The Five Year Project
The goal: earn royalties totaling $7,500 every month within five years.
Basically, I needed a new theme for my blog. See, I started a blog called My First Book, which was about me writing, then editing, then querying and finally publishing the first book I managed to finish. But once the book was published, my big writing goal was achieved, so I needed something else. Something bigger.
A few days after thinking about it, I had a particularly bad day at work, and I realized that although I could continue working at my day job, I didn’t want it to be the only way I made a living. I wanted to do it with the thing I loved: writing.
And that’s where the idea started. First, I thought I wanted to match my salary income to income from my writing, but when I wrote the number down in USD, it seemed tiny. After having my blog be about something that seemed close to impossible, it felt wrong to take a step back. So I made the number bigger and bigger until it scared me. Then I stopped.
Not 1 year, not 10 years, but 5 years.
Now, I know that because the number is so big, there’s no way I can achieve the goal in a year. At the same time, I didn’t want to take ten or more, so I decided to give myself five years.
So my goal turned into earning royalties totaling $7,500 every month for a year within the next five years. In other words, I want to earn $900,000 by 2018.
Thing is, there’s no way for me to ensure that I’ll make the money. All I can do is write and edit the best books I can create over the next four years and keep getting them published. Hopefully I’ll be able to write and publish 20 books in total, and they’ll add up to my goal.
But if they don’t, that’s okay too, because I’ll still have achieved more just from trying than from sitting back and dreaming of what I could achieve.
- Possible: write.
- Impossible: write without a goal and … achieve that goal.
- Repossible: write with a goal.
Excerpt from The Vanished Knight
Since the death of her parents, Callan Blair has been shunted from one foster family to another, her dangerous secret forcing the move each time. Her latest foster family quickly ships her off to an exclusive boarding school in the Cumbrian countryside. While her foster-brother James makes it his mission to get Callan expelled, a nearby ancient castle holds the secret doorway to another land…
When Callan is forced through the doorway, she finds herself in the magical continent of Tardith, where she’s shocked to learn her schoolmates Gawain and Darrion are respected soldiers in service to the king of Nordaine, one of Tardith’s realms. More than that, the two are potential heirs to the Black Knight—Nordaine’s crown prince.
But when the Black Knight fails to return from a mysterious trip, the realm teeters on the brink of war. Darrion and Gawain set out to find him, while Callan discovers there is more to her family history than she thought. The elves are claiming she is their princess.
Now with Darrion growing ever more antagonistic and her friendship with Gawain blossoming, Callan must decide whether to stay in Nordaine—where her secret grows ever more threatening—or go to the elves and uncover the truth about her family before war sets the realms afire.
If you’d like to contact her, feel free to mail her at warofsixcrowns(AT)gmail(DOT)com, Circle her on Google Plus or follow her on Twitter. If you’d like to see her writer-side (beware, it’s pretty insane), please feel free to check out her blog. You can also add The Vanished Knight on Goodreads.
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