Watched Plan Your 2023 Writing Year

Super useful way to think through the year and see truly how much time I have available to work on projects. Combining this big picture thinking with the 12 Week Year approach for quarter by quarter planning is going to make a big difference in figuring out a reasonable, realistic workload and accomplishing my goals. I hope to publish my first two books in 2023; this exercise made me recognize that is doable but tight since it involves finishing writing one of the books and revising both, plus figuring out a bunch of self-publishing steps I haven’t done before.

I also have to decide if I can afford to take Fridays off of writing as I currently have planned, which only gives me four writing days weekly. Writing only four days a week and giving myself 4 weeks off of writing (two weeks vacation plus two planning weeks) and 2-4 random extra days off a month (appointments, trainings, conferences, headaches, consulting work) works out to about 145-150 working days. Considering I have brain capacity for about 3-4 hours of fiction writing on a standard day, that’s not many hours of actual writing time available, about 430-600 hours for the year. (Of course, that is significantly more than I have been doing, so…)

I’ll definitely need to push back the ARC I scheduled for mid-April 😂 To pick a new date, I’ll need to decide what order I’m going to work on projects — my current plan is to finish writing the rough draft of Book 2, then go back and finish revising Book 1. I was hoping I’d finish writing Book 2 by the end of the year but between my realizations about plot changes and following a mellower writing schedule, that certainly is not happening.