Thoughts on 2026 - Author's Edition
The thought struck that I'm doing my writing in Hard Mode.
If you're unaware, I play Star Trek: Fleet Command, and one of the biggest complaints the player-base has is the devs never...take...breaks. Every three months is a new arc with new content and sometimes even a new game mechanic. There's never a time for things to go 'fallow.' Pretty much everyone in the player community would be perfectly happy if the devs took a quarter off from new STUFF and just focused on the 'cleanup and polish' of the game (bug fixes, interface improvements, QoL updates, that sort of thing.)
As I've hit burnout ONCE AGAIN, I realized the other day that I've been trying to do exactly what I'm critical of the ST:FC devs for; trying to churn out content literally year-round and never 'sharpening the saw,' to borrow a phrase.
What this boils down to for my writing is...I'm just not gonna push so hard all year. This last year I JAMMED out text, literally hundreds of thousands of words spread across no fewer than 10 books and quite a few short stories. I was so focused on creating the content that I was able to put zero time into my health, my family, and my job.
So that's going to change this coming year. My new goal is three chapters a month for Code of Ethics. Period. This should give me 36 new chapters by the end of the year, and I'm NOT going to push myself to produce more. That'll put CoE at 97 published chapters with a total word count just shy of 500k by the end of the year. (That's half a million words for Code of Ethics alone.) Ch. 97 is expected to be smack in the middle of Part 4 and into some of the deeper character growth for Diane as she encounters more players in the game and confronts many truths she's been shielded from behind the American Wall. This does mean the 'big reveal' that my Spoilery Spoilers What Spoil crowd are getting hints of won't happen until 2027, sadly.
2026 gets to be the year I work on me. I'm hoping to either get a real promotion at my current workplace or a new job that pays what I'm worth. My kiddo will be 18 and that will change a LOT in my life, giving me a level of freedom and a wealth of options I've been barred from due to parenting agreements and the legal structure of everything. If we haven't fully toppled the Orange Fascists' regime by then, I'll probably be preparing to move to a part of the country I'm not afraid for my life every time I walk out the door.
Limiting my output to just 36 chapters this year means that I'll have time to do other things I've had in mind for CoE and everything surrounding it. I've had ideas for promoting the book on Tiktok/Youtube Shorts, going back and polishing up chapters I dashed out to get out the door by a certain time or I'm not quite happy with, etc.
Also, the 'keep myself from burning out' thing is a rather big part of it.