Good morning interested individual,
Book progress in November was… slow. A mixture of different events taking up my free time and the fact I’ve just been feeling a bit glum has contributed to a few days in November whereby nothing was written at all.
Troubling, then, seeing as I wanted to reach halfway by the end of the month, and find myself at 30,000 words out of the 60,000 target. I’d then have written down most of the main sections of the book I had planned out at the start, with the remaining chapters being those which I need to sit down and figure out who I’m going to speak to, what points will be raised, and so on - a good task to start in the new year when, hopefully, people’s calendars aren’t so busy yet.
Fortunately, I did just that, striking a weird momentum in the final few days of November which saw me end the month on 30,049 words. Solid.
My aims for December are to finish one last chapter I can do before carrying out further research/interviews, and then send off a bunch of interview requests to take place in early 2023. All being well, I can do that just before the festive period and I can have a proper rest from book writing for a few days.
The difficult thing now is that, with four months to go until the deadline of 31 March 2023 (which also happens to be my birthday), and to allow enough time to make final edits before sending it over to the publisher, I kind of have to hit around 10K a month for the remaining months. That means 40K by December, 50K by January and then 60K by February to allow for a full month of editing.
That sounds practical, but given my other commitments outside of writing this book, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous about timings. Encouragement is welcomed.
Also, a note: Thanks to Elon Musk deciding to use his unnecessary wealth to take a sledgehammer to Twitter HQ, which owns the Revue newsletter platform, there’s reportedly plans to axe/discontinue Revue before the year is up, and I quite like having this small audience to hold me accountable. Therefore, in 2023, I’ll probably be moving this over to the far more stable platform of Substack. You won’t need to do anything on your end, though of course, you can always unsubscribe from my natterings at any point, if you so wish - that should be at the bottom of this email.
In the meantime, have a restful end to the year and an exciting start to the next one.
Liam