What in the world has made me decide to try and write over a half million words in one year? The easy answer is that I’m insane, but that doesn’t explain what my goals are in this project.
My entire life my father has been convinced of the immutable power of Murphey’s Law. The way he saw it you could count on it to the point of making it work for you. The way it worked was that if you wanted to make sure that something happened then you needed to have an airtight backup plan. If something going wrong was not an issue, then it wouldn’t go wrong. I’ve internalized that in some ways, and I’ll find myself doing it even without thinking about it.
Murphey’s Law is not the only immutable power in the universe though. I have always been a firm believer in the power of Sturgeon’s Law. Theodore Sturgeon was an American Sci-Fi author and critic. After twenty years of fighting people who used the worst examples of Science Fiction and Fantasy as a way to claim that Science Fiction and fantasy are crap. Sturgeon’s response was that Ninety percent of everything is crap.
But if we can assume that ninety percent of everything that we write is crap them the more that you write then the more good, or great things that you will produce.
In 2012 as part of National Novel Writing Month I created the Empire of Norlich and the Adventures of Eunice. In 2019 for National Novel Writing Month I decided I was going to continue in the world with A Fairy Tale. In both cases I wrote slightly over fifty thousand word in just thirty days. This is what made me decide that for the entire year of 2020 I would release a fifty thousand word novella ever month. The first two were already completed and were released for January and February. That means that I would need to write ten more fifty thousand word novellas before the end of the year, or write five hundred thousand word in the twelve months of 2020.