If there’s one thing I learned over the course of 2020, it’s that I’m really good at putting too much on my plate, Figuratively, I mean–when it comes to food, I’m pretty good at portion control, unless it’s flautas or my mom’s recipe for homemade chicken noodles. With those, I inevitably give myself a tummy ache. When it comes to work, though, it’s a headache, and it’s basically all the time.

Since I founded my own publishing company and became my own boss, a lot of my deadlines are self-imposed, but they’re still deadlines I set in stone every time I put a book up for preorder. I don’t want to miss that kind of deadline, and I haven’t yet, though I’ve had to push back a couple intended release dates as I struggle to navigate a sluggish publishing field where printers are regularly behind on production schedules and you never know how long it will take for a proof copy to make it into your hands. I went from publishing once a month in early 2020 to publishing every other month, then every 3 months toward the end of the year. But even every 3 months is 4 books a year, which is a hard pace to keep up when you only have an hour or two a day that you can work on… well, anything.

Keeping up is hard, but the fear of falling behind is horrible. It’s a struggle that exists even when I’m the one setting the deadlines, and it’s especially frustrating when I know that if everything were normal, I’d have no difficulty keeping up with my plan to publish 4 books a year. Two of this year’s releases were already written, after all, and I want Spectrum Blade to land in Q3. That’s a faster turnaround than what I’ve previously had on books, though, and even though there’s a pretty hefty gap between now and then, the difficulties and roadblocks I ran into last year linger in the back of my head, making me question whether or not I can do it.

I suppose should it come to it, I can always push Spectrum back and aim for September/October instead of August, but that pushes the second book in the series (which I also hope to write and release this year) back to 2022, and then it starts making all my publishing plans a little wonky. Slow, but steady, I suppose, and maybe dropping to 3 books a year wouldn’t be horrible. Still, it’s hard not to feel like it’s a little bit of a letdown to even have those thoughts springing up when I’m still in the very beginning of 2021’s publishing plans.

Serpent’s Crown will still be released this weekend, and the final book in the Snakesblood Saga is still right on schedule for its release in May, so nothing is changing early on. Then again, I guess one advantage of being in charge of all my own release dates is having the flexibility to change things, right?

Either way, it’s been a month of progress, and I’ll pop in next week to tell you all about how a month of writing Spectrum Blade turned out.

Though I made a lot of progress during NaNoWriMo back in November, I didn’t finish the book. I didn’t even come close. I told my sister I’d need to do a second NaNo to be able to finish the story, and even that would be questionable. But when was I supposed to find the time?

Over the course of December, I played with the idea of doing another month of hard writing pushes that would get me closer to finishing the book. But January would be devoted to finishing edits on Serpent’s Crown, so that was off the table. The first half of the month was going to be way too busy.

What about February, though? Could I aim to write 50,000 words in February, getting me closer to having the first draft of Spectrum Blade ready to roll? The required daily word count would be a little bit higher than it would be during a longer month, but not high enough that it would be impossible to manage.

But there were a few things in the way. For one, the fact I still try to share videos on YouTube every weekend, so that would be something I’d have to clear from my table if I was going to write 2k words a day for the whole month. It’s a very doable word count for me, but it’s about 1.5-2 hours of work, and that’s the absolute limit of work time I have.

The solution?

Filming a month’s worth of content ahead of time.

January ended up being pretty frenetic, with a lot of projects crammed into the last two weeks while I prepared for my own personal NaNo round 2, ensuring I’d have content to clean up and share through the whole month. I didn’t quite make it, but I got enough made that I could mostly focus on writing, sparing just a day or two each week to preparing videos for release on the weekends.

And how’s it going otherwise?

Well, it’s going. I’ll give a full run-down of my progress at the end of the month, but in the meantime, you can see my weekly progress updates on my author Facebook or Instagram pages.

Here’s to a productive writing month!

I already shared my writing goals at the end of December, but mentioned I had some other goals, too. While getting books out is definitely my #1 goal, there are two other big categories for things I want to achieve:

1: I want to work on improving the quality of content I offer, and
2: I want to continue to improve our home and quality of life.

I’m already taking steps toward the first one, there–I recently upgraded my overhead camera mount so I can film better videos and work with better lighting, which will improve my visual quality. I’m also working to incorporate more viewer feedback so I know the things I’m sharing are the things people want to see from me. Even though my YouTube adventures have always been more hobby-oriented than book-oriented, I feel like it’s an important way for me to connect with communities I care about, and since my dolls are all characters from my books, they’re sort of tangentially connected, anyway.

I also plan to start using my author Instagram page a little more regularly, sharing pretty book spreads, shots of my planners, cover and character artwork, and quotes from my various stories. If you’re interested, you can follow me over there @authorbethalvarez and share your thoughts!

This goal also extends to learning to better my craft as an author, and while I haven’t yet determined how I’ll continue to improve (I’m starting to run out of books on the craft of writing…) I know it’s important for me to keep at it, so I’ll find something to study and work on, for sure.

The second goal I mentioned is a little more broad. It means continuing to work on improving my health, hopefully learning to like exercise, and tackling home improvement projects until the end of time. There’s still painting to be done, coming up on two years after we moved in, and we’re about ready to tear out the carpeting in the master bedroom and bathroom (ick!) to replace it with laminate and tile. That’s probably the biggest of the projects ahead of us, but I’m hoping to have it finished before the end of summer. Other possibilities are building a retaining wall in the back yard and laying stone for a new patio, but we’ll see how far we get–sometimes doing flooring is challenge enough.

I hope to do a better job of sharing those projects along the way too, but we’ll see–I’m hesitant to make big goals after how 2020 turned out…

This year, am I right? It’s been a wild ride, and I don’t think I need to say anything else about it. So I won’t. Instead, here’s a look at everything I have planned for 2021. Just books, this time–I’ve got some personal goals, too, but I’ll discuss them later since I’m still planning some of them out. Besides, books are why you’re here. So. Books. 2021. Here’s what we’ve got.

I plan to release four new titles in 2021.
The last two books in the Snakesblood Saga, and the first two books in my next fantasy series, Spectrum Legacy, which I’ve mentioned on and off over the past year or two. The release dates are already planned, but they’re slightly flexible, because if 2020 taught me one thing, it’s that I have to be flexible with my project planning.

Serpent’s Crown, the penultimate installment in the Snakesblood Saga, will be released in February.
This one’s fully edited and in the final stages of formatting and proofreading, but cover art still needs to be completed. Assuming USPS backlogs don’t cause difficulties getting print proofs and the final print copies, there shouldn’t be any  problems getting this book out on time.

Serpent’s Blood, the finale of the Snakesblood Saga, will be released in May.
This one is with the editor now and progressing as planned. It doesn’t need quite as much work as #5, so I see no reasons this will be delayed.

Spectrum Blade, Spectrum Legacy #1, is scheduled for release in August.
This one is still being written, but it’s halfway there, and should be complete before Serpent’s Crown is out. I still have to figure out who’s going to handle cover artwork and who’s going to do editing, but I’ve tried to give myself a bigger buffer of time for producing books this year.

Paragon of Fire, Spectrum Legacy #2, is scheduled for release in November.
I’ll probably aim for an early November release with this one instead of letting it land near Thanksgiving, but it will depend on production schedules, since this one hasn’t even been started yet! But like I said, I’ve given myself a bigger buffer of time to get these books complete. Ideally, I want to fall into a rhythm of writing and releasing 3 or 4 books per year, but we’ll see how things change. What’s realistic right now might not be tomorrow, so that’s why I haven’t yet set concrete release dates for this series.

Keeper’s Kin and Westkings Heist will both get a digital box set release.
Since Keeper’s Kin has just started being released wide, it’s about time it gets wrapped up into one bundle. I’m not 100% certain when these two will land, but it’ll happen some time.

That’s all I have planned for book updates in the coming year, but I think that’s more than enough–especially compared to the breakneck pace I held through all of 2020. I’ll share updates on all of these projects through the year, of course, and if you want the earliest news, the best place to get it is my twice-monthly email newsletter.

Everything else I’m doing in 2021, well… for now, that will be a surprise.