This week, I finished the first draft of book number 64.

Around about now is the two year anniversary of the financial settlement of my divorce, two years since I bought this tiny apartment, just over two years since I rang my old job from back in 2017 and asked for my job back and got it.

It’s been two years of relative stability, but in these two years, I’ve written much less fiction than I did when I wasn’t working in a day job. This is not a post about that time, the before divorce times… (sentence redacted to save me from an inevitable email abusing me for writing about this stuff in public – how dare I tell my truth, and how dare I react and not stay silent).

This is about now and the future. I’m writing less fiction because I have less time, but it’s still happening. Writing fiction literally saved my life when I was depressed. It’s helped me process a lot of trauma. Giving personal traumas to characters is actually helpful when combined with actual therapy. Who knew, lol!

I’m writing less now but I’d like to think that what I’m writing is more purposeful.

64 is a huge number of books, even when a third of them are novellas. The average length of my 64 books is Mills & Boon length of 50,000 words. Of these books, 52 are currently published, one will never get published (a practice book, the second one I ever wrote), and one might not get published (written in anger and needs a lot of editing to make readable). The rest are in the publishing pipeline somewhere.

More books on a backlist does help with sales – I almost never market my books. I find the process of marketing stressful. Once I’ve written (rewritten and edited) a book, my brain dismisses it as done and forgets about it, which is quite neurodivergent I suppose, but also makes marketing tricky. I’m getting better at being in reader groups and responding to ‘are there any books with this?’ with books of mine that fit.

Anyway, this rambling post was inspired by finishing a draft, and also by reading this interesting blog post from the amazing Giigi on the pressure to publish. I needed to hear that it’s okay to go slower.

The Pressure to Publish: Why Chasing Speed Is Hurting Authors