I bit off more than I could chew.

Trying to write 12 books in 12 months is still something I believe is possible for me—but not while I’m also trying to finish my short story project. Today, I uploaded story no. 11 (The Wheel). You can get it for free today if you have Kindle Unlimited. If not, just wait until next week, when I’ll make it freely available from Monday through Friday.

It’s around 11,000 words—roughly a fifth of a full novel.

When I look at the other 41 short stories I still plan to release as part of this project, I have to admit it will take more time than I originally hoped.

Whenever I try to write, edit, or translate another novel, that time has to come out of the STORY52 project. And when I focus on the short stories, there’s no time left for the novels. It’s a dead end with no easy solution, especially since my YouTube project takes time too—just like my real-life work.

I estimate that writing The Wheel took about 12 hours, followed by another 12 hours of editing and around 4 hours of translation. Today alone, I spent 3 hours designing the cover, finalizing the formatting, and uploading it to KDP, including the metadata. That’s roughly 30 hours of work in total.

For a full novel, I estimate around 60 hours for writing, 90 hours for editing, and 30 hours for translation. The additional 3 hours for cover design, formatting, and KDP setup stay roughly the same.

When I add up the work still required to publish the remaining 41 short stories, I’m looking at the equivalent of 6–9 full novels of work in this project alone.

Because of that, my main goals for 2026 have shifted:

• Finish the STORY52 project completely
• Publish the second part of my 17 series
• Publish as many additional novels as possible—though certainly not 11 more

Last year, I published 10 short stories and 3 full novels. Reaching 42 short stories and 4–5 novels is now the new goal. If I can achieve that, I should be ready to attempt 12 novels in 12 months next year.

It’s not a great way to start the year—completely turning my main goal upside down—but I don’t see how I can realistically manage 12 novels in 12 months and 42 short stories on top of that. Besides, there is also private life which has thrown some serious health issues my way that I need to deal with.

It’s a mess.

I just hope I can clean up that mess and be ready to tackle the big 12-in-12 project next year.

I’ve seen people say they don’t want to read a book that came out of NaNoWriMo.

If you’re not familiar, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. Participants are challenged to write a novel of at least 50,000 words in a single month. You can technically start any time, but every November 1st, NaNoWriMo takes over social media as thousands of writers announce their goal to complete a novel in 30 days that day.

For some reason, many people assume that books written under this challenge must be badly written. I once stumbled across a Medium article (before they banned me) titled: “Thanks, but if your book was written in 30 days, I’m not interested.”

Sure, with so many people participating, there will inevitably be a lot of rough drafts—and some of those even get published. Perhaps the author of the Medium post encountered some poorly written stories and then generalized from there.

But just because a book is written quickly doesn’t mean it’s bad.

Think about the opposite: does a book automatically become good if it takes a year to write it? Or is a novel written over a decade necessarily superior to one completed in two years? The answer is obviously: no.

Consider some famous examples:

• Stephen King wrote The Running Man in just two months.
• Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson was written in two months too.
• Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea was completed in roughly 8 weeks.
• Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men was written in a month.
• H.P. Lovecraft often wrote stories within weeks, sometimes days.
• Stevenson reportedly wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in only three days.

It’s not limited to literature. The script for Rocky took Sylvester Stallone four days. Sam Raimi wrote The Evil Dead in three weeks. Even a complex drama like Good Will Hunting was written in just seven weeks.

Music follows the same pattern: Ozzy Osbourne claimed that Paranoid, one of Black Sabbath’s biggest hits, was written in ten minutes—music and lyrics. Paul McCartney wrote Yesterday in a dream and merely jotted it down upon waking. Smoke on the Water was improvised in front of journalists who wanted to see Deep Purple write a song live.

The bottom line: when creativity strikes, time doesn’t matter. You can write a masterpiece in days, or toil for a lifetime and produce something forgettable.

If you’ve got an idea, sit down and write. And if you can’t stop writing, chances are you’re creating something so engaging that readers will struggle to put the finished book down.

Of course, editing and professional proofreading matter. But don’t assume that a book automatically becomes better simply because you spent more time on it. What truly matters is the idea and your talent for shaping it into a piece of art. And if you have both, you might write a hit song in your sleep, a timeless classic-novel in days, or an Oscar-winning script in weeks.