New Books and Old Books revisited

When I reposted this article from Nov 11, 2017 I realized that it would be a great chance to see what had changed from one year ago.

Some things are still the same.

I haven’t been as active as I would have liked with this particular blog. Mostly because I’ve been too busy to write blog entries.  To make matters worse the blog actually disappeared from view due to a WooCommerce/Wordpress glitch and had to be recreated.

Just over four years ago, I was approached to teach live project management courses. I’ve really enjoyed the teaching aspect although it has been an education in how not to run a business and an education in the training industry in general. It did take up a large portion of my time but since it helped fund my course development and writing, I didn’t mind. Besides, I’ve met a large number of project, quality, and change managers as a result. And helped more than a few obtain their PMP designation.

That hasn’t changed much. Even my rate hasn’t changed. However, the amount of teaching I have been doing for The Knowledge Academy has decreased steadily until it is well below the minimum I need to fund my other efforts. As a result I’ve been searching for new companies to teach for. If you know any, please give them my name.

Last year, between the downtimes, I continued to write. I talked about having written two books that grew directly from my teaching a PMP (Project Management Professional) exam preparation course. And that I had the opportunity to ghostwrite several fiction books (I’m not allowed to say which ones). I also said that I really enjoyed writing fiction and was looking forward to writing more. Hopefully, some under my own name.

That hasn’t actually changed all that much. Although I must admit I didn’t produce anywhere near the number of books over the last year that I did the year before. One of the Ace the PMP Exam books was published in 2017. However, the second ended up taking until August 2018 to be finished. I’m hoping that the first will be published as a Kindle ebook by the time this entry is published. We’ll see. One thing I’ve learned is that 50 exercise books are really really boring to write. So I’ll have to rethink any others I write in the series.

I did continue to ghostwrite although I only finished three books last year. One has been published as a paperback. Hopefully all will be published as Kindle eBooks by Christmas. All told I’ve now written about two dozen books since I decided to make a career out of writing.

One thing that still hasn’t changed is that as a result, I’ve had to severely limit my time on other projects. I have been intending for some time to write a book for Project Sponsors and an associated course. I still haven’t managed to make enough time. I also need to convert some of my LearningCreator.com and TrainingNOW courses to sell through Udemy or one of the other course companies. Sometimes I wish it didn’t take so much time to write and produce coursework. I really need to get off my tush and focus on creating a course for resale. So that’s in my plan for 2019.

In November of 2017, I had a major project appear. This is what I said about it at the time.

About a month ago now (October 2017), I was approached by Shirley Meier (Shadow’s Daughter, The Cage, Exodus, and many more) to collaborate with her on a new mystery series set in her beloved Muskoka Lakes district of Ontario. We’ve started the project and I’m very excited about writing it. I’m already in love with the characters and the story. Not to say that things are perfect. This is my first collaboration and her first with me. So we’re feeling our way through the process (her writing method and mine are very different). But I’m feeling excited both about the book and the writing. We each keep saying we need to finish other projects but we seem to be producing a full day’s worth of writing on this book in our spare time. We can’t keep doing this but dang it is exciting to watch, and enjoyable to do.

So watch for my new mystery series … due in 2018.

So what has happened since?

I’m still kinda sorta excited. It turned out to be a lot harder to do that we estimated. And it took up six months of my writing life. Because of the method we had to take to write the book we weren’t able to feed off each other’s excitement. As a result we got about 90% of the book finished but couldn’t quite kill the last few chapters. Making matters worse, we had several structural errors that need to be repaired. While the problems aren’t as serious as we think they are they’ve kind of messed with our heads. Writer’s depression reared its ugly head. Reality … there isn’t that much required to turn this into a saleable book but we’re having trouble finishing it. In October of this year, we got a burst of energy. With luck we’ll finish it and publish in 2019.

However, it did light a fire under me. I had an old Airship/Steampunk story I had started years ago that I’ve done nothing with. When the Ravensbridge mystery hit a wall, I switched to writing that. I’m perhaps 75% done the first book of three. So I’m hoping to publish that in 2019. We’ll see. I’m pretty sure I’ll finish it but as it is my first Science Fiction/Fantasy I’ll want to be extra careful with editing and pre-publication.

So all in all, I wasn’t that far off. The year wasn’t nearly as effective as I had hoped and frankly a lot of things that I was counting on fell apart. But we keep struggling.