This is the first time in at least twenty years that I’m not dreading January.
This is my first January without the Evil Day Job–and all the support that entailed. If you’ve ever worked in the financial sector, you know January’s brutal, especially on the IT side. Everything is urgent. Files didn’t arrive in time, or something failed to move the file to xyz. Reporting and annual statements need to be done. Books need to be closed. Jobs that only run once a year fail and no one remembers how to fix it. Everyone who ever supported the xyz report is gone and now it’s incorrect. Naturally this is the perfect time for servers to go down too.
It’s always a clusterfuck.
This year, I don’t have to live in dread of my phone ringing in the middle of the night. I don’t have to brace myself to read the pinging messages in Teams, or hop on an urgent call to figure out how to recover from a failure.
I’m so excited to see how much I can accomplish in 2026!
Last year, even working the Evil Day Job through 6/1, I managed to write over 300k. That’s the most I’ve written in a year since I started tracking in my spreadsheet in 2021. I could go back through old journals or blog posts too, but I doubt I ever wrote that much except maybe early in my career.
My goal for 2026 is at least 500k.
I’m working on books that I started four plus years ago. And I’m finishing them.
Blizzard Bound is already done, and I have a clear plan for the rest of Darby’s story. Queen Takes Darkness2 is almost finished. I’m in the final scenes, and should be able to publish it this month. Then I’m returning to Darby’s story to crank out the rest of her trilogy.
While building Monstrous Revolt and Queen’s Purge at the same time.
Let’s see how far I can get this quarter!