase that average by about 20%, leaving us with 5,400 words per chapter. Nine chapters left and some rounding puts us at 49,000 words to completion. Please excuse me while I go yell bad words from my balcony for a few minutes…

Now that I have that out of my system, how much longer do I want to give myself?  Let’s go for broke and say 12 weeks! I’ll start the clock on February 1st to give myself time to prepare.  If I’m smart, I’ll take some time to knock down that word count and give myself a head start, but we’ll see how that goes…

So, as of right now I will need to do 4,100 words per week to haul the rest of my novel from the Void by April 25th, 2020. Someone get ready to ring that bell, because this heavyweight fight is about to start!

A New Year for The Merchants

The Merchants of the Void has had a mixed beginning.  There have been some ups and downs, but I have learned from both.  As the saying goes, “As long as you fall forward, you’re still making progress.”

The Good

The first big thing to happen to the blog is existence.  I have been passionate about writing since I my teen years and would have loved to had a community for support.  This year I decided to take action and start one myself.

In addition to existing, the Merchants have grown at a relatively steady pace.  My travels with the Merchants have also brought me in contact with some new faces like TJ Baker.  Not only have I made new friends, but I’ve also reconnected with some old friends as well!

Lastly, I have learned a great deal from the research I’ve done for the blog posts and my writing has been all the better for it.  From discovering that Science Fiction is a bizarre cornucopia of stories to digging into my own deep seated fears, I have grown both as a person and writer.

The Bad

It hasn’t all been rainbows and sunshine for sure.  There have been some dark moments and things that just didn’t work.

My day job this last holiday season kicked the crap out of me both physically, mentally, and time-wise.  The routines I had established for preparing posts and working on my novel were chewed to bits by my ever changing schedule.  Before long I moved from being ahead to backlogged.

While time and energy were certainly the most prominent challenges, I have also been plagued by the feeling that there has been something missing.  I have enjoyed producing the content I have so far, and I hope you have too, but it feels like it’s coming up short of what I envision.

I have contemplated this at length and I may have found what’s been bothering me.  The articles I have written and topics I have discussed have all been covered. With a quick search you can find a sea of similar articles, videos, and podcasts that provide almost the same information.

I don’t mean to imply I haven’t added anything to the conversation, I feel like I have.  Not only have I lent my voice to them, but also explored some of the neglected aspects. I have been aggregating information into one place for you and filling in some of the thin spots.  That is what I want to accomplish, but I feel there has to be a better way to do it.

The Future

To be able to continue without burning myself out, I’ll need to make some changes.  First, I need to restructure my schedule between my day job and the blog. Second, I need to organise and refine my content to get it to the quality level I want.  Third, I want to branch out with new types of media and start building a community of writers.

Schedules

My day job leaves me little time and preparing weekly blog posts consumes most of it.  By the time I have taken care of those two things it’s late, I’m tired, and the last thing I want to do is work on my novel or the website.  To fix this I’m going to be cutting back the posts to once a month on the 1st. This will give me more time to expand and refine, as well as spend more time researching and polishing the articles.  I’m doubling down on quality over quantity.

As for newsletters, I’ll send out a major update mid-month to announce the upcoming post and any upcoming changes.  Instead of my weekly update newsletter, I’d like to do a special blog section, like a weekly journal. I’m leaning toward setting up a subdomain for that, but I need to look into the technical aspects more before I can say for sure.

Organising

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been working on a high-level overview of writing a novel.  This overview covers everything from the “I have an Idea” stage to the “How to Market My Book” stage.  This will serve as a foundation to help divide content to focus on helping writers at different stages.  A writer who is busy planning a story is going to have very different needs than someone who is preparing a polished book for publication.

I can also use this guide as a method of gathering specific resources that will be of value to members of each stage.  For example, to help a first-time writer proceed through the research stage I can seek to interview an expert in researching off-the wall topics.

This will also help connect members of the community to one another. If you’re a veteran author, you can easily find newbies to mentor. If you’re an editor or cover designer you can meet people who need your advice and skills.  Even if you have no interest in writing a book, you could connect with those seeking beta readers or critique partners. They get the support they need and you could get endless cutting edge reading material.

Branching Out

While I’m reducing my post schedule, for now at least, I am planning on adding other types of content to compensate.  Ideally, I would like to eventually feature a blog post, podcast episode, and a video each month. I’ll need to dig into the technical side and probably acquire some equipment to get started however.  I also don’t want to saddle myself with a ton of work editing audio and video every week and end up swamped again, so we’ll see. One step at a time.

In addition to audio and video, I’d like to modify the actual content.  I would like to focus on bringing in outside experts to interview or guest post like I mentioned earlier.  They know the information you need far better than I do, so why not bring them to you to deliver it?

Lastly, I am going to be revisiting my previous posts and explore fleshing them out into full-blown guides.  Instead of a study on villains or heroes, perhaps I can expand those into a full guide about character types and their interactions.  I can offer a full guide to plotting out a novel instead of a post about only outlines. In short, my posts have been snapshots I’d like to turn into movies.

Wrap Up

To recap, I have made crazy progress on my novel, while somehow managing to end up back at the beginning of my word count.  If the next 12 weeks don’t finish off this book, I may need to throw something through a plate glass window. Just saying…

The website is going to get a re-write soon, from the main points down.  I’m going to be cutting out some dead weight, streamlining what’s left, then giving it some muscles.

This next phase for the Merchants is going to shine brighter than quantum gorilla poop, and that stuff is crazy bright.  It’s like staring into the sun. Painful and occasionally unavoidable. There’s only one question left. Are you as excited as I am?

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