I thought I’d reflect on my year in writing for 2021, my first year as a full-time writer. I enjoy reading them from other writers, and I suppose I’m in sort of a reflective mood.

Warning: 2021 hasn’t been all great for me, so this may turn a bit dark near the end. I considered leaving that part out, but I don’t think that’s fair. So TW for death of a parent. But if you want to read just the writing bits, I’ll put in another warning before we get to that so you can take the offramp.

To fully understand 2021, we have to go back for a moment to 2020. In 2020 I became a full-time writer. I’ve written about that and some of the advantages that make that possible for me (most notably, having a military retirement that covers healthcare.) I’ve had good success as a writer, but not really ‘you can live on this and this alone’ money.

As part of my transition to full-time writing, I decided that I could write two books in a year instead of one, and I signed contracts with two different publishers to make that happen. We open 2021 with one of those books, THE MISFIT SOLDIER, already turned in to my editor at Harper Voyager, and me, in theory, working on THE WEIGHT OF COMMAND for Audible Originals.

As it turns out, I’m not great at writing two books at once. My brain just doesn’t work that way. Also, I seem to need a break after finishing a project, to reset. This led to me asking for a 3 month extension on TWoC (which was quickly and graciously granted by my editor at Audible Originals). But we’ll come back to that.

The first milestone came in March, when I got my edit letter for THE MISFIT SOLDIER, and it started with ‘Is this the book you meant to write?’ Which sounds like a brutal edit. And it would be…except it was absolutely correct. It *wasn’t* the book I meant to write. Somewhere in the writing of TMS, it had departed from what I intended and turned into a mystery in the same vein as the PLANETSIDE series books.

At that point, my editor, David Pomerico, who is fantastic, gave me two options. Either go back and write the book I intended, or he would work with me to make what we had into a better story. I chose to rewrite. I had a plan, and we agreed on about six weeks to get it back to him. What followed was my best six weeks of the year as far as writing. I set an aggressive schedule to get all the work done–I rewrote probably 70 percent of it–and I ended up with the book I meant to write. And I’m really happy with it.

From there we did the normal follow on stuff–copy edits, page passes, etc–and somewhere around June I put that book to bed for good. Review copies of THE MISFIT SOLDIER have been in the world for a couple of months, and it releases on 2/22/22, which is a pretty cool date for a release, I have to say.

And then it was time to finally get to serious work on THE WEIGHT OF COMMAND. It didn’t go well. I didn’t really know where the story was going, and while I had a lot of scenes I really loved, it just wasn’t coming together. So I kind of forced it and came up with a short draft that I rounded out to about 80K words with my second pass, and I sent it off to beta readers in July or August.

I’m a big believer in beta readers/critique partners. I have some that I work with repeatedly, and sometimes I switch it up. Because I was doing two books in a year, I didn’t want to burden all of the same people, but at the same time, I have folks who provide very specific expertise that I rely on. For example, JC Nelson has read all of my books before they have published and gives me tech advice which is invaluable.

This book needed more in this phase than anything else I’ve written. Thankfully, I got it, even though I didn’t know what I needed. But one of my first round readers, Keena Roberts, gave me some keen insights that let me figure out the problem with the book. It wasn’t the story. It was the character, and she gave me some great ideas on how to fix that. (I should note that there were other readers as well, and they all added to the story. But this particular set of notes was really transformational in a way that doesn’t usually happen.)

So I revised the book, adding 15 or 20 thousand words, and for the first time felt like I had something. But I was running late, so I asked for an additional month (on top of the first extension) and again, it was graciously granted. My second round readers confirmed what I thought — that I’d gotten it right with the revision.

Normally at that point, I’d have sent it to my agent for notes, but I was out of time and didn’t want to ask for a third extension, so we decided to send it to the editor and she’d read it concurrently (which she did, and gave me some great notes that I added in along with what the editor provided.)

I got my edit letter really quickly–it might have been 10 days later–and the tone of the letter was frightening. It was my first time working with Steve Feldberg, my editor at Audible, so it was a bit of a new experience, parsing his style. He thought the book needed some work and had a lot of great ideas. It was a big edit, and suggested that there would be more rounds to come.

But as I processed it, I found that not only did I agree with what he said, I knew how to do it, and it wasn’t that hard. The ideas just flowed from the notes. I think earlier in my career, it might have gone a different way. But while it was a big edit, it was *nothing* compared to what I had to do on THE MISFIT SOLDIER. So while it was a lot on the surface, by comparison it seemed easy, and I went into it with a lot of confidence. It took me about two weeks, and when I got back the second set of edits, we were down to minor tweaks, and all of a sudden we were ahead of the expected schedule, which turned out to be really good due to other events.

But before we get into that, I want to hit another aspect of the writing business. Between revisions of TWoC, I was working on proposals for my next projects. Because with the completion of TWoC, for the first time since 2016 I didn’t have any books under contract.

To set the stage, my agent and I weren’t really worried about getting a new contract. The sales of my first three books were good enough that someone was going to pay me to write more books. That’s a great position to be in as a writer, and not as common as you think, so it’s not something I take for granted. But that’s where we were. The question was, what were we going to sell and to whom.

And that’s hard for me. I don’t even like going to restaurants, because there are too many choices. I just want someone to tell me what’s for dinner. I’ve got a file of ideas, and I’d be happy to write any of them if someone told me that’s what they wanted. But writing doesn’t work that way (at least not for me at this point in my career.) So I had to write proposals.

There was one book that I wanted to write more than anything else. It’s an idea I’ve had since 2018. The catch is, it’s different from my previous books in a lot of ways, so I wasn’t sure anybody would want to take a chance on it. My first five books have a lot in common: They’re all in the military SF arena, and they’re all told from single point of view in first person. This book I wanted to write is none of those things. It’s a bigger book, with 4 POVs, told in third person, and it’s not military.

But I *really* want to write this book. So I wrote a proposal and sent it to my agent. We went back and forth on the details probably 4 or 5 times, trying to get it exactly right. What I ended up with was over 4000 words of outline, but we agreed that we had the best product we could put together for a pitch, and we sent it off. We sent it to one editor. There were a few reasons for that. First, we had an option clause that said that Harper Voyager got 30 days to look at my next proposal before anybody else. So we didn’t really have a choice.

But really–and I’m being honest here–there’s nobody else I wanted to do this book with. I wanted to write the book, but I wanted to write it with David Pomerico editing. There are a lot of reasons for that, and maybe I’ll write a post about it some day.

I really wasn’t sure what would happen with that proposal, so I started writing more. I’ve got several ideas for books, and realistically I probably have a few places I could go to get them published. So I wasn’t really worried about it, but I still kind of was, if that makes sense? Uncertainty and all that.

Long story short, Harper Voyager came through for me with a wonderful offer. They wanted to publish the book that I’m tentatively calling Generation Ship, and they wanted to do it in a new format (my previous books have been mass market paperback, this will be in trade.) And by the way, they wanted to give me a raise. So yeah. I get to write my dream book. More specifics on that when we officially finalize the contract, but I expect you’ll see the book in late 2023 if all goes well.

And this is where you should exit, regarding the trigger warning from the top of the post, if that’s something you need to do.

But I haven’t started writing the book. I haven’t done much of anything in the past two months, really, when it comes to writing. In early November, I got a call that my dad was in the hospital and it wasn’t looking good. So I headed down to Florida to be with my mom, and I’ve been back and forth a few times since then. My dad passed on November 30th, at the age of 80. I’m not going to go too far into that, because this is about writing and not my personal life.

But there’s an intersection. With the things going on in my personal life, I haven’t had the juice left in the creative tank to write. I’ve done a little. I’m working through copy edits on THE WEIGHT OF COMMAND, and will probably finish them tomorrow. But that’s it. And that’s okay. Everybody on my publishing team has been really supportive (to the point where Steve told me, literally, ‘just get it to me whenever you’re ready.’)

So if there’s a bright side to this, it’s that I’m fortunate enough to have a job where I can basically just stop working for two months, and where I have understanding and supportive people around me. Honestly, I can’t imagine having to go through this if I was back in one of my previous jobs. (And there’s a commentary in here somewhere on jobs and how we treat people in our country, and stuff like that, but that’s probably something for another day.)

In the end, I’m ending the year behind. I was late delivering TWoC, and I would have liked to start writing Generation Ship a couple months back. But I’m getting back on track. I’ll start the draft of that book on Monday, and we’ll see how it goes. 2022 is a new year, and I’m okay (both professionally and mentally. I’m ready to get started.) I’ll have two books coming out and a third one to write. On top of that, we only agreed to a one book deal, so I’ll probably have some proposals to do as well.

It doesn’t sound like a lot, and for some people it probably isn’t. I know authors who write three books a year. I’ve learned that I can’t do that. At least not at this point. I think I’m going to limit myself to one for now, and if I have additional time, I’ll fill it with other projects. I like to give back to the writing community, and I don’t currently have any obligations in that regard, so I’ll probably look for something. And if we ever get Covid under control, I’d love to travel and do some more conventions. I’ve been booking a few, just in case things get better.

I considered leaving out the last part of this post, but ultimately I included it in on the chance that it helps somebody else who is struggling to write (or do anything, really) due to things in their personal life. It happens. Try not to beat yourself up about it too much.

And for everybody, best wishes for 2022. May it be better than 2021.