It’s probably rather obvious that I am not the world’s most avid blogger.  I haven’t counted, but it’s not unlikely that the last November post i wrote is still on the front page of my website.  All the same, I like to explain what they are for people who have never read one, and to get myself into a November headspace, even as I’m writing this one a bit later than normal.

November is the National Novel Writing Month.  It’s a global celebration of creativity and writing – usually fiction – without a sense of holding back for approval from other people.  Just write.  Make something.  Go nuts.  I love it.  It’s festive and energetic, and while writing is usually a solo-act, this tends to come with a more of a community feel, which is really amazing and different from the rest of the year.

If the whole year was like this, I would be exhausted, but as a one-time, monthlong event, it’s refreshing and it forms a reset to my writing year.  I used to take off the entire month of October so that I’d be chomping at the bit to get going on midnight of November 1 (with a giant bowlful of leftover Halloween candy), but that doesn’t suit my lifestyle or my writing style anymore, so November is, instead, a month where I try to avoid scheduling releases (more on that later) and where I just push myself for high-energy writing and creativity.

This is a funny year, for me, socially, because a lot of my writing groups have drifted apart.  None of them for bad reasons.  Just the way of life.  I’m not upset by any of them, though I miss almost all of them.  It means, though, that as I was rounding into this November season, I was planning on celebrating by myself.  I play a writing game online that has a huge celebration for November, and I enjoy that, but the community I’ve had there is part of the drift, and… it’s fine.  Writers write, even when they write solo, and i can love November even so.

I went to a creator’s conference in October, which was lovely and fun, and where I sat down with creatives from a lot of other professions and had a really good time talking to them about how they do what they do, but the highlight of the event was meeting up with a lifelong friend who is a painter.  We goofed off like we used to when we were much younger, we enjoyed getting together – less common these days – and we went home after a weekend blitz, back to normal lives.

And then my writing game threw up a challenge I’ve never met before.  A really, REALLY big one.

And I thought…

Nah.

I can’t do that.  I’m busy, my last few months of writing have been really slow, there’s no reason to expect anything to change, and I’m tired.  I need to get myself together, but I’ll do it another time.  I’ll get myself into a better situation and then I’ll reorganize my writing life to work the way I want it to.

And I was immediately struck by how little I liked that answer.

So I picked up the challenge, did some math, and texted my friend and asked her to go with me.

So I’m doing NaNo differently this year.  She’s making art and I’m making words, and we’re chatting every day about the challenges of really big goals and doing things a different way and hwo much *fun* it is to just *go for it*.  As of this writing, I’m a tiny bit behind pace, a little under halfway through, and loving the knowledge that I can still *do this*.  I don’t know if I’m going to make it, but geez it’s going to be a different month than it would have been without a big push.

So give yourself a big push.

Be bold.

Have fun.

Then we come to the other half of what November means.

Because November is the high holiday of my writing calendar, I intentionally take a good look at the previous year and at the upcoming year and I make my plans.

in recent years, those plans have been pretty close to a much longer-term plan that I’ve been working through, and while the old plan ended this year, I have a new long-term plan written out where I can see it from my writing chair, and I’ll talk a bit about that, but I really want to focus on how that plan interacts with the way 2025 looks right now.

First of all, I’m behind.  For reasons that are not writery, I’m *way* behind.  Hours have been hard to find, and the hours I do find don’t result in the productivity I’m used to.  I’m not burning out (no worries, there), but I am distracted for very legitimate reasons.  Like the hours I sleep shifted by almost three hours this year.  And stuff.

So while I’d wanted to have four (FOUR) Carbon books out before the end of the year, right now I’m not sure I’m going to release any in 2024.  The first one is written (book 5) and I’m a good piece of the way into book 6, with plans to have book 7 done before the end of the year and maybe put a good scare on book 8.

Gigantic NaNo challenge for the win, y’all.

But I don’t see a way to *not* interrupt that creative flow and get a book ready for publishing this year, so they’re going to have to go out starting in January, which is *really* frustrating, because this is the longest I’ve gone without releasing a book in… I’d have to check, but it might be four or five years.  Could be more.  I’ve had a firm schedule, and I’ve stuck to it for a long time, and I liked the way that that worked.

But.

In the fight between what you want and reality, reality always wins.  So I’m betting on the winner, here, and not letting it bother me more than it must.

The books are fun, and while I knew it was going to take me a bit to get back into that mindset, after years of writing in Verida, it’s *there* and I’m having such a good time with the sense of play that these characters have.

Looking at 2025, I’m hoping to have almost all of the Carbon work *done* by sometime in January, at which point I’m going to take a couple of weeks and get myself back into the immediate plot details of Tell, because I have been promising these books for years, now, and it’s *time*.  Four more books for Tell were originally planned at the front half of 2025, but since my fall didn’t come together, I’m hoping that they are ready to go for a late summer release.  I’ll spend my summer writing four more books for Surviving Magic, and those will start going up – if everything improbably goes to plan – over the winter holidays.

My release schedule for 2026 is light, by comparison, (eight Veridan novellas) because I am planning on launching a brand new series of Urban Fantasy where, no kidding, I plan on having 12 books that release one a month, back to back.

And I am so psyched for you guys to meet the lead.  She’s amazing.

Keeping a focus on 2025 and looking back at 2024…  2024 has been my best year as a professional writer by a large margin.  I learned a lot of useful things and I’m applying them as consistently as I can across a lot of series.  I’m meeting new readers, and some really, spectacularly cool stuff has happened.  I find myself kind of hopelessly, recklessly optimistic for 2025, because that’s my nature.  I’m capable of adapting when things don’t work, but I have this vision of what’s possible, and it’s just gorgeous.  My intent for 2025 is to take the things that worked for 2024 and keep adapting, keep experimenting, keep expanding, but the real goal is to put more books into the hands of readers who are looking for *that book*.  Books in series that readers are constantly asking for, most notably.

I know that it’s kind of… one of those evil author things to do, to leave a world and go work in a new one, and I do a *lot* of that.  It isn’t an inability to focus.  I think I’ve demonstrated that.  It’s that there are other places I want to go, and I really hope you’re going to love them as much as I do.  When I first told readers (and writers) that I was starting a fantasy series, when I was setting out to write The Queen’s Chair, a lot of them told me ‘I didn’t know you wrote fantasy’.  Because I hadn’t written a single novel that was properly fantasy at that point.  But I’d always expected that fantasy would dominate my catalogue, because it’s where I came from as a person – as a reader, as a consumer of fiction, and even as a writer.

There are more pieces of what I want to *do* than exist in the series I’ve done.  And I want to go try my hand at those things.  I want to find the readers that that is *the* thing they’re looking for.

And I really am sorry that it means that your favorite characters are left at four or five or seven or eight books for the time being.  Hopefully if you’ve been hanging with me since before Verida, this is going to be your year, though.

I don’t forget.

I just write long series in big worlds, and sometimes it takes a five-year plan to get to everything I want to do.

(That’s a lie.  I still want to write a Sarah Todd sequel, and that isn’t even *on* the five-year plan.  New Sam and Sam is, though… out at the very end… we’ll all wish each other luck as I try to hold those in place over the next four years.)

Regardless of whether the timeline gets shifted around or pushed, 2024 has been wonderful and amazing, and I am so excited to get to revisit worlds I have dearly missed, going into 2025.

It’s not just the spirit of NaNo, but it certainly boosts everything.  I hope you run and play and are recklessly optimistic.  I certainly plan to be.