Next Writing Project Update

 

I recently watched a Youtube video on Mike’s Book Review where he talks about reassessing his video output in a response to his disappointing viewership. He has 64.5K subscribers, but most of his videos are watched by 6K or less viewers, which kinda bums him out. And this is not the first video of this type I’ve seen. It seems that there comes a point where years of effort playing the game of Youtube algorithms pays off in subscriber numbers, but not in satisfaction. At this point, these Youtubers step back and reassess what they’re doing and why.

I’m at a similar point, though not from dissatisfaction with my results, so much as recognizing the reality of what I can do, and not do. I wrote and self published four novels and two novellas in the last two years or so. They were short novels, by my standards, and so they where much easier to write than a 100K+ novel, but even so, it is not a pace that I can keep up. Nor do I want to. Though I had fun writing those shorter novels and novellas, in my mind they were just long stories rather than real novels, and I want to get back to writing something a bit more ambitious. As I mentioned in some previous posts, I spent the summer trying to come up with just such a novel, and failing. I spent the fall starting and abandoning several short novels, as my interest in them faded. However, in the last couple of months, I’ve taken the world from that failed effort, and a plot from some older failed efforts, and combined them into a story that, I think, I can make a novel out of.

I have written the first chapter – some 8,000 words – in this novel and I have the first half of it pretty well in hand. After that it gets a bit sketchy. But I’m confident that I can make it all work. However, as I said, I want to write a novel, and I want to write the best novel I can, so that I am going to hold myself to a high standard, and not rush through this story. I’m not setting any deadlines for myself, either to finish it, or word count per day. It will be done when it is done. Perhaps by late fall 2022, but it could easily slip into 2023.

I’m approaching this book as literary fiction. Not heavy literary fiction, but something more than pure genre fiction. It is set in the far future, so could be considered science fiction. However, as in many of my previous books, I like hybrid past/futures – futures that look a lot like the past, with advanced technology mixed in, and this book will be no different. The basic plot is an espionage story this time around. But since I’m not a thriller type of writer, it will be more like a 39 Steps type of story – travel, mysteries, captures, and escapes. Yah, nothing too new here.

So, bottom line – do not expect to see a new C Litka book before fall of 2022 at the earliest. Hopefully it will be worth the wait.