Creating each newsletter is a weird beast. There are two things that make getting one out the door difficult. The first is not making any progress. When there’s nothing to report on, I draft something that’s just another writer complaining about being stuck. I don't think many want to read that. On the other hand when I’m making great progress, I’m too busy making progress for the distraction of a newsletter.

These dispatches get written when I’m somewhere in between, either when I’m metaphorically coming up for air after a productive period or when I’m trying to find a rhythm and need to take a break to write something else. I think this one is of the coming up for air variety.

Much has happened since early October, although that’s not reflected in as many words in my manuscript as I would like, I do feel like it’s all been positive.

Going to Can*Con was a success. I had some good conversations, my T-shirt was a catalyst for many of those conversations, and I learned a lot, most of it good, some not so good. I posted some notes to my blog.

[Links to everything below.]

I connected with a friend, Michael Pinkus, to do regular progress review meetings. This worked out well, and it’s interesting to compare notes about our vastly different writing styles. After a few meetings we decided to record our conversations as a podcast, in part to make our accountability more public. I suspect these sessions are only of interest to a few other authors, but what the heck, it’s kind of fun to put them out there.

I discovered a significant problem with a minor character in the novel, who wound up having two deeply incompatible roles. I now have so many characters that I need a cheat sheet to keep track of them, so I spent some time upgrading my NovelWriterExtract tool to create spreadsheets for characters and locations in the story, then went through tagging the characters with a synopsis and some other information I need to keep track. I also discovered a problem with how I’m doing my word counts and fixed that. This resulted in my word count dropping by some 1,800. Not a disaster by any means, but a bit of a blip in my tracking data. Armed with this information, I added a new minor character to take on the incompatible part of the existing character, and tweaked the story to reflect that.

I gave a talk to one of our local writer groups on personal branding, and working book signings and shows. Feedback was generally positive, which helped assuage a bit of imposter syndrome.

With the help of a great bunch of people I don’t know on Mastodon, I spent some time brainstorming for a good title for this story. I got some good ideas but still no light bulb eureka moment. Then just a few days ago, the word I’ve been looking for on-and-off for three years finally popped into my head! I’m virtually certain that this will form part of the book’s actual title. This lifts a disproportionately heavy burden on getting the book done.

I set a goal of finishing the first draft by the end of the year (which requires a massive increase in my output) and promptly ran into a difficult plot problem that has left me with almost no new words while coming up with a solution. The good news is the solution fixes another issue that I’d left to the second draft to resolve. This is reflective of my experience with goal setting, and why I don’t do it that much: as soon as I set a goal, it seems something pops up to make it virtually unachievable. Now the goal is to get as close to completing that draft as I can.

Back in 2022 if someone had told me that I'd still be working on my first novel at the beginning of 2026, I would have been appalled. But if I had finished this thing in 2023, even with the help of great editors, it would have been something I'd already be trying to forget. There has been so much to learn along this journey, both on the writing and publishing sides. I have a feeling that there's still much more to learn, but at the same time I really do not want to be sitting here at the end of 2026 with nothing published. There are more stories waiting in the wings, impatiently.

What I’ve Been Reading

Mostly non-fiction, all on the subjects of book marketing and production. My To Be Read pile continues to grow.

Thanks!

Thanks for reading my newsletter. If you have any comments, questions, suggestions, etc. you can reach me by replying to this message.

Links

• ​Notes From Can*Con 2025​
• ​The ​“​No Hook” Podcast on YouTube
• ​NovelWriterExtract (GitHub)
• ​The Mirage of a Home Stretch on my first draft goal evaporating.

Closing Image

I write SF, my progress partner writes mysteries, although I don't think they're particularly cozy. This makes this cartoon all the more amusing.