How I Plan Book Writing and Track Progress to Meet Deadlines

I've completed two books with a simple formula + what I'm doing differently for Book #3. Plus, prosperity gospel creeps its way into the sobriety space, I hate it, and I want to hear from you.

Hi! Some housekeeping before we get into it.

• Last week’s piece about Matthew Perry stirred up big feelings, no surprise. When I shared some screenshots on Instagram, I got backlash from people who didn’t read the full piece before commenting and falsely assumed I was speculating that he’d died because he relapsed. I expected that. What I didn’t expect, although I probably should have, were the comments from folks who “just wanted to provide hope” by claiming things like sobriety can be “a guaranteed, lifelong win” for anyone, “it doesn’t have to be hard and heavy,” and “total freedom is available.” What’s implied here (and sometimes overtly stated) is sobriety is a wholly self-determined endeavor that is inevitable given a certain set of inputs: the right information, the right perspective, and (of course) the right mindset. This alone, while troublesome, isn’t worth a whole lot of time and attention; prosperity gospel creeps its way into everything in our culture. What concerns me is most of these folks, we’re talking 90%, are sobriety coaches (trained by the same program) according to their bios. I’ve been disturbed by this growing trend for a couple of years now and will be writing about it soon.

In the meantime, if you have any thoughts, feedback, insight, or experience with this type of sobriety messaging or coaching, please hit reply on this email and share. If you’re reading this on the app or website, email admin@lauramckowen.com. Your experience will be kept anonymous; I am the only one who reads these emails.

• Love Story Schedule - To streamline and build sustainability around workflow for this newsletter, I’m making some small but important tweaks to my publishing schedule and content. Starting today, unless something weird happens, I’ll post every Wednesday. Generally, I’ll publish two longer essay-type pieces a month for paid subscribers, and the other two will be more bite-sized, e.g. Dig Lists, BTS on Book Writing (see below), and the like, which will be a mix of free and paid.¹

• New series: Behind-The-Scenes (BTS) on Book Writing! I’ve decided to take y’all along as I write my next book, Book #3. That means once or twice a month, I’ll let you in on how it’s going and share my writing process. All these posts will be archived in a new BTS of Book Writing tab on the homepage, and they’ll mostly be for paid subscribers only. Today is the first edition.

ICYMI, I’ve already talked quite a bit about book publishing here:

• How much I made on my first book

• How I got (all three of) my book agents

• How Push Off from Here became a book

• ‘All Things Book Publishing’ live call replay: a live 90-minute call that covers types of publishing, how to get an agent, how bestseller lists work, book deal structure, and more.

---

How I plan book writing and track progress to meet a deadline, plus the software I use

The manuscript for my third book, another memoir, is due in June 2024 and is scheduled to be released sometime in Fall 2025. From now until then, I will bring you along behind the scenes through the writing and publishing process. This means every couple of weeks, I’ll share something I’m going through in real-time as I write or an aspect of the overall writing and publishing process I find interesting here on Love Story. Some posts will be available for everyone; some will be paid. You don’t need to do anything to receive these, they’ll arrive right in your inbox per usual.

Today, I’m kicking it off by talking about my writing schedule: how I plan for and manage my time to complete a first draft on deadline, as well as the software I write in.

My writing room.

Book 1: We Are The Luckiest

Before I became an author, I had this idea that writing a book was such an ethereal, loose, emotional process that it could not be managed practically. Wouldn’t something as rigid as a schedule take away from the ~magic~?

Haha, cute.

When I got the publishing deal for We Are The Luckiest, to calm my anxiety, I created a word count plan working back from the manuscript due date. I didn’t know if it would work, but I needed something as a guide.