I’m not going to try and jinx myself, but it appears July might be a pretty productive month for me after two middling months of May and June. It’s giving me a little bit of confidence.
Before we get into the ins and outs of what I’m looking forward to, here’s the stats for last week:
Writing statistics for the week ending 19 July 2025:
Words: 6,700
Days writing: 7 of 7.
Days revising or planning: 0 of 7 for 0 minutes.
Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of planning/revisions): 6 of 7 days.
All in all, this was the best week I’ve had in three weeks, and if the next couple of weeks go as well as they have, I might have one of the best months of the year.
My intentions are to try and get projects continuing on a straight-ahead path on the next year. At this point, I don’t have the excuse that I have nothing to write about.
Unfortunately, some of the events I will be planning to promote my books will likely have to be pushed back into the incoming school year, so a lot of my weekends might be occupied by bopping around the region to various indie bookstores, libraries, and book fairs. Well, such is life, and at least I’ll have a way to keep busy on the weekends.
Now The Yank Striker’s Journey is now available for purchase, I’ve decided to try and get moving on at least a couple of new books for next year because I want to start building up a good back catalogue. This includes the sequel to The Holy Fool, set in the present day, which I’ve gotten close to 8,000 words written so far. For a particular reason, I decided to hold off finishing the book until July 2026, although explaining the reason for this completion would be a bit spoilery to just reveal it here at this time.
Now that Journey is out, I’m out of excuses regarding getting started on the third book in the series. I need to do some serious outlining on this work. In a perfect world, I would have a rough draft set by the end of this year, start the beta reading and plans for release in May and the promotional stuff happening in June of next year. I just ended up holding things off until the last minute and that bit me in the rear well and good.
I know how I want to finish up what I’m calling The Yank Striker 3 for now. It’s only going to cover a single season in DJ’s career, his first full season in European football. I’m going to have to resolve the cliffhanger I left us at the end of Journey1. I’ve decided also to try a multiple point of view narrative for this next book in the series, although DJ will remain very much the main character of the book. I’ve fallen in love with the multiple POV format from my fan fiction, so I’m interested in turning it loose on my original fiction. I think it will work well.
There’s at least three other ideas I need to get going on, including continuing the Kayfabe Stories series and ideas for at least two other novels. At least some of these I might be looking to self-publish, and all of them have at least some Iowa connection and two of the novels will have a heavy Iowa influence. If Stephen King could make it as a regional writers of New England science fiction, I can do the same with Iowan sci-fi/dystopia/fantasy/speculative fiction.
Did you know you can buy ISBN numbers, which are how books are identified? That’s one way of determining or facing your mortality, trying to think of how many books you have left in you to write before you kick off.
Anyway, all you writers, if your not writing, get off your duffs and start pounding keys. Don’t wait forever like I did. And everyone keep safe.
If you don’t have the budget for a paid subscription, feel free to just send me a one-time payment of whatever you have the budget for.
While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.
- Oops, spoilers, etc. ↩︎