After Rachel left Barry at the alter and moved in with her high school friend Monica, she quickly found herself way out of her depth. Her father had taken care of her, financially, her entire life and now her sudden swan dive into independence was giving her a good deal of mental strain. Topping her list of issues: she no longer had a plan for her life.

“Y’know, it was clear,” she lamented. “It was figured out. And now everything’s just kinda like — ”

“Floopy?” suggested Monica.

“Yeah.”

Monica pondered her own circumstances anew and then realized that she didn’t have a plan either. They checked with Phoebe who noted, not only did she not have a plan, she didn’t even have a “pl.”

The Plan

Well, I have a “pl”. It may even be a “pla.”

At this point in my life, it’s clear I’m not going to sell millions of books and cut movie deals. I’m not going to attend the premiere of one of my books adapted into a big budget film. And I definitely will not be invited to the grand opening of “Underhaven World” in Orlando, Florida.

But I can attain closure with my backup plan. It’s a good one and I know it will work. How? Whelp, because I’ve done it before. Check it out:

Exhibit A: Timekeeper. My biggest software pet project has been Timekeeper: a Windows-based application that tracks all the time I spend doing things. The project began in 1999 and I used the (simply awful) Version 1.0 for about eight years. I finally got around to writing Version 2.0 and moved to that in 2008. By 2013 I’d been talking about how cool the hypothetical Version 3.0 would be for five straight years.

Unable to put it off any longer, I finally began work on the third version on March 1, 2013. I kept at it in my spare time: mornings, evenings, weekends. The list of features grew. I changed directions once or twice. I built new software libraries to drive it.

The months wore on. I grew to hate it. I just wanted it to be over. By October 2014, I decided it wasn’t just good, but it was good enough. While it didn’t have all the features I wanted (and it definitely had bugs), it passed my minimum requirements for usability. I slapped the “beta” label on it, uploaded it, and *snap* just like that, my brain considered it done. I can still remember how good I felt. Not out of any sort of sense of accomplishment but by just having this self-imposed weight lifted from me.

Over the course of 592 days of development, I’d put in 801 hours, 35 minutes, and 51 seconds of work on it. (A figure I know is accurate because I use Timekeeper: a Windows-based application that tracks all the time I spend doing things.) And even though it wasn’t finished, the act of releasing it to the public gave me closure.

Exhibit B: Personal Mail Service. I’m in the habit of using a different email address for almost everything. This keeps my private email address spam-free while disposable email addresses are handed out to everyone from Amazon to Zoho. However, creating and maintaining them is a pain. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention, so I came up with an idea: my own mail service.

I needed a web-based tool where creating and maintaining dozens, if not hundreds, of email addresses would be easy peasy. But as I began looking into the sheer programming effort, I thought, “No. I can’t spend 592 days and 801 hours on another pet project.” So I found an existing service that already provided everything I needed. I tried it out and *bam* just like that I had closure on a project I barely even started.

Get On With It Already

I know, I know. Two and a half blog posts and a couple thousand words just to get to the punchline.

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to just write the novels I have in progress. Straight through. Start to finish. I don’t make them awesome. I don’t spend forever perfecting them. I dump the story in my head onto the page, slap a cover on it, and self-publish it. It will sit alongside my non-fiction publications at Amazon.com and my brain will thank me for lifting another great weight.

Any questions?

“Charlie! That’s horrible! Anything worth doing is worth doing right! What’s the point?”

“Charlie! Why waste the time and resources to just do something half-hearted?”

“Charlie! Who on earth is going to take the time to read a novel even you yourself didn’t care about writing well?”

All good questions! And I have one answer for all of them: I can’t write a novel, I can’t stop thinking about writing novels, and I want to — nay, have to — stop thinking about writing novels. This is all I got.

“Charlie! Don’t you think you’d find greater satisfaction in producing one really solid and well-written story than one that’s just meh?”

Another good question! You would think so, wouldn’t you? And I’ve thought about this a great deal. More than you’d think, most likely. So let me splain:

Remember my cancer memoir? Sure you do! Well, according to Timekeeper 3.0, I spent 337 hours, 14 minutes, and 11 seconds working on it. It began back in 2014 and I finally published it in December 2017.

To date I have sold 42 copies and earned about $75 in royalties. That comes out to about twenty-two cents an hour. And I’m pretty sure I spent more than $75 in copies for myself, giveaways, plus other overhead. So for the sake of argument, let’s just say I made zero on it.

But that isn’t the half of it. The book contains a little over 44,000 words. Bare minimum for a novel is generally 50k. Here are a some others, just for comparison:

My 44,000 word memoir had no storyline, no plot, no character arcs. It was like a giant blog post. In theory, it’s the easiest (and fastest) kind of writing there is. And yet I still spent over three hundred hours working on it.

If this were my full-time job, that’s not a big deal. Only about two months, really.

But, and I can’t stress this enough: this isn’t my job. My real job takes up anywhere from forty to seventy hours a week. I spend most of my evenings with my family for dinner and watching television. I have chores and other grown-up responsibilities. Which is why a straightforward, two-month writing project took nearly four calendar years to complete.

I look at that and can’t help but extrapolate. A novel is ten times more demanding. For starters, it’ll be double the word length. And great care and attention must go into the plot, characters, narrative, voice, and everything else. If my past performance is any indication, my first novel will be published in 2083. I’m jaw-dropped amazed when anyone who isn’t a full-time author manages to publish a novel.

But for the sake of argument, let’s say I do that. Let’s say I commit, not 337 hours, but two thousand hours on it. And let’s say by some miracle, I get it done in just six short years. I’ll put it on my website. And launch a marketing campaign. And I’ll post it all over social media. And . . .

And I will sell 42 copies and earn about $75 in royalties. Why? Because selling books is difficult. I’m an absolute nobody. This will be just one novel in a sea of a quarter million other new novels that come out that same year. In fact, the only real good that will come of it is that I’ll get that feeling of closure.

And that’s the heart of Plan B. Why spend six years and thousands of hours to get to a place I know I can reach in a tenth of the time? This isn’t being defeatist, it’s just being realistic about my capabilities. And like the smart mouse who decides against fighting a lion, I’m okay with it.

So What’s the Plan?

First up is Ronald and the Curious Bookshop. This is a story idea I had in 2013, and one I’ve talked about here before. It’s both the most-developed storyline I have in my head as well as being the least complicated.

After that? Well, let’s just get one done and go from there.