At the end of 2024, work sponsored me to do a law course. The content was brilliant; it was just that there was a lot of it.  An awful lot. I soon realised that to complete the whole course I needed to do at least 10 hours of study a day without fail. And that’s after a full day of work.

I enjoyed the content, but there was just too much of it. All my publishing plans, as well as every other aspect of life, got put on the back burner as I worked until 2am most nights studying contract and copyright law. I learned a lot, to the point that I would – later in 2025 – get into an argument with a rival’s legal counsel and point out that he was wrong on international law. Get me!

The problem was that it burned me out. I was doing the equivalent of a full law degree in just 6 months, all whilst working a very complex and demanding job.

By the end of March, I was miserable. I’d spent close to 6 months doing nothing but studying, and I was stressed, behind, and burned out. I kept telling myself that after May I could get back to the other things I loved, but the law content was neverending, I needed more time. It felt like it would never end.

I was reminded of the time back in 2021 when I ran my experiments – a number of pen names to try my hand at self-publishing before deciding to go that route. Back then I’d lost some of my mojo (but in that instance it was writing burnout) and proceeded to write anything and everything.

Now one of the great things about publishing is that once you’ve published, it earns you money. Now without promotion that number dwindles down close to nothing, but I found one of my pens was making a solid $70 a month. Not bad when you consider I’d not touched it for 4 years.

So I decided to resurrect it… mostly for my sanity but also because if those books were evergreen, then having more of them would be a good thing.

And so began my little publishing empire that no-one knows about. That’s fine. It means my data is very pure, and I used that data to inform improvements. I took my newsletter with 8 subscribers and started sending out updates. I added new books to the catalogue. I even started translations.

And as the months went on, the empire continued to grow. I used to believe that success in publishing was about doing everything perfectly. I soon learned it was about fighting fires. I became very good at putting out fires and not wanting to quit because I made a mistake.

I built systems in Notion to handle the project management of publishing books. I connected with other writers in my space, and when the latest internet drama occurred, I just ignored it and worked on my craft.

By September, I had a process. I was working almost as hard as I had been on studying, but I was still having fun.

And then my father passed away, just before I was due to do a special event for Halloween.

I honestly think the publishing helped. My world was chaos, but I had books with multiple milestones, each with its own deadline.  I had processes I just needed to follow and for most of that month and November, all I could do was to follow as I unpacked my grief. I don’t remember much of late September and October, but those milestones and the publishing schedule got me to keep putting one foot in front of another.

2025 was My Year of Foundations – the idea being to lay down the groundwork for things to come, both with my law studies and what I had hoped at the start of the year to be my fantasy books. And in a way, I did just that. I didn’t continue my studies past May, but I still have all my notes, and I go back to them from time to time. What I learned has already helped in the day job. Maybe I’ll return to it in the future, maybe I’ll be too busy.

Because, you see, that $70 a month pen has grown… a lot and is now a decent five-figure business… and it’s still growing. I just hit a new monthly record for the 9^th month straight. And yes, my overheads are low… very low. I’m always reminded of Youtube channel that is boasting how it’s made a student of their online course $100k, yet spent $95k on ads. Most of my outlay is software subscriptions (Photoshop, Notion, etc.).  I’ll probably need to do more advertising in 2026, but that’s OK, because my 5 figure business still has 5 figure profit.

2026 is going to be my Year of Growth. Whilst I want to continue to grow the pen, I also want to get moving on my fantasy books as well. The schedule for the first half of 2026 is already tight, but I’m going to try to fit them in.

The only other thing I made time for in 2025 was teaching swords. For many weeks, it was my only time off and something I looked forward to. But as Dad got sick, I really struggled over the summer, and I’m thankful to my students who picked up a lot of my slack.

In early September we got a bunch of new students who are great, and the seniors helped get past their safety test. I’m really proud of them and am excited about the lessons for 2026.

Unfortunately my health meant that I’m still not competing. At the start of the year, I went to a bunch of chiropractors and found that, yes, for some reason my SI joint is jammed, but I was too large for their x-rays which was pretty depressing. I lost a lot of weight in the first half of the year, but I suspect I’ve put some of it back on over the last couple of months. My standing and walking has become easier though. In 2024, I struggled to walk further than 200ft. Now I can do close to a kilometer. It still hurts, my leg still goes numb, but my plan is that if I can lose the weight, someone can crack me back into place.  Currently, I joke that I feel like I need someone to throw me down a flight of stairs.

In other forms of entertainment, I’ve been lacking. I’ve been working so hard that I couldn’t listen to audiobooks or find time at night for reading. As such, I’ve not finished a book since March. I want to carve more time out for reading in 2026.

Likewise, the only game I’ve really played this year has been World of Warcraft, and even then I have a load of gaps in my playtime, dropping out of the last raid.

I’ve also made the decision that the price hike in Gamespass is too great and so in 2026 I’m going back to Steam. I’d rather buy a discounted game, play for a few hours and then move on than pay Microsoft’s exorbitant rates.

I’m planning on going to my first writer’s conference since that Eastercon I got Covid.  I’m still in two minds about Eastercon, but honestly, a lot of the publishing drama just bores me now. It’s petty and short-sighted and I honestly can’t be arsed to argue. I still have friends in the industry who I’d like to connect with again… but maybe when that 5 figures a year becomes 6 or 7. Instead, I’m going on a writing retreat with indie authors where I intend to write some Adrian Faulkner books.

My biggest enemy is time, and the hidden win this year is the work I put into systems to project manage book releases – writing, editing, line editing, ebook production, newsletters, promos. I have interconnecting databases for the lot and feel like I’m doing the work of 5 people, juggling the launch of one book, whilst doing the first draft of another and editing a third.  I put a lot of my success this year into the systems I’ve built in Notion.

So all in all, 2025 was a strange one. On one hand, it was an amazingly successful year, and yet it sucked losing my dad. It was both the best year and the worst. I’m still a little numb from it really, sad that he’ll never get to see the publishing empire I built, but at least he got to see the start.

It’s impossible to predict a year. Nothing ever goes entirely to plan. There’s always complications, and things that slightly alter the focus. After all, 365 days is a long time. But I hope that whether I grow my pen, or put it on ice to develop my books, or do something entirely different, I hope I can grow the momentum I’ve built this year.

When I stepped away from traditional publishing, I couldn’t help but feel it as a bit of a defeat – a “not good enough” – even though, indie publishing makes more sense commercially and artisitically.  There was part of me that felt I needed to prove that, but this year’s success have got me to a healthy point where I don’t feel like I need to prove anything to anyone. I got my first Amazon All-Star Bonus, made the top 500 in both France and Italy, and made more than I dreamed possible with a 4 year old pen name.

I’m doing OK!

The post 2025 – The Year Of Foundations first appeared on Adrian Faulkner.

I very much want to get back into competition. This year, more than most, I’ve missed it, and as my students have now reach a stage where they are ready to start to compete, it’s only going to get worse. I want to be ready and am trying to put in all the right measures to get back in shape.

I started 2024 going on some blood pressure medication. Nothing too serious, but not surprising given my age and weight. But it took a while to get right. The first prescription didn’t agree with me, to the point where I honestly don’t remember much about January and February. But once I had it all under control, I came out of that fog with severe mobility issues. I can’t walk more than a hundred metres without my back and hips locking up and causing me incredible pain.

Getting to the bottom of that has been a journey. I did physio to enable me to do things I could already do. I had a chiro refer me back to the doctor. I had doctors that sent me to the hospital, only for the hopital to refer me back to my GP. I had doctors admit that they hadn’t done the tests they said they had, and then diagnose that my vitamin D was low (although I’ve since learned, it wasn’t that low).  Consequently, I spent much of the year trying to up my Vitamin D intake in the knowledge that it can take a long time to recover from a serious deficiency. I’ve since gone back to the chiro, but they seem to be having no effect.  As a result, I feel I’ve got nowhere.  However, they did confirm that my entire lower back and pelvis are all locked up.

The issue has overshadowed everything. I can’t exercise. I can barely walk. Even simple things like cooking are a painful chore. I’ve not been anywhere this year or really done anything.

No, that’s a lie. Outside of my back and my inability to hobble anywhere other than over the road to the supermarket, the year proved pretty good.

This year at SWOTS (School of the Sword Swindon) I started teaching weapons I’ve not actually studied or taught before. We started the year with Sword & Cape. That was a lot of fun. We then went onto single sidesword. It was my first time teaching or learning any dall’Agocchie. I think it went pretty well. We spent the summer learning two swords, which I really enjoyed, before ending the year with some Alfieri single rapier.

Attendance has been steady but the group has such tight communication that if one of them drops out, they all quickly follow. It’s for this reason that I’ll probably be likely to do an intake this coming year.

Writing also started to come together. My aim for this year was to launch under my own name. Sometime around the summer, I decided I wanted to create a multiverse of books, and then spent most of the summer doing some retconning.

I relaunched The Four Realms in October, with the plan to follow up with a book a month, but then work happened.

I really enjoy my day job. It’s probably the best it can be without it being my own business. I’m good at my job, it has real meaning and my co-workers are lovely people. I secretly think they were worried I might move onto a new position elsewhere when I have no intent or reason to move. So they offered me training as a way to keep me happy. Problem is that with my job, short of doing a law degree, there’s not any training that’s really useful.

But we found a graduate diploma which is basically a law degree with fewer modules, and work agreed to finance it. I’ll believe it when I see it, I thought. Things change so rapidly in the business that I was expecting the budget to disappear before full agreement could be made.

But it all got signed off in October and in mid- November I got access. The problem it’s a full on course. I’ve seen it as a proper opportunity and grabbed it with both hands. But somehow, I’m expected to do 1200 hours of study before exams in April – June and that works out an average of 10 hours a day of study.

So I’ve been in a bit of a panic. I’ve been gifted an amazing opportunity and want to do well, and as a result, almost everything else has been put on the backburner to give me a chance of reaching April with all the study and coursework done.

In doing so, I’ve learnt that I maybe need to prioritise secondary things so that they keep ticking along slowly instead of just being fully delayed.  Even 4 hours of editing a week would help keep the books ticking along while I study.

It’s something I need to perfect in 2025. Luckily I hadn’t really started to build momentum yet so if I have to delay the full ramp up until Summer 2025, that’s a price worth paying… but at the same time it’s annoying. Perhaps if I had thought it likely for it to all be approved and move ahead, I would have planned around it. But we live and learn.

It means that the first quarter to half of 2025 is going to be dominated by study and exams. I’m OK with that. I had planned to go monk mode with the books, anyway. This just changes what I do with that time. It’s not like I can go anywhere with my mobility issues is it?

My only other major aim from last year was to start to learn Japanese. One year on, and I’ve just passed my 1 year streak on Duolingo. I’ve taken my time, refusing to move on until the revision exercises on modules become something I ace every single time. I plan to keep it going in 2025, but will worry less about the leagues. Progress is progress.

So whilst there have been some frustrations, 2024 ends on a lot of promise, both in terms of writing and my career. If I can follow through with those plans without anything coming along to disrupt them, and sort my mobility out, 2025 could end up being very successful.

Hopefully I’ll not only get a new qualification, I’ll get a few books out as well.

But I suspect it’ll very much be a year for keeping my head down and just getting on with things. Who knows though? I should have learned by now that it’s hard to plan out an entire year.

For the mobility issues alone, I won’t miss 2024. It was a pretty boring year for me overall, being unable to go anywhere or do anything. If I could wish for anything for 2025, it would be the ability to move around come 12 months from now.

The post 2024 – The Year of Business first appeared on Adrian Faulkner.

As you know, back at the end of last year, I decided to part ways with my agent and pursue Self-Publishing. This wasn’t born out of any frustrations about the difficulties of traditional publishing and looking for an easier ride. Instead, it was born out of a couple of years of experiments and some realisations that came out of that.

I’m not anti-traditional publishing. I have friends who work in the industry and they are good people. I may do it in the future. But I became aware that they weren’t interested in the type of stories I like. I created a pen name and self-published under that for a couple of years and in doing so realised that the issue wasn’t me.

You see, ever since I was 8 years old, I’ve wanted to tell BIG stories. I wrote a Narnia inspired epic fantasy that my teacher thought was so good, they typed it up and put it into the school library. It was a hundred pages long and has unfortunately long since been lost (probably for the best).

But a few years later I discovered Lord of the Rings and was amazed by the worldbuilding. The Shire felt as real to me as my local area, and I was amazed by the imaginative scope of it. It became my benchmark, with everything I wrote afterwards trying to be more imaginative and bigger in scope.

Along the way, I discovered the importance of character, and this merged into wanting to tell individual stories against a vast canvas.

Because I was so overflowing with ideas, I struggled to bring everything into a single story. The Four Realms was that, a book I’d worked on for years. It’s a cross-genre mash up of ideas and I’m grateful for Andy Remic in believing in me, because no other publisher would take it on. For a start, how do you even market such a book?

I realised that if I wanted to make it in traditional publishing, I needed to constrain myself. Pick one genre and stick to it. But even then, I had bold ideas for arcs that crossed multiple books.

When I first started taking my writing seriously, three book deals were the norm. That gave writers the room to build big, epic arcs. But then authors got asked to wrap everything up in 2 books, and now, unless you are at the top of the top, you’re unlikely to get a book contract for more than one book.

And that causes issues. Because ideas setting up a payoff in a later book get chopped out, and everything becomes a self-contained story that isn’t given the room to grow.

Now, I don’t blame traditional publishing for this… but I got told that I didn’t want to tell big stories, that I’d get bored, that they would become a chore. And I believed them.

But still, I planned out a twenty book series, navigating all the challenges of sell-thrus and different length contracts, only to find out that there are successful authors out there with popular series, who are struggling to get a new contract even when their numbers are good.

And I’ve written 5 book series under my pen name, and sure, I need to figure out a way to keep a wiki on all this stuff… but I do love writing new books in an existing series.

So upon leaving my agent, I really went back to what I love about writing and storytelling in general. And those big epic multi-arc stories somehow had got lost along the way.

By rights, I should start a single new series, write 3 books and then market… but the time spent editing for my agent, also saw me write a LOT of books. Most of these were the first books in series, but there were a couple of second books as well. They’re all very different, but unlike my book I wrote when I was 8, I think these are good.

And so I made a decision.

What if I created a multiverse?  What if all these books and their series were linked cosmere-style and together they painted a HUGE picture… a HUGE epic story. So over the summer, I got planning. I came up with something truly huge.

And unlike the Marvel Multiverse, I’m not writing these series so all the main protagonists meet up and kick ass. I want these stories to weave in and out of each other, in a way that the series can be enjoyed on their own, or as a whole, spanning a lot of books and series.

One of my biggest challenges was magic. In each of my series, there’s a different magic system. So, I also spent the summer building an overarcing structure to magic, that my various magic systems (with a little adjustment) can fit into or co-exist. It was incredibly complicated and involved me building a few computer models to get it to work. The result is that whereas Cosmere has about 30 different magic systems, I have over 300.

To put this to the test, I rewrote The Four Realms. I replaced the magic system so it fits into my global schema without it being too noticeable. It worked, and as a result, the 2024 edition of The Four Realms is out to buy now.

I’m now in the process of retro-fitting the magic structure to other books I have written and are just sitting there. I have an order, and once they are done, they’ll be coming out.

They’ll seem unrelated at first, just a cameo or a reference here or there. With Phase 1 we’re going to be very much be focused on the earth-based stories, although later on, expect to see a couple of fantasy worlds you can assume is off on some distant planet somehow (I mean, I know, but I ain’t telling)

Over the coming years, series will come and go, some having more integration with the central arc, others hardly anything.

I can’t promise that you’ll like every series. I intend to write a lot of different things and so there’s always going to be those that just aren’t to your taste, but I can promise you that over the years, my ideal of what telling a truly epic tale comprises has only grown. Some things will take years to pay off, but I can promise you that when they do, they are going to feel all the more epic because of it.

Most importantly, I cannot begin to tell you, how excited this all makes me… I have a full schedule of book releases to get to you and my plan for the winter is just to go monk mode, keep my head down and start getting all these books released.

I did think of hiding the fact that the books are all connected and let readers work it out, but I figure it makes for a more interesting story for those of you who are interested in the writer side of things to follow along with. It’s certainly not going to be easy, especially with some of the things I want to pull off.

But the good news is that all the planning is over and we’re on our way with the first two contributions: The Four Realms and its prequel novella. Our story has started and we’ve got many, many years before we get close to the end.

*technically, it’s a shared universe but multiverse is better universally understood

The post The Creation Of A Multiverse* first appeared on Adrian Faulkner.

What held me back was the fact that I had a really good agent. Going into 2023 I already had the data to prove that whilst success wasn’t pre-ordained, it was doable. I’d originally planned for my experiment to last the year of 2022, but had extended it a year after my new job stopped me writing for a number of months. My job was (and still is) very satisfying and mentally intense, and as I discovered, the two worst things to have when it comes to writing motivation is job satisfaction and feeling mentally shattered by the end of the work day.

But in extending my experiments with pen names, there was the danger: the self-published market is ever changing. There would always be more experiments to run. Whilst I really enjoyed my secret pen names, I found that it became hard to market when you were hiding yourself. I worried that I’d be stuck in this eternal loop where I would want “just one more experiment” or “another year” to test developments in the marketplace, all the time unable to really unleash the full weight of marketing and unable to be 100% authentic because I wasn’t me.

So I made a big decision for 2023. This would be it. At the end of this year, I’d make a big decision. I’d either deliver a traditional novel or I’d part ways with my agent.

As part of that decision, I chose to go to Eastercon in Birmingham. I was keen to catch up with my traditionally published friends and talk about what I’d been up to. I think there was part of me that wanted them to talk me out of it, to say that I was being stupid or had missed something obvious.

But if I went there looking for a reason to stay on the traditional path, I found only the opposite. I’ve never seen my decision as a battle between trad vs self-published. Both have pros and cons. And what works for one person doesn’t work for another. Instead, I was looking to find my path. Or rather, I was looking for someone to counter the reason and logic I had for what seemed like an obvious path for me.

And I suppose it would come as no surprise, that I came away more convinced than ever that self-publishing was the route for me. At least for the forseeable future. I didn’t go there to burn bridges, only to find personal direction.

It came at a cost though. I finally succumbed to Covid, and whilst the actual covid wasn’t bad, I did suffer with long covid that has plagued me for the rest of the year.

I’d hoped to improve my health in 2023, but I actually got a little worse. Covid sapped me of energy and caused everything to hurt that much more. I’m not going to go into a load of personal detail, but needless to say there has been a lot of steps forwards and backwards. On the plus side, some new medication I was prescribed a few weeks ago has given me a bit more energy, but this is a battle that’s going to last into 2024.

This really scuppered my plans to return to competition. I miss sword fighting at a competitive level, but my fitness levels would not cope with a tournament. I was already relatively old when I was competing so no-one expects me to return. Heck, the people I used to regularly compete with retired from competition in their early thirties. I’m determined to make a comeback, but as this year has proved, it’s going to be a long and difficult path.

It’s not that I’m without motivation though, as 2024 saw the launch of my own swordfighting school. This had been years in the making and almost came to fruition in 2020. However, the pandemic saw to that. It took a lot of work at the start of the year but May saw the launch of my club. I even used the lessons I’d learnt on Facebook marketing my pen name’s books to get all places sold in about 8 hours.

That’s taken a lot of time this year, and I absolutely love teaching. Watching my students grow has been an absolute joy, and a suitable replacement for not being able to fight myself. But dear God, do I miss it.

As I go into 2024, so I’m starting to teach new things. That’s both exciting and scary but I have the first half of 2024 pretty much mapped out and am very much looking forward to the adventure as we continue to grow.

As you can imagine, this had an impact on my writing. I always have high goals. I’d rather aim high and miss, than not push myself enough. I’d wanted to write up to 12 books in 2023. I managed to do 5. Given the job satisfaction and the time my swordfighting school has taken, I think that’s respectable. I learnt a lot and made some HUGE mistakes. I even discovered that one of my books had one key chapter replaced with a copy of a previous one. I still don’t know how that happened, but the important thing was that I was able to recover from it, and whilst I was reluctant to commit, I knew from Eastercon that I needed to part ways with my agent and go it alone. But that was so tied up in my dreams of being a successful author that part of me felt I was possibly making the biggest mistake of my life.

That got countered in the autumn, when an author who I share mutuals with, shared their success. They’d been a successful trad published author, also working on scripts and comics. The pandemic came, and like a lot of people, found that work had dried up. So they decided to self-publish. They started around the same time that I started my experiments so I’d been following their career with interest. They posted that after a number of years their revenue had exceeded 7 figures.

It made me realise a few things. First and most importantly, that going self-published wasn’t a compromise or second-best option. Even with my experiments I was matching some of my trad published friends. And even with all my mistakes, my reviews were still really good. I COULD do this.

But I also realised that launching as me, would mean that I’d be starting at 0 again. There would be new challenges and mistakes, and sure I’d find a way to overcome them. In many ways, it gave me some regret that I’d wasted so long tinkering with pen names. If I’d made the change back in 2021, I might be approaching 7 figures now.

But I also realised this wasn’t just about the money for me. Sure, it was nice, but this was in fact about being able to tell the stories I want to tell. It was freedom. Heck, if I wanted to write a series that only 2 people read, that seemed more important to me, than writing stuff I didn’t properly love.

I love the epic. I want to write sagas. I want inter-connected series. Self-publishing feels like freedom to me. No worrying about whether I need to cram a trilogy into 2 books due to contracts. I have a good job, and yes it’s been incredibly busy and stressful this year, but I still got 5 books out. If I can continue that pace I can afford to ‘take my time’ financially and write the books I want.

In many ways, this reminds me of my old A-F days. Back in 2000 or 2001 I made the decision to change the tone of the site. I went from trying to be like everyone else running a neutral news site – trying to convey professional journalism to the point where the content was incredibly dry – into something more like AICN (a big film news site in the day) where the passion ran off the page. It was both a creative and strategic decision, and one that propelled me.

Likewise, I feel self-publishing is that mix of creativity and business. I get why it’s not for everyone, and one of the big lessons I need to learn is to not derail myself when things go wrong. Part of that is solved by treating this as a business.

I question why I can work with the CEO in my day job and make decisive decisions, and yet wonder why I am filled with doubt and indecision with my writing. I realised there’s something about working for someone that distances me a little from the outcome. So, as a psychological hack, I’m giving my writing business a fictional CEO who I work for. That way, when something goes wrong, I can sort it out for them, rather than beat myself up and let it impact my output.

My indecision meant that as I reached the end of the year, I’d still not parted ways with my agent. I had a great new book, and there was a part of me that was like “perhaps she’ll like this one”, despite her having told me that she doesn’t like contemporary fantasy.

So I came to the conclusion that this book would be the first of books I release under my own name. I felt like releasing Black as Knight would be too obvious, and give people the wrong impression that my decision to go self-published was purely based on rejection sensitivity. Black as Knight will be coming, but not before 2025.

In December, I finally parted ways with my agent. No drama or hard feelings. I’d always said that it would either be the greatest or worst decision, and you know, a few weeks on… I’m feeling optimistic about the future. I have so much to do and (given that xmas is so disruptive) I’ve been itching to get on with it.

It means my gaming is probably going to take a hit. I remain, as always, a World of Warcraft fan. I still raid, but I can only make one night a week, so my gear score has suffered. I’ve been enjoying dragonflight but I burned out on Mythic+ by the summer. A couple of friends and I started a new Minecraft survival server and that’s proved to be a lot of fun as we’ve built huge bases. I’ve spent some time over xmas working on a netherbase. I want this to be something we dip in and out of. I took some time off to play a bit of Balder’s Gate 3 – clearly game of the year for me – and it was great to come back and find one of my friends had done loads to our main base. Likewise, he has been away so it’s been fun to do some stuff with the netherbase ready for his return.

I’ll probably still dip into games throughout 2024. There’s a new Warcraft Expansion I’ll take holiday for, but I want to use some of that on writing conferences. I just hope I avoid Covid this time, as long covid serious wrecked parts of my year.

2023 was my year of making. I made 5 books, I made a swordfighting school, I made big decisions. Sure, I never got to everything, but I’ve always been about setting my goals impossibly high and enjoying the result. I felt I made a lot.

2024 is about building my writing career. I realise that in many ways I’m starting from 0 again. Sure, the pen names have given me a lot of insight and knowledge so I’m not coming into this green. Those books still earn royalties as well.

But I’m building my name from nothing. I have to build a portfolio of books as me, and I doubt I’ll see any traction until I’m 5 books in. That’s a lot of hard work and comes with its own challenges, but that’s part of the fun of running a business. I’m determined to have fun doing so, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be challenges.

So it’s probably no surprise that 2024 is going to be my Year of Business. It’s going to be exciting. I’ll be able to talk about books without fear of friend polluting my market data. I’ll be able to take what I’ve learned and apply it. But let’s not kid anyone… I need to write a lot.

However, I’ve set my target lower this year. With writing under my own name comes a lot of self-doubt so I’m going to be kind to myself. The aim is 8 instead of 12. The reality is hopefully 3 or 4.

We’ll see. As part of my promotion, I’ll be bringing back The Climb next year but probably as a weekly newsletter (although you may get it as a blog until I have all my newsletter funnels and magnets properly set up). I’m going to wait until I have a book to release before pushing ahead with marketing, but you should see me more active on socials this year. I need to learn TikTok.

2024 is going to be exciting and challenging, and that’s before the year has even begun. My aim is to write this update in a year’s time with several books released. If I can report that, then 2024 will have been a success.

But I have no doubt it’s going to be a wild ride.

The post 2023 – The Year of Making first appeared on Adrian Faulkner.

Not that the Black as Knight submission process didn’t hurt. It did. After spending 8 years on that book, for it to spend another 8 months on submission, only for it to then fail at the last approval… was very tough! After that happened in March 2021, I needed some time off to feel all the disappointment.

I started bouncing back around May, and after discussions with my agent, I came up with a few book ideas. The one I ultimately worked on was called The Accursed.

I spent most of that summer doing two things: writing that book and learning all I could about story structure. I watched a lot of YouTube and read a lot of books on plot and story theory. Why? Because I never wanted to spend 8 years editing a book again. I’d get The Accursed right the first time, and only need light edits.

The Accursed was a complicated book. It had several points of view, with the idea that at key points within the book, there would be flashbacks to give new insight into the characters. I’d plotted it out as a 4 act structure.

Except, as I came to the end of the third act, I realized that the book really needed to end there. It was a natural conclusion. It was already 150,000 words long. But I then had a book that was now missing its final act. And on top of that, I realized that I had one point of view that had about 2 of the 150 chapters of that book.

So I ended up with the very thing that I didn’t want: a messy first draft. People think it was Black as Knight that broke me. It was actually The Accursed.

The thought of having to pull that book apart and fix it got me questioning my love of writing.

I reached early autumn trying to find my love of writing. I tried a few projects – my video series, The First Draft was one, trying to get me to enjoy the mess. But you’ll notice that everything suddenly dried up.

So here’s what actually happened.

In my research, I found a group of writers who wrote fast and published on Kindle. They made decent money as well. They published extremely detailed instructions on what they did as well.

I’ll admit, after 8 years on Black as Knight, the idea of writing a short story and having it on sale by the end of the week felt so freeing. But I had fears as well. What if I did that, and I was terrible?

And that’s when some suggested a pen name. If those books got 1 star reviews, I could just bin the pen name.

The instructions also taught a lot about self-publishing as well. They went into metadata and how to do your own covers. Given I’d done a bit of games writing and tried a few screenplays, I thought this might be another thing to diversify my talents.

My aim wasn’t to be good, it was to have a safe space in which to learn and fail. I felt like a failure and needed something to regain my confidence in private. It was also a challenge. I had a week to write, edit and produce a 12k word short. It seemed impossible.

But I tried it and quickly found insights about myself. When I was under pressure and didn’t have time to think, I inevitably made the right decision. I learned to love the messy first draft because I now had 8 years of experience of rewriting and editing and had become good at fixing drafts. I just needed to trust myself.

There was no time for anything else. I was a conveyor belt, churning out these stories. In one month, I wrote 250,000 words. And I know what you’ll say? “Were they good words?” They were certainly fixable as those books got plenty of 5 star reviews on both Amazon and Goodreads.

This was a revelation to me. I could write a good book, and fast, but I had to get out of my way, and just get on with the work.

That’s not to say I didn’t make mistakes, but I took the profits I made to finance improvements. I got a lifetime license to ProWritingAid to help with editing. I bought another lifetime license to Plottr to help with planning out books. I bought Atticus to help with ebook production.

By the end of 2021, I was making more money pro rata than my traditionally published novelist friends. This provide to me that everything that original article had said about self-publishing was right.

I took the mindset that this was all an experiment. That this was me dipping my toe in the waters to get a feel for how hot the waters were. Did I want to write short stories for ever more? No.

So I wanted to take it further and see how this worked with novels. I had one problem, though. My agent contract said that commercial novels had to go through her. And I didn’t want to break that contract. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go self-publishing at that point. This wasn’t about money, it was about understanding the landscape. I just wanted to learn so I could make an informed decision.

So I decided to go short. I started a new pen name and wrote ‘novels’ around 40-50k in length – far under the commercial limits traditional publishers want. My plan for 2022 was to write up to 12 of these, and see how they did. I came to the conclusion that I’d get to the end of 2022 and decide which market (traditional or self-published) was best for me.

After burning myself out a bit on shorts, I wanted to slow down a little but I could still write a book inside a month. But I had a complication.

I changed day jobs and moved into quite a demanding role. It required (and still does require) a lot of thinking so come the end of the day I was too knackered to write. So in July 2022, I decided to put the plan on hold for a while – at least until I had settled down in my new job.

In the meantime, I used income to pay for some recommended courses on advertising. So whilst I wasn’t working on my self-publishing experiments, I was still learning and growing.

I also tried my hand at another novel to send to my agent and the traditional market. By this time, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my writing career, but I thought it would probably involve some hybrid of trad and indy publishing. But still, the thoughts of being tied to a book a year, and the prospect of 8 years of edits, really turned me off.

I picked things up again in 2023. I went to Eastercon and had a great time. It was good to catch up with people I’d not seen since before the pandemic. Most of them were now traditionally published, and part of me wanted to come away with a renewed passion for trad publishing. However, hearing of all their challenges and issues with the marketplace meant that the only thing I came back with was Covid.

Still, I gave myself a hard deadline of the end of the year to make a decision. It gave me time to think but also more time to experiment. I certainly had my own challenges, but unlike my trad published friends, I was in a position to fix them. I made yet more mistakes, but all of them were fixable.

I released 5 books in 2023. I made mistakes; I learned a lot. It certainly wasn’t easy. The mindset is very different. I see a lot of trad published authors see the extra work being in the production. That’s the easy part. It’s the marketing that’s the challenge.

In the meantime, an author who I share mutuals with made a post in one of the private groups I’d joined over the past two years. They’d started self-publishing around the same time as I started my experiments, but had jumped in with both feet. In just a couple of years, they’d made over a million. And the only difference was that they’d committed from the outset. It made me realize that I could always find more to experiment with, but until I fully committed, I’d always be half-arsing it.

So we get to this month, my final release of the year and the end of two years of experiments.

I’ve learned so much. That’s the biggest downside to self-publishing. There’s a wealth of information and you either have to be really selective and improve as you go along, or you’ll be overwhelmed. Even now, I’m looking at the current buzz for direct sales and wondering if that’s something I should be diving into, or leaving for further down the road.

On one hand, those experiments allowed me to gain the knowledge and confidence that I can do this thing. I was willing to take risks because the worst that could happen would be that I just move to a new pen name. But if I’d taken the plunge, I could have been 2 years further ahead. This whole process feels like starting at square one again.

Except, I’m starting with 2 years of knowledge.

Either way, my opinion hasn’t changed since Eastercon. For what I want to write, traditional is an ill-fit. Book contracts are getting shorter, which means huge overarching stories are near impossible unless you are already established. And yes, if you do well, you’ll likely get a new contract, but to me that’s the difference between an HBO miniseries and one that gets written and filmed while the season is airing.

I’m certainly not anti-trad publishing. I think for some people it’s certainly the right path, and who knows, maybe one of my projects in the future might be better suited to it. But after spending the last two years learning, I’d prefer to have more control.

I look at trad publishing marketing and its last year’s Indy tactics. I totally understand why, and I’m not knocking it. But it used to be that trad publishing was the safer option to Indy publishing. I really don’t believe that now.

And I’m not saying this is what everyone should be doing. As I said, I have no hate for trad publishing, and I’m still going to champion my trad published friends. But this has felt right for me for a while now, and despite trying hard to convince myself otherwise, that view hasn’t wavered.

This isn’t a shortcut. This is a strategic decision that is probably going to take me years to bring to fruition. My plan isn’t to take my trunk novels and publish them next week. Sure, I will probably revisit some and release, but down the line.

Hence why I’m writing the start of a new series that I plan to release in 2024. At times, it feels like I’m back at square one again, but at other times, I’m talking to someone and mention some nugget or other of information I’ve learnt that forms part of my strategy. It’s then I realize that even though the market constantly changes and there will always be new things to learn, I’m not going into this blind, but with the experience of having published 26 books over the last 2 years.

The post What I’ve Done For The Last 2 Years first appeared on Adrian Faulkner.

Now, when things like this happen, people often wonder if there is some drama behind it. Publishing is full of scandal and people acting inappropriately, so I understand the interest, but there’s no drama.

I’ve been with my agent for 8/9 years and she’s been amazing. I got her through sheer luck. Close to a decade ago, a group of friends and I were at an Eastercon, hoping to break into the market. One or two of us were just breaking in, getting their first agent and readying books for submission. It inspired the rest of us, so we made a deal that we would all return from that Eastercon and submit to agents.

I think because this was a challenge, it made me a little braver than usual. I took a list I had from Publisher’s Marketplace of the best agents in the world and applied to the top 5. And then I forgot about it.

Over the next few weeks, I moved on with my life, occasionally getting a rejection. Probably because I had stepped outside of my comfort zone and gone for the very top, these rejections didn’t sting. I was expecting them.

But then, about 2 months after I submitted, I got a message from one of them saying she’d like to speak to me. I was in Oklahoma at the time, chasing storms, and the fact I had an agent who was interested floored me.

Roll forward to a few weeks when I was home, I had a twentyish minute call and, at the end, she offered to represent me. I couldn’t believe it. I had just secured one of the best agents in the world.

“How did you manage that?” my friends asked me.

“I have no idea,” I replied, as much in shock as them.

Of course, there were going to be edits, and when they came back early that summer, they were extensive. That was when my imposter syndrome really kicked in. It sent me for a real loop. I don’t think I ever really got over it.

The result was that my edits were very slow, and being the bottom of her priorities, responses were as slow. Requests to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite compounded this. I spent eight years rewriting that novel, and each rewrite just compounded my imposter syndrome. That was no fault of my agent.

We finally went on submission in summer 2020 and the book failed to sell at the last hurdle. Again, these things happen, and I gave myself time to be upset with it. But it left me with a feeling of unhappiness with my writing.

It wasn’t until I wrote other books that I realised what was killing my love of writing was the prospect of potentially spending another 8 years editing, while some of that original friend group has gone onto publish 9 novels.

When I went quiet 2 years ago, it was to try something in secret. I wanted to find my love of writing again, but I wanted the space to fail in private. At the same time, I watched the market intensely.

I reached a tentative conclusion back at Easter, where I met up with friends again and had a long chat about our collective experiences.

The conclusion was that I wanted to go the Indy Publishing route, but I’d said I would wait until the end of the year and then make a firm decision.

I know some people will be surprised. Some will think my motives are purely to spite those who rejected me, or that I can’t get over the rejection of the book. I honestly have no issues with Traditional Publishing and I’m not saying I won’t ever go back.

Nor is this just a plan to publish Black as Knight. Indeed, the first book I intend to publish is an entirely different world.

Instead, my justification is purely a business one. We’re approaching a time of incredible upheaval in publishing. Publishing is always on the verge of dying, and I don’t see it going away. But big six-figure deals are going to become rarer. In the meantime, I know authors who are pulling in 6 figures a month self-publishing.

It’s not all about money. Deals are getting shorter. It used to be 3 book deals were commonplace, then it became 2 book deals and now it’s book by book. Likewise, unless your book is a huge release, your book will not get a lot in the way of marketing.

By self-publishing, I get more control. I also get more risk. It’s not easier, it’s just different.

It’s a completely different market as well. Some authors make the mistake that it’s about production and stock, when it’s really about sales funnels, KU vs wide, targeted marketing, and sell-thru. I have amassed a lot of knowledge in the last 2 years and still I’m learning. Heck, I was speaking to someone today about email open rates today.

I also look at the big writers like Brandon Sanderson who, with his kickstarter, has become a publishing company.

It used to be that a publishing company could produce and market a better book than anyone could on their own. I honestly don’t believe that’s true anymore.

So ultimately it came down to a business decision for me. And with two years of data in front of me, the answer was obvious. Didn’t make it any less scary, though.

However, with this change in direction, I have no need for an agent. Maybe if I do well and want to license paperback or movie rights, but I’ll cross that bridge if I ever come to it. For now, the focus is on getting books out.

So I ended our relationship. There’s no malice or ill will; no drama or shenanigans. I’m just moving on, and we’ve wished each other every success.

This will not be quick. I estimate it’s going to take me 3 or 4 years to find my feet. But that’s 3 or 4 years of building backlist and revenue. And I’m going to make some huge mistakes along the way.

I’ve had quite a few people tell me that what I’m doing is incredibly risky, and they’re right. But the last time I felt this confident was back in the early days of running AF, when I decided to shift the tone. Then, just as now, people told me I was wrong. People told me that a site based out of the UK could never compete with the US. I always remembered that when I was swamping superbowl numbers and burning out motherboards from the sheer level of traffic.

Maybe this endeavour won’t be as successful, but I’m excited about writing again and relishing the challenge.

I’ll post another blog in the next few days on what I’ve done over the past two years in order to reach my decision but just know, I anticipate releasing novels in 2024.

I’ve not yet finalised how I’m going to document my progress, but it should be a wild ride.

The post Moving On first appeared on Adrian Faulkner.

In many ways, 2021 was my annus horribilis. I started the year being dreadfully ill–something caused by the events of 2020–and the further I get away from that time and continue the long process back to full health, the more I realise how ill I was. I also had somewhat of an unpleasent encounter with publishing. Several of my friends still work there, but some have left and told a similar story to me.

So in many ways, whilst I soldiered on, and kept The Climb running as much to hold myself accountable as to document my life, so I found there was more and more that I couldn’t talk about.

That was very much the case in late 2021, where I started on a bit of an experiment. Some of those things like Write Productively and The First Draft were part of that experimentation, but there were other things I did that I never told a soul about.

And whereas I found the public elements a little bit pressurised, I found the secret stuff freeing. With the video projects there were expectations, deadlines, deliverables. With the other projects, I had no public accountability.

And so that was why I went quiet at the end of last year. I wanted to broaden the experiment, but I wanted to be in an environment where no-one knew but me, where I was able to try things others might advise against, fail incredibly hard and learn important personal lessons.

After such a shitty year, I ended 2021 in a position where I had written more than I ever had done, 99% of it trash. I had also found new ways to work, developed processes and systems to support that. The question was, could I scale that?

My biggest challenge and the aim for 2022 was in being consistent.

I often like to think my theme for the year isn’t a reflection of the year as a whole, but the thing I will strive for as the year goes on. So in approaching 2022 my aim was to make myself consistant. I wanted to maximise my productivity without having mad sprints that would leave me burnt out. I wanted something more sustainable where I could achieve goals by chipping away at them, not dropping everything else and only doing that one thing for months on end.

And looking back now, whilst the year did not go how I would have liked it, I found consistency in ways I hadn’t really planned.

The thing that really torpedoed my plans as I saw them was my day job. I began looking for a new permanent job in March / April and started with a new company at the beginning of July. And whilst a lot of my motivation to write had, in recent years, been derived from hating my job, I loved this new place. The people are amazing and nice; the attitude is can-do, and the job is fulfilling. In fact, the only ‘downside’ is that the role is very demanding. It’s a massive step up from what I had been doing, and I really needed to put all my mental focus into it.

I don’t regret it, even though I didn’t have the mental energy to jump into the writing at the end of the work day. I was in a position where I could really add value to the company and see the impact of my efforts.

As a result, I delayed any writing for 3 months while I settled in, but then encountered a new problem.

So much of my drive to write had come from wanting to get away from my 9-5 that now I had an enjoyable and fulfilling job, the motivation to write wasn’t as strong.  My year had already been torpedoed.  My plan for consistency was in ruins, replaced by a year of stability.

I still wanted to do my scaled up 12 month experiment  (because I want to know), but with a new World of Warcraft expansion due at the end of the year, I knew starting it there and then was probably a bad idea.  So the plan is to run my secret 12 month experiment next year. I’m finding I’m becoming more and more against things starting on New Year. It just seems all to often to be a way to procrastinate. But it made sense in this case.

So 2022’s experiment gets pushed to 2023, and whilst that was my main focus of consistency, that’s not to say that things haven’t been done in the last year.

As anyone who knows me will testify, I like my systems. My productivity runs on the systems I’ve built for myself. And far from getting sucked into the productivity sinkhole, I find these are of real benefit to me and answer an actual need.

This year I overhauled a few systems.

I’ve had a personal accountability daily tracker for a number of years now, mainly to tell my old job what I’d been working on, but I revamped it this year.  I widened the accountability to the whole day, added areas for tracking things like reading, music and learning (I already had trackers for writing). I built an amazing gamification of my productivity but it practically broke Notion so I moved it into an embedded excel sheet. I also included areas for tracking my goals, and analysing where things go wrong.

I’ve extended this to the weekly and monthly views, which whilst I think there’s further work that can be done, feeds upon what I did in the daily tracker.

I built myself a master tags database, allowing me to add notes to my daily tracker of things I encounter which may be of use to future me without having to take the effort to build specific pages for them in Notion.

I’ve also gone over my goals and milestones and for 2023 completely revamped them to be much more focused and trackable. For someone who hates milestones, this has been a huge piece of work. I occasionally find myself looking at these productivity Youtubers who have built themselves second brains that I would have once marveled at, only to now think their systems are a little more basic than mine.

And the result is more than just a procrastination exercise. My system is built for me, and it certainly works for me.  My systems are built as a safety net to help me when things get busy rather than a prison, and so some days I use them more heavily than others. But it’s allowed me to be productive in my work. I use ToDoist for my tasks and saw my greatest ever streak (only ending when I forgot to turn it off when I took time off).

If there’s one area I have been consistent this past year, it’s in gaming. During the pandemic, I leaned on World of Warcraft heavily as my escape. As I moved into the experiments and then a new job, it has proved to be a way to recharge.

In 2021, with the Blizzard accusations of sexual harassment, a lot of people (including me for a time) stopped playing the game, resulting in the disbandment of my guild. I went back to my main back at the end of last year and started working on alts. I found new fun in collecting things and managing a vast array of alts. That eventually meant spreadsheets to track each character, what they had done, what they needed to do, and the like.

This summer saw a change allowing horde and alliance from different servers to play together. As a result, back in September, I was able to join some of my old guildees, along with new friends, and raid with them.  Raiding with my main has been a dream for ages, and I even got to tank, where I rediscovered just how much I love tanking.

It’s meant I’ve been able to go into Dragon flight with my main as my raiding main, and I’m having a blast having already cleared the raid on normal, and running Mythic+ as a tank.

I’d hoped I would have been burned out a little by now (giving me more time for some of my other 2023 goals) but that doesn’t seem to have happened yet. Some of my 2023 goals do relate to progressing my huge array of alts, but in many ways, the consistency I have found there is something I’m looking to emulate elsewhere.

One of those big areas is fitness. Now my health is much better than it was in early 2021, I’ve been focused on losing the weight I gained whilst ill. It’s a long road and often feels like 2 steps forward and 1 step back (which is still better than a few years ago where everything was in rapid decline).

My aim for 2023 is to slowly get back in shape. The fact I’d made so much progress by getting medical conditions under control only for them to be brought to chaos by individuals that looked to actively exploit them is something I get constantly reminded of whenever I try to make progress. It’s a long road to being back where I was, and it’s littered with reminders of people who make me unbelievably angry.

I still can’t fit in my fencing jacket so HEMA is currently off the cards, but I do plan to open a school early next year (if I can sort out a venue) and want to be in a position where I compete in my first tournament by year end.

I’ve still been super involved, running the websites for both SOTS and Wessex League. I did a massive hosting migration this autumn, where I moved a lot of the sites I host to a new provider. My old provider who I’ve hosted on for years, has deteriorated over the past few years to the extent that when they did internal migrations, they broke underlying systems and never fixed them. They also stopped providing some services, started charging for others, and it became a massive job just to maintain very simple sites.

The move was a mammoth piece of work. I still have sites and domains to move, and whilst I’d hoped to get it all done by the end of the year, I’ve done most of them already.

Now a lot of the work is done, I can focus on content on those sites (which has been sporadic this year)

Last year was very silent on the social media front. A lot of this was intentional. My idea was to disappear and be forgotten while I experimented with things. A lot of it was also due to being exhausted at the end of a long day at work.

As part of my systems upgrades in 2022, I built myself some Social Media tracking systems. The tracking is working consistently but I’ve not really made a lot of effort to create new content. I want to start doing that in 2023, but more from a place of just being consistent rather than there being a big overall social media plan. Something I learnt in 2021 (and my big take away for the year) was that I need to get out of my own way.

By that I mean that I’m more likely to learn and plan, wanting everything to be perfect before proceeding, only to then get thrown off when I get thrown a curve ball. Historically, I’d then go back and refine systems to prepare for this eventuality before proceeding, impacting my consistency.

I have nothing against having those systems in place, because I honestly believe that for 2022, the upgrades I made to mine are a real investment. Neither do I think learning is bad. I’ve done a lot of major learning this year and see it as a worthwhile investment.

But sometimes the best way to learn is to do, or learn WHILE you do. That’s easier said than done when there’s some form of accountability or a deliverable at the end or a fixed system that will break.  I think my systems over the last few years have been very flexible, but the thing that wasn’t was me.

In my experiments in late 2021, the thing I learnt was that if I didn’t continually stop and evaluate, wonder and debate with myself, I made huge progress.

By having systems for review and tracking, it’s helped me alleviate the need to do that, but there’s a need for me to proceed when I feel 75% ready, not when I feel 100% ready. This is a real mindset change, but one that I found very true.

I also have systems for planning, and I can give you one example. I used to spend a lot of time on plotting. It’s still a bit of a dark art to me. My editing used to feel like that but I worked out a system to edit that’s massively sped it up AND improved accuracy.

I spent the summer of 2021 looking at plotting. I watched a bunch of videos on the subject; I read a load of books, looking at not only novels but scripts and plays.

I used a lot of this knowledge to start building more robust plots and whilst I wouldn’t say I am beholden to any one ‘method’, I use a variety of them to layer over my plot and spot potential issues. I look at plot arcs, emotional arcs, and character arcs. I now plot in Plottr and export to Scrivener to write.

I think it’s helped to strengthen my plotting. So much so that a novel I wrote before all this plot work, really needs a rewrite because I can identify a number of minor issues with the plot. Those systems are worthwhile because they allow me to take action quickly (Yes, I know I’ve not rewritten that novel as a result, but… 2022!)

So if I stop trying to second guess myself, have systems in place that are comprehensive, flexible and that I trust, I can get on with the actual work.

In many ways, the aim of my experiments is to identify the areas where I second guess myself and put things in place so I don’t.

It is, therefore, unlikely to be a surprise that 2023 is the Year of Making. It’s a year for not feeling fully ready despite having everything in place and doing anyway.  It’s a year for getting out my own way, for doing the work and not letting the distractions and outside influence derail me. And I have no doubt that like 2021, it won’t be a year where that’s what I’m actually doing all year, but something that I work towards.

I would like to get all those secret projects done though!

The post 2022 – The Year Of Consistency first appeared on Adrian Faulkner.

Going into 2021,2021, we were still very much in Lockdown Life, but despite that I felt things were I felt things were making progress. I’d just managed to deal with an issue that was affecting my health and causing me a lot of stress, so I was looking forward.

But that issue had really affected my health, and I can say now, sitting on the eve of 2023, more than I realised. I mean, everyone was down and depressed, but I’d just got rid of a major cause of stress. What I didn’t realise was how slowly my body reacts to change and my health continued to decline to the point where in February I was a lot more ill than I realised at the time. Perhaps I didn’t want to see it. I had spent years getting myself from nearly losing a leg to an athlete competing at the European Games, only for it to be ruined by idiots I would have fired on the spot.

But with that behind me, I had one of those rare times in my life where I had time to consider what to do next for a while. I wanted to write, but if I was to do that, I needed to be super productive. I also had a book under consideration at a publishers.  2021 felt like a new start.

But that deal fell through at the last hurdle, for reasons there were frankly ridiculous and more than one person believed based in everyday bigotry. If they’d hated the novel, I would have been upset, but I would have carried on. Instead, I was left with a lot of questions, answers that I didn’t get until much later on in the year when I spoke to people who were at the company. Should I have made a fuss? Honestly, I don’t want to be an author who succeeds just because I made a platform for myself on being treated unfairly. Whilst I want to market myself to maximise returns, I don’t want to do it by claiming I was treated unfairly. I’d already had one such fight, I had no energy for another.

Instead, I would channel the reasons into an experiment later on in the year, but more on that later.

I’m proud how I kept going after that whammy when I felt so rough. Part of it was pride. I should have taken more time away, rest, but I dove right in, taking that experience and turning it into an invisible chip on my shoulder to drive me on. I started a new novel.

I took a lot of time that summer to study theorycraft. I’ve always felt plotting was my weakness, so I spent ages watching loads of youtube videos on story theory. I looked at screenplays, romance novels, everything. What I didn’t want was to produce something formulaic, but to take these things I’d learnt onboard as tools that I could use them as reviews to see where there could be potential issues.

I learnt a lot, felt I’d developed a lot as a writer because of it. So I started a mini experiment, writing short stories using what I’d learnt. I did this totally anonymously – never told a soul – as I wanted to be free of expectation, even from myself.

Because these stories didn’t matter, I looked at writing faster. I quickly realised that I would get in my own way too often. I’d stop, consider and take a break from the writing while I figured out a particular problem. I was seeking perfection in a first draft, and whilst that’s meant I’ve learnt to write very clean first drafts in the past, it slowed me down. It also screwed up my editing because I always saw other writers doing heavier edits when mine were either full rewrite or nothing. I realised if aimed at a 80% perfect first draft instead of a 100%, I had a much clearer idea of what needed to be edited.

So I changed the way I edited to give myself the confidence to write less perfect first drafts, refused myself any breaks from the work, even if I felt it was all going off the rails and needed a moment to consider. I just wrote.

And wrote.

And wrote.

By the end of the year I was doing 250,000 words a month.

I’d just spent 6 months writing a novel that, from my new found understanding of plot, had some potential issues and needed completely deconstructing. What an inefficient use of time compared to my current method.

And because those million of words I wrote in the fall of 2021 were completely anonymous, I was able to get feedback on them in secret ways that people never knew.  And the biggest surprise was how good the feedback was…. I mean… it was stellar!

I think that saved my writing, because after having my confidence crushed earlier in the year, I was able to prove that those feelings I’d felt at the beginning of the year were justified. And I actually had fun writing for the first time in ages.

I effectively, radically changed the way I plotted, wrote and edited, and it was a massive success.  But I wanted to scale it in 2022.

All those systems I put into place allowed me to be a writing machine and allow me to be super productive, but I wanted to scale in many ways that I still can’t fully explain without outing myself and my experiment  (spoiler, a new day job kinda wrecked the experiment so I pushed it back to 2023)

So if my aim in 2021 was to become super productive, I found a way to do it.  But it came with a cost.

I needed all the time.  250k words in a month is no joke, even less of a joke when they are quality words. That would be 2 full novels a month! Hence why The Climb stopped. I needed that time, plus the things I was doing I couldn’t talk about.

However, other things dropped off the radar. I became super focused on one thing and everything else went by the wayside. Hence my goal for 2022 – The Year of Consistency.

I needed a way to ensure that while I was focused on this one thing, the other things were still ticking along. I’d happily drop to 125k words a month if it meant the other stuff got done.

So that’s where I ended in 2021. After a shit start to the year, I picked myself up, and started squirreling away in silence, beholden to no-one, finding myself a safe writing space where I could push myself, happily fail and then be pleasantly surprised when I proved myself unexpectedly right.

I have the systems and processes in place to do what I want to do. I’ve invested in systems and tools to help me (from trackers I’ve built myself in things like Notion to off-the shelf software to help with various tasks). I’ve put time into learning to come out of 2021 much stronger than I entered it.

And whilst 2022 did put a major hiccup in plans for further experimentation, I’m hoping that 2023 can take advantage of the groundwork I laid down in 2021.

The post 2021 – The Year Of Productivity first appeared on Adrian Faulkner.

Today was another busy day. 

I’ve got a lot to write, a lot to edit and a lot to read. 

I managed to do the first two. 

My problem is that reading takes time, and I think I really need to do these outlines as I read the books I’m learning craft from.  There’s also a temptation to skip bits in order to execute fast.  I think that’s a mistake.  By all means work fast, but don’t take shortcuts. 

However, a lot of this preparatory work seems needless.  I need to write the story in several different ways, write various sample chapters, blurbs and just about everything.  I get that the idea is to ensure you really understand what the story is about, but at the moment, this feels like overkill. 

So I’m really fighting to skip those parts, saying I already understand them.  To do that would be to possibly ignore some key part of the craft that this outlining book details.  Plus, I promised myself I would try this process.  I committed, and when I did so, that also meant the bits that might seem a bit redundant. 

I keep thinking back to that time in the summer where a good word count day was ruined by the fact that I’d caught up with myself.  I knew the next major beat, but in having so many characters and character arcs, weaving the scenes became a challenge, and I needed to stop and take stock. 

I don’t want to do that. 

So I’m hoping this process will help with that, even if I have to write this story 50 different ways. 

Speaking of Word Count, I’m finding my count rising.  I managed to write over 7500 words today, and edit 10k.  I might want to go over those 10k quickly tomorrow because I’m still getting the hang of integrating software into my editing process.   

My aim is to get 80% accuracy on a first pass, rather than 100% and attack stories in waves rather than try to get them perfect in a single draft.  Of course, if I could do that, I wouldn’t complain. 

So whilst I still have a load to do and this week will not let up with how busy it is, today went well. 

I’m thinking I can push my word count higher.  I think just under 10k might be my limit before quality starts to drop.  Up until that point, my only erros seem to be just typos and the odd clunky sentence.  But I lose a lot of writing time as I’m still terrible at backspacing half a sentence because I typoed a word and have a need to correct it there and then.  I’m getting better but it will take practise… something I will have plenty of opportunity for this week. 

I still keep feeling I’m going to crack and burn out at some stage, but I think I have enough diverse projects I’m juggling that if one becomes a bit laboprious, I can swap to another for a time. 

All of this is a product of understanding myself as a writer and building processes that suit the way I write.  I just hope this new outlining method, despite the shaky start, proves to be a major leap forward to ensure that my developmental edits are kept to an absolute minimum. 

Fingers crossed. 

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Past Years: 2020 – The Year of Being Fearsome | 2019 – The Year of Soldiering Through | 2018 – The Year of Priorities | 2017 – The Year Of The Offensive

The post Writing, Editing, Reading – The Climb #976 first appeared on Adrian Faulkner.

I’m feeling pretty good with myself today.  I started late today and thought I wouldn’t get many words done, but I ended up getting over 5.5k done.  And this was despite the focus of the day being on outlining the novella. 

Surrounding myself with focused, business-minded, and fast writers has really pushed me in the last couple of weeks.  I feel my process has massively improved over the last couple of months.  I was doing OK during the pandemic, but it often felt like a fight.  Now, I feel I’m more focused, better organised. 

I was turning out around 45k words a month, which wasn’t bad, even if it was spread thin over several projects.  For October, it looks like I’ll have written over 100k and edited over 50k.  As recently as August, that would have seriously burnt me out.  Now, I seem to take the words in my stride. 

Behind this is a realisation.  If I write 1000 words on a project that’s good, but if I write 2000 words I get it done in half the time; 3000 words, a third of the time. 

However, in order to do that,  I need to not be thinking of what to write next.  The problem I had with the first draft of The Accursed was that I’d plan out the next couple of scenes, catch up with myself and then need to break while I figured out the detail for the following scenes. 

Writing fast these past couple of weeks on test shorts has proved to me that I can write fast and have a good level of quality.  BUT, and this is key… shorts don’t need a lot of project management.  Yet, I’m still using a structure and have gone as far as to build a template in Scrivener for my own use. 

The novella is going to see me take this a step further.  And to do that, I need to do a bit of reading.  I was looking at a plot with a four act structure (which is a structure I’ve not used before).  I spent quite a bit of time today reading a craft book on the structure and what it actually means.  I worked on the plot as I read and it’s given me a basic outline for the novella, broken down into scenes.  However, I’m in the process of reading further on how I can take this structure and produce a complete roadmap for the story. 

I’ll be honest and say at the moment that it feels like overkill and I have enough  to start the novella.  But what I’m reading says this is a trap.  They may be right.  I had this level of detail for The Accursed and whilst I never lost the story, I wasn’t always sure about the POV or action that needed to take place in a scene.  As a result, The Accursed took a while to write and is going to take a bit of editing. 

The aim is to avoid that with The Worthy and try to write something that needs little revision.  That means putting the work in at the front end.  That means testing it on the novella.  That means reading about the craft aspect, and following the technique. 

That definitely seems to be a mantra for me at the moment.  I’m good at taking technique whether it be writing or business and adapting it, but I think I need to be better at following to the letter.  I’m going to try it, anyway. 

So the plan is to outline this novella in detail, and then write it quick, remembering all the time that an extra thousand words on a story could halve the time.  And if I continue to write like I have this month… it’s not impossible that I have not only this novella, but the first draft of The Worthy by Xmas. 

Now I’ve gone and blown it by tempting fate! 

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Past Years: 2020 – The Year of Being Fearsome | 2019 – The Year of Soldiering Through | 2018 – The Year of Priorities | 2017 – The Year Of The Offensive

The post Crafting Process And Plots – The Climb #975 first appeared on Adrian Faulkner.