Sometimes the harder you push, the harder it is to do the work. Stress, anxieties, writer’s block, guilt, insecurities, second-guessing, over thinking… they all add up and undermine your progress and confidence.
That’s where I am today.
I’m behind schedule, and every day I get further behind. Part of me wants to just relaunch anyhow and deal with the consequences, but the part of me that isn’t a short-sighted idiot, knows that’s a bad idea. The consequences will be that I’ll run out of backlog unless I devote every spare minute to writing and editing until I burnout from the stress of it all. Basically, I’ll be right back where I started before I decided to relaunch— minus the poorly edited first part of the book, but probably adding a poorly edited second part.
I’m just not comfortable with any of that. I started this on a whim, and it bit me in the ass. I’m not a particularly fast writer, especially if I need to edit as I write. I’m trying to up my speed, but its going to take more practice before I get to that point. I’ve been writing for decades and have never, ever thought once about how fast I wrote.
I think about that all the time since the day I posted my first chapter back in April. I’ve gone from 700 words an hour to about 1000— but even that sad output (compared to others doing “fast release”) requires hours of additional work both before and after. I needed another hour to outline what I was going to write, and then two hours to edit what I wrote. That usually added some words, but 1200 words for 4 hours of work isn’t enough. April’s writathon (when I started out only doing 700 words an hour) was literally a full-time job with no days off.
I never want to do that again.
So what does all that mean as far as the relaunch? Well it’s not happening this month. I won’t be participating in Writathon since I have no live fiction to post to, but I’ll still be doing a November writing challenge of some sort with a goal of at least 50k.
I’ll spend the rest of October doing the Preptober thing, making sure I have the tools, supplies, frozen dinners, etc ready to go so I can focus on the output (but not the editing, yay!) I should be in a really good position at that point to finish the novel in December while prepping for the relaunch— doing edits, fixing issues, making new cover art, etc, etc.
For now the relaunch date is up in the air, but it is likely to be in December. If things go really well maybe the beginning of November, if they go poorly, possibly January. It’s hard to plan things during the holiday season because you just never know how much time you’ll really have at your disposal. (Although for the first time in years, I’m not cooking Thanksgiving dinner so yay!)

Ok, wrote that because I’ve made my decision. I was going to come here and whine but instead I took a proactive approach. It’s the right thing to do. I’m not ready for relaunch, and I won’t be ready in time for writathon, but I DO want to make a big writing push.