I’m currently taking lots of notes from Grok’s advice. In the future I’ve planned to write one novel with each outlining method recommended and then post a detailed article about each with a real life case study. It’s a long-term project that is going to take me years, but it should be interesting.
You can follow my Grok Diary in real time here: @michael_brig
I’ve already had that experience. If I write a novel without taking notes beforehand, my writing doesn’t feel that tight. Sometimes I even lose interest as a writer when I freely write a story. Readers will surely lose interest even quicker with such a book.
I’ll focus on learning basic outlining techniques and adding them to my author system. Should be an interesting topic to explore with Grok.
You can follow my Grok Diary in real time here: @michael_brig
Happy New Year to everyone!
I know—I’m a little late. Over the past couple of weeks, I had some IRL-things to deal with, and I didn’t find much time or a reliable internet connection. Because of that, I wasn’t able to work much on my online projects. The result: no blog posts, no YouTube tutorial videos, and very little novel writing for three to four weeks.
Sorry.
This is certainly not an ideal start to a year in which I planned to write 12 novels in 12 months, but I’m still aiming for that goal. In the long term, I absolutely want to get there—even if I only manage to finish a handful of novels this year. In the short term, my focus is on building a solid system and routine for my work life in the next decades.
My to-do list for this year still looks like this:
That’s quite a lot of work. It’s doable for me—as long as my offline life doesn’t fall apart, like it did in December and early January.
That said, most of my private life issues are now resolved well enough for me to return to a reasonable work schedule. Daily blog posts will resume starting today. Work on short stories and novels will also continue, so that by the end of the year I can finally give something away for free on Amazon every week.
So far, I’ve published 4 novels and 10 short stories. By the end of the year, I don’t want to have just 14 stories out there—I want 52, so this weekly giveaway system is fully in place.
My work on YouTube will restart later this week as well.
So no—I’m not dead, not hospitalized due to an accident, and not imprisoned by the German state. Life simply got in the way. But now that I’ve pushed it out of the way… I’m simply back.
My first year of trying to become an author. It wasn’t a full year but I started around April this year to put some effort into finding readers and growing my platform. For the most part, I wasn’t successful.
Growing from nothing online isn’t what it used to 20 or even 10 years ago. There is censorship and shadow-banning everywhere, people are mostly on social media these days, and search engines are on the way out due to AI. Hard to tell where all that develops into.
What I do know: I enjoy writing and I’ve got lots of stories to tell. Would be great to find readers for these stories but even if I don’t it’s still fulfilling to release a new novel – which I’ve done three times this year.
I intent on writing till I die – hopefully half a century in the future, but you’ll never know. Having these annual reviews as a big progress report is a fun thing to do. I already publish monthly reports with detailed numbers which are the articles that run best on my blog, so annual reviews might be interesting for readers as well.
The idea for such post; I’ve gotten primarily from these two sites:
Both guys are way bigger than I’ll ever be, but just in case you haven’t heard about them, check them out – both are great reads.
I lot of wins. My output has increased massively because of three main projects:
Putting it all together, I think that I can actually write a full novel in 30 days volume-wise. A project that I’m tackling in 2026.
What didn’t go well in writing?
I threw away an idea I already fleshed out for more than 20K words. I also abandoned, re-started, and re-abandoned another one with 50K words. After deleting it all, I felt bad about it and wished I would still have the files to continue working on it.
This made me develop a couple of iron rules for writing:
For next year, I need to stick with these rules no matter what. I’ll also expand these rules whenever I feel like something should be set in stone.
My goal was to publish 4 books, I managed to get out 3:
Dec 25 | 17 Part 1: Like A Rolling Stone (US – DE)
Sep 25 | Endless (free novel for my mailing list subscribers – you can get it here)
Jul 25 | Forever (US – DE)
Additionally I published 10 short stories in my STORY52 project:
My blog developed well artistically. I’m happy with my body of work. The Archives presents it all and the Resources showcase the best stuff and links to other sites/books/videos.
What didn’t go well in publishing?
If I had started earlier, I would have managed to publish 4 novels this year which was my initial goal. I also didn’t put out as many short stories as I wanted. First, my idea was to write/edit/translate/publish them one at a time to have a weekly new release. But around October I decided to write the first draft for all 52 stories first and then gradually edit/translate/publish them.
I think I failed at this much more than I succeeded.
Blogging
My blog attracted some scammers who send me mails about BS they want to sell, but real reader interaction is rare to non-existent. I have around 200 readers per month. Hard to tell how many are real readers and how many are just bots and scammers.
Short Stories
The STORY52 project brings me around 30-50 readers per published story. How many of these become regular blog or novel readers? The future will tell.
Novels
My first novel Forever got around 700 free downloads, collected 30 reviews, and had less than 100 sales in total this year including KENP reads.
My second novel Endless is the book that I give away for free if people sign up for my newsletter. I currently have less subscribers than fingers on one hand.
My third novel Like A Rolling Stone was released in December and had 90 free downloads.
What definitely didn’t go well in finding readers?
My Substack: I wanted to write a fun weekly satire series called Clownworld Chronicles. The idea was to take a socio-political take of the weekly news cycle and poke fun at it. I liked writing it but literally nobody was reading it.
Substack doesn’t seem to have an internal traffic system that allows writers without an audience to find readers organically. And as I don’t have readers, I couldn’t show these stories to anyone.
I curbed the idea for now.
My tutorial channel developed nicely by the end of the year. I’ve got more than 12,000 subscribers now. I also finished two big 12-hour courses that I gave away for free (about Inkscape and Gimp).
What didn’t go well on YouTube?
My other YouTube channels flopped. I’m very certain that YouTube shadow-bans my entire profile so that I get 0 views for new uploads. On my tutorial channel I just hustled my way through it with making daily videos for years. But I don’t have the time to do daily videos on a second channel as well, so there wasn’t much motivation to make any videos at all additionally to the tutorials.
It is what it is. I decided to only make videos for fun on one channel called StoryLines (a single video every week) and daily tutorials for now.
Censorship in Germany has become crazy. The state is arresting people for criticizing politicians in masses now. I decided to only write about movies and other things no one could get offended by.
I read much less than I used to. In total I might have read 10 books this year – way to down from my usual yearly average of 60-80 books.
My health got a bigger hit that I have to deal with next year. I couldn’t work out as I wanted to, but I managed to at least keep my ideal weight of around 73 kg (at 1,81m).
Moving. I felt like I needed a change. So I’m started moving in December which should completed in February 2026. For now I’m staying in Germany, but the mid-term goal is to leave the country entirely.
I’ve learned a lot. But there is still so much more to learn. The writing part is almost where I want it to be, but the marketing and finding readers part is way behind what I had hoped for.
Good news is that I’m in it out of passion. Giving my mom my first printed book and seeing her being happy when she read it was already worth it. I’m generally proud of every book I put out and there are so many ideas in my swipe file that I just feel the need to work on even if that never leads to fame and riches – but I’d prefer the version where I could also get the fame and riches on top.
I’ve got a lot of plans for next year, which will be my first full year of trying to become an author. You can follow along on X or this blog. Would be great to have you.
Goodbye to you, goodbye to 2025!
Merry Christmas!
To celebrate, I’ve made some of my books available for free until Friday. Grab a copy here:
Like a Rolling Stone English Version
4 Bullets (Englisch Version | German Version)
World War IV (English Version | German Version)
In case you’ve missed previous giveaways of my short stories, grab the following issues here:
If you like the stories, please give me a review on Amazon, thanks.
I’ll take a break for the holidays and start fresh in 2026. Until then, enjoy your time with family and friends, and I hope to see you again next year.
– Michael Brig