How I Wrote Eight Books in One Year.

You're probably asking yourself, "How does she stay so motivated?" Well, you might as well answer yourself, "She doesn't."

I don't do motivation. At all. I don't even think I can. Because I try, and then pfft- nothing. What I do do (hahaha, I know, I said "doodoo"!) is competition. 

When I was eighteen, I found this really helpful authors' community online. It was for new or indie authors to help get feedback from each other and inspiration for new ideas. There, I made this really awesome author friend (I have a few, it's kind of amazing). She's quite a bit older than me, with kids my age, but we still get along well. 

Anyways. I read this author's personal story even before I started talking to her. And in it she stated that she wrote all seven of the books in her series in only one year. And I never forgot that (well, obviously not, since I'm writing this four years later).

I was living on my own at the time, but a few months later I had to move back home due to things that were out of really anyone's control. I had to find distractions because of the things that happened, and I decided to throw myself back into my writing for good. I thought about the author's community, but by that time I didn't care about sharing my writing anymore. But I thought about my friends story. 

And that was when I decided I could beat her (in a very friendly way, of course). So I decided to write eight novels in only a year. I'd already written one, so I only had to write seven more. I settled on an average word count I wanted all of them to be, and calculated. Then I divided by the number of days I had left in the year to get the number of words I would have to write daily. And then I started writing daily. Some days I couldn't write as many as others and had to double up the next day. Some days I didn't get any sleep at all. But all of that didn't matter, because in the end, I finished my goal of eight books in a year with just a few days to spare. And I'd never been so proud of myself. 

Since then I've finished only one other book, about twice as long as the others, and have started about fifteen or so more projects. 

The eight books that I wrote in a year were all part of a series. One is meant to be a stand alone with a follow-up series, but I'm now working on shortening the other seven into a follow-up trilogy (one is a novella and will be a special epilogue at the end, as it's a prequel story about one of the side characters). And, currently, I am putting the stand alone through its final edit before sending it to agents for publishing. 

I really hope I get published soon. It's my dream to live nothing but a life of writing, and that's all I've lived for the past few years. But I have to get serious enough to start making money from it. I can't do anything else, and I have a lot of hospital debt. But one day. One day.