Work/Work Balance

I've done a lot less with attempting to be published this year than I had planned, partially because I have been trying to improve my work in my "real" career. I finished my master's degree (in insurance management of all things), started working on a new migraine-inspiring certification, and tried to climb the corporate ladder a bit. That last one especially failed in spectacular fashion, which is leading me to wonder why I even bother to try to do anything more than I am doing in the work that actually pays.

The good news in that regard is that a decrease in interest in my insurance career has corresponded nicely with an uptick in the amount of writing work I'm doing (22 pages alone, just yesterday). I also got Manic Sonata ready for publication on KDP and CreateSpace, am going through those same steps with Saboteur (Invasion of Miraval, Book III), and have been re-reviewing Souls of Chancelleria with the hope of maybe actually getting it ready for agent submissions. Justice for the Dead is likewise being prepared, but at a somewhat slower pace.

In theory, I'm supposed to be writing the sequel to 111 Souls right now, but I've found that project stalled for a while now. I keep abandoning it and delaying coming back to it, because picking up its complicated threads of overlapping stories can be annoying. Instead, I've churned out 178 pages of Justice for the Dead's sequel, Alchemical Properties, in 39 days while fleshing out a new historical fiction piece. If I can keep up this pace, I might actually complete 5 books this year, a personal best, but just not the 5 I thought I would when I started planning on January 1.