Do You Have a Dream? Update

Hey all! Still as rushed as before, but since it would suck if I missed my own bloghop, I thought I'd give a quick update on my Five-Year-Project activities.
First bit of excellent news is that my ITIN arrived. So at least I know I'll be able to publish.
Then, I've received the draft of The Vanished Knight's cover. Can't share yet, but it's awesome. Can't wait to show you all.
I've also received the first round of copyedits. Will be Iaunching into them this weekend. In the meantime, I'm steaIing snippets of time to finish Birds vs Bastards by Friday. Only two scenes left.
Next month, I'll be back to editing TVK. I'll be drafting in my down-time, but I haven't decided which WiPs to work on.
That's it for now. Who else has news to share?

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Sometimes, I need to rearrange the furniture in my head.

Ever since I've gone and set my goal, I've realized that I needed to change my approach to writing.

I still pick what I want to do and when, but I pretty much always need to do something.

Fortunately, there's a lot to do. To illustrate. This is a long term list of  everything I want to get done so far:

Concept

StW

Wo6C4

Wo6C5

ES2

ES3

ES4

ES5

ES6

ES7

ES8

ES9

BvB2

CiC

DD

CaA?

HM

SS1

SS2

Draft

VD

P

MDtS

RH

Rewrite

Wo6C3

BvB

ES

O

Edit

Submit

Publish

Wo6C1

Wo6C2

Every single one of those highlighted abbreviations stand for books I want to write, edit or publish. The red, yellow and green show me my priorities. Green's what I'm doing at the moment, yellow's what I want to do in the near future and red's for things I want to do, but that can or must wait for a bit longer. Either way, my list is growing.

In the past six weeks, I've added three more ideas to the list of concepts: HM, SS1 and SS2. SS1 and SS2 are two books in a series. I dreamed something that's kickstarted a concept the night before last. Usually I just ignore my dreams, but for some reason, the more I ignore this one, the less I can think of anything else. So I gave in and SS is now a concept I'm trying to actively work on. In between my rewrite to BvB.

At least, now that I've decided to put more thought into the concept right now, it feels like it's letting up enough for me to finish the rewrites. Phew.

Since I know some of you will want to know what the abbreviations stand for:

Wo6C is for The War of Six Crowns. So Wo6C1 is in fact the book I'm in the process of editing for publishing. (Remember to help reveal the title! I even made it easy for you.)
BvB is for Birds vs Bastards, which is just a working title for my high concept urban fantasy.
O is for Otto, the main character in the dystopian I wrote for last year's NaNoWriMo.

The others... well... Guess you'll have to wait and see. ;-)

Do you also keep track of what you've worked on/are working on? Do you also feel the need to shift some priorities around as you go?

The Plan

Seems like quite a few of you want to know the plan. So would I. Kidding!

I actually have put some thought into this project. Here's the thing... I've done the math. Using my background studying investment management, I'd calculated my expected (average, for the non-investment crowd) returns from an average book.

I won't bore you with the calculations.

But the result is this... Assuming that my average books earn the same average amount every month, I'll have to publish 126 books in four years in order to make $7500 per month for the last year.

So... No matter which way you look at it, my goal would be impossible if I were to produce average stories. Which is really turning this project into a challenge I'll relish. Because a lesser being would make the goal more realistic. Not me, though.

That goal is here to stay.

What will I do?

And here's where I'm probably going to dissappoint you. Because the success of my attempt will depend soully on my ability to produce books that sell well. Better than average. Which is yet another snag. Because right now, I have no idea as to how my books will sell.

The best thing I can do at the moment is to play the odds. My logic says that the more books I publish, the better the odds that some will sell well. But NOT if I'm churning out books of average quality. I'll need to balance speed and quaIity and produce the best stories I can, as often as I can.

Yeah. I know this is really obvious, but doing the above means I need to think of very many things. Like how I'll balance drafting, rewriting, editing and submissions. And speaking of submissions, will I query agents or submit to small presses on my own? The latter will likely be faster, but how will earnings compare? And above all that, I need to figure out how to keep writing despite rejections. And the pace I can maintain without burning out.

Those things I'll have to learn as I go along. Looks like I'm in for a tricky five years...

Any bits of advice for the insane person?