Volume Five Status Update

Can you believe we're talking about Volume Five already?

I've been working on it in between all the other stuff I've been doing, and as of this moment, the first draft stands at around 35,000 words, or 140 pages.

Sounds like good progress, right? Well, sort of. After my experience with the first four volumes of the Joel Suzuki series, I've learned that there inevitably comes a point in the whole process that I now call "Stop, Regroup, and Rewrite."

This happened with Volume Four around early 2017 after I had hit the 27-28,000 word mark. Usually what I run into is that the story begins to head in a direction that I'm not completely happy with, which forces me to retreat a bit to get everything back on track. In Volume Four's case, I ended up cutting around 5,000 words before I was able to move forward once more. You may recall that with Volume Two, I actually (for the most part) started over again from scratch!

The good news is that I recognize this as a necessary checkpoint that I always have to get past, and now that I'm there, I know that things are moving along exactly the way they should. Also, it doesn't mean that I'll fall behind schedule; as you may know, Volume Four actually came out earlier than expected.

Which raises the question - when is Volume Five's expected launch date? Well, right now, I'm looking at early 2021, in keeping with my original every-other-year plan (Volume Four was supposed to have come out in early 2019). As always, I'll be providing you with occasional status updates as we go along. So, onward!