excerpted from the latest issue of the C. Dennis Moore Newsletter, which you can subscribe to here:
I’ve been thinking the last two days about this list I have taped to the side of my desk, a list of titles I was going to work on from a few years ago. Originally the list was 14 titles long and since then I’ve completed 6 of them. Which isn’t terrible, almost halfway there. But I seem to remember in DOING IT WRITE, somewhere, saying I had worked out the math and it was entirely possible to complete that list within a year. I just can’t remember how many words a day it would have required, going by the estimated word counts I had worked up. I can’t find it, so maybe it was in the follow-up book that never came out.
Either way, I’ve been thinking about that list. Doing the math again, if I take a rough estimate of what’s on that list right now, how many words I think they’ll be each, I get 390,000.
That’s only 32,500 words a month, or 1083 words a day using a 30-day month. I can do 1083 words a day so easily you don’t even know!
But would I?
Some mornings I get up a half hour later than I meant to and that throws me off. Some days I need to work on updating old books or setting up free promotions or the newsletter. Some days my computer takes up the entire morning with updating for the 20th time that week…
In an ideal world, I would take the next year and finish everything on that list, which still consists of the next Band of Gypsies novella, which is over halfway done, THE THIRD FLOOR 2, THE OUTSIDER’S GUIDE TO ANGEL HILL (a novel), “The Kingdom 2” and “The Night 2” (novellas), “Heart of the World”, a short novel of maybe 30,000 words, RITE OF DAWN (a complete rewrite of a very early shitty novel, which would probably be 50,000-60,000 words), and an Angel Hill podcast novel. Three novels and five novellas in a year?
Three novels in a year. Short novels, about 80,000 words each which seems to be my standard. Man, novels are hard.
I don’t know. The more I think about it, the more daunting the task seems. Plus, it would completely eliminate Invasion Agents, Angel Hill shorts, and the Holiday Horrors. At least for a year.
I’m still mulling things over. I just need to finish something. As it is, I’m making very slow progress on three things at once. This is close to the system I had in place a few years ago where I would spend one week working on one thing, then move on to something different the next week, and the next, and the next until I came back around the next month. I might try that one again, because it feels like the daily progress is progress in numbers only, but there’s never time to build any sort of momentum when I’m constantly moving to something else the very next day.
Or I could just focus on ONE thing until it’s done, but again, that cuts into Invasion Agents, which is SUPPOSED to be a monthly book. I don’t know. We’ll see what happens.