7 Easy Steps to Writing 12 Books in 24 Months

(Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love to Write)

Elizabeth Roderick written in goofy script over a purple circle with white stars. Author written in a blue blob below. Comet and stars all around.

It’s 5:00 a.m. and I’m really tired of obsessing about the election, the climate, and every embarrassing thing I’ve ever done throughout my tedious life, so I’ll christen this website with my first blog post: my villain origin story, which I’ll entitle 7 Easy Steps to Writing 12 novels in 24 Months, or How I Quit Worrying and Learned to Love to Write.

My name is Elizabeth Roderick, and I’ve written 18 books and counting. Kind of like those weird religious people that used to be on TV, except instead of pushing children out of my vagina, I push books out of my…wherever books come from. My psychic vagina.

This might not be impressive if I’d started birthing books as early as they brainwash evangelical women to start birthing babies, but I only started about 10 years ago, when I was 36. Maybe also impressive is the fact that most of those books were written in a two-year period.

What is my point for letting y’all know what my personal writing process is, and what works for me? Honestly, THERE IS NO POINT. In writing, as in most things, comparison is the thief of joy.

I will write this essay because it is 5:00 a.m. and I need a distraction, and I love to try to forge connections and relationships in the writing community however I can. However, I’m not trying to sell anyone on this process. In fact, I would honestly discourage you from doing anything that I do. I have enough self-knowledge at this point to know that most things I do are Bad Ideas.

If people take away any message from this essay at all, it’s that your process is your process. Whatever works for you, works for you.

I will say this, though: if you want to write a book, you can. You can do it. You really can. Yes, you. I don’t know why you would want to subject yourself to such a tortuous thing, but that’s only because I’m speaking with hindsight.

So, my first item of advice is to write a book because you’re in love—madly in love—with your story and your characters, and not because you want to be someone who has written a book.

I’m not judging anyone for the latter. We all want to accomplish things we can feel proud of and that others will be proud of us for. But honestly, no one is really proud of me for writing 18 books. Most people’s reaction to that fact seems to be bitterness, condescension, and suspicion. More on that later. But, at the end of the day, there’s no good reason to write other than being obsessed with whatever it is that you’re writing…unless you’re actively being paid to write, of course, which most of us aren’t.

(Another thing you should take away from this essay, if anything: writing books is not an easy way to make a living. You probably have better chances earning a living playing competitive solitaire on one of those apps.)

So. Why do I say you should be in love with your story and characters? Well, falling in love with my story is how my villain origin story starts. Let’s get into it.

The year was 2013. My husband at the time had just gotten a tenure track position at a state college. I’d left behind my family, my friends, my paralegal job, and my bands (I play bass, among other things) and we’d moved from the Seattle area to a house in the middle of windswept nowhere on the central coast of California, which was the only place we could afford on the central coast of California. There’s a lot of backstory here, but I won’t bore you with much of it. I have a series of embarrassing vignettes about it that maybe I’ll put out at some point. But basically, we moved to California, there were no jobs for me there, and I was left with time on my hands.

About 10 years before that, the idea for the Tales from Purgatory series had come to me. “Come to me” is carrying A LOT of weight here. Long story short, I am a neurodivergent person with a bucketful of diagnoses. I bought the wristband, good for a lifetime of rides at the neurodivergent theme park. For instance, I get to hop on the psychosis coaster now and again, especially when I’m having trouble sleeping or when I put certain substances into ye olde flesh machine.

Both of these things were the case on July 10, 2004, which happened to be my 27th birthday. My daughter was about six months old at the time, and I was married to her dad—who is not the same guy I was talking about above with the tenure track job. My kid’s dad doesn’t have a PhD in anything, though he could probably get one in making bathtub ketamine out of chemicals he bought with bitcoin on the dark web. That would make a great thesis. There’s some real intense specialized knowledge that goes along with that sort of thing.

A lot of you are probably getting the idea that my 7 Easy Steps to Writing 12 Novels in 24 Months are probably not going to be steps you’ll actually want to take. That’s smart. You’re way smarter than I am.

Anyhoo, Kid was a grubby little baby, and not a good sleeper, so I wasn’t sleeping well. And her dad convinced me that I should make us some weed brownies for my 27-club birthday. I know there are a lot of things wrong with that sentence, especially considering I did NOT smoke weed (and still do not) because I am intensely sensitive to it. But being the person I was at the time, I baked the brownies. I then ate way more of them than any THC-sensitive person with no tolerance should have eaten, and ended up having the most intense psychosis of my life. For about 18 hours, I believed I had died and gone to a bardo world. I thought everyone I saw was a spirit or a demon, and that they were all giving me clues that would lead me either to a hellish place or to nirvana.

I did eventually come out of it, thankfully. And the way I processed the experience was to turn it into a story. That’s how Tales from Purgatory was born. Happy birthday to us both.

So, obviously, it was 10 more years before the thing got written, but that wasn’t for lack of trying. I had a couple false starts where I’d get about 10k words or so into it, then left off. It wasn’t until I was in California and without a job (other than wifing and mothering) that I finally hit my stride.

The summer before Doctor Husband started his new job, we decided to hike around California for a few months. Kid spent summers at that point with my parents, so she could visit her dad who lived in the same town as them, so it was just Doctor and me. As he and I dorked around in the Trinity Alps, the Lost Coast, and Lassen National Park, my story really started to grab me by my tits and drag me around. I mean that almost literally. It was hard to think about anything else. At the end of the summer as I was driving back up to Washington to pick up Kid, I had to stop off in some random Oregon town and buy a laptop so I could start writing. And, sitting in my hotel room that night, that’s what I did.

And I really started writing. I remember that it did require some pushing at first, convincing myself to write instead of doing other things. But my life was already starting to fall apart at that point. We were having trouble buying a house (California real estate can fuck a duck) and had to stay in hotels for several months, which reminded me of a different period in my life—a time of heroin addiction and sketchy hotel rooms and general instability. I am very much a person who functions by distraction, and writing was a distraction from what was essentially PTSD.

I wrote 18 hours a day. It was a fucking JOY to write, a JOY to exist in my story. I was my characters. Their world was my world. Whenever I had to be doing other things, like chores and parenting, I was still half-living in the bodies of Magdalene Richards and Gavin Cavanaugh. I don’t outline—never have, almost certainly never will—and so I had to write to find out what happened next. And I needed to know what happened next.

So, this finally brings us to the first of my 7 steps to writing 12 novels in 24 months:

1.       Fall in love with your story and your characters.

This isn’t something I can tell you how to do. I have suffered through long periods when no story was really speaking to me. You can still write through that sort of thing by finding some other reason to write, but there’s really no substitute for being so engrossed in your story that you hit that flow state. So, if you really want to try to recreate my specific prolific brand of self-destructive writing mania, which I highly suggest you don’t, you probably should be into your story, like, a lot.

I didn’t believe I could actually finish a novel until I typed the final words of Book One. I wasn’t a person who had done a lot of things they could be proud of in their life, but I was so proud of myself for writing a book. I did all the goofy shit people who finish books often do, like sending it out to everyone, as if it was anything anyone would want to read at that point.

I also started right in on Book Two with no delay, because the story wasn’t over yet and there was no way I could let it go. Some people say never to start book two of a series unless you’ve sold book one. I think that advice is crap. Write what you want and need to write.

I ended up drafting all seven books of that series, over half a million words, in almost exactly a year. In fact, because I love finding synchronicity in meaningless shit like that, I ended up writing almost 12k words in one day to finish Book Seven the day before my daughter came home from her summer with my parents (if you’ll recall, I started Book One the day before I picked her up the previous year).

And then, right after I finished Tales, I started in on The Other Place series. Immediately. I had more stories to tell, and I loved the semi-unhealthy dissociation of living in my alternate universes. I’ve told the story behind The Other Place before, and I’ll tell it again here on this site, but not in this essay. I suspect this essay is already A Lot.

So, during this first year when I was writing Tales, I did actually put thought into how to get published and how to actually learn to write, pretty much in that order. I researched how to query agents. I made connections with other writers and ended up joining the SLO NightWriters. I ended up joining four (4) critique groups through that organization, and I made so many good friends who really helped my craft.

It was also undeniably a crash course in Shitty Things Writers Say to Other Writers, as well as in You Can’t Listen to Every Critique. That latter fact definitely deserves its own essay, because knowing how to process and parse writing advice and critique is a delicate art. So is GIVING writing advice and critique. The learning curve was steep and I probably have worthy knowledge to impart on those subjects.

As for the Shitty Things Writers Say, this was when I first discovered that drafting a full-length novel every six to eight weeks was not necessarily a thing that other writers respected.

No one I was in a critique group with ever said the following shitty thing to me. I think most of them saw that I was working hard at improving, and that I actually WAS improving. Like with anything, practice makes perfect (“perfect” being a meaningless concept here, but), and writing 18 hours a day and working with four critique groups will indeed make you better at writing. However, other writers sneered at me that anything written that quickly had to be utter shit.

Friends, those first books WERE utter shit—at first. But MOST first drafts of novels are utter shit, especially early in a person’s writing career, no matter how long it takes to finish the draft. I’ve learned that the quality of my personal drafts is roughly the same whether they take me six weeks or a year to finish. But, if I did have a second step to writing 12 novels in 24 months, it would be this:

2.       Give yourself permission to write badly.

I’m not the first person to discover this rule, but it is one of the only universally applicable writing rules, and one everyone needs to follow if they plan on sticking with the writing gig.

And so it follows that another universally applicable writing rule, and the third rule in my list, is this:

3.       Revise.

Probably most of the “your writing must be shit” people were speaking out of bitterness and jealousy. If you hang out in writing spaces, you know that far too many of us don’t seem to actually enjoy writing. They like complaining about writing, talking about being writers, monetizing writing advice, and writing essays on 7 Easy Steps to Writing 12 Novels in 24 Months, but that’s not the same.

I don’t want to judge people for this bitterness, either. When I am not in love with a story, when I’m finding it hard to hit that flow state, I feel like I’m withdrawing from a drug. I’m sure this is partially true, because nothing, not even heroin (which I don’t do anymore, if you were wondering), gave me the level of endorphins I get when I’m sucked into my stories. So, when I’m not getting my writing jollies, I can be pretty grumpy about it. I try really hard to not say, or even think, shitty things about other writers, though. That’s something we can all work on, I’m sure.

I guess, in that vein (har har), the fourth item on my semi-nonexistent list would be:

4.       Be obsessively addicted to writing for probably deeply unhealthy reasons.

This is when we definitely get into the things you might not want to do. Because, dear readers, my writing habit was one of the biggest nails in my marriage’s coffin. Granted, another of those nails was my ex-husband being a big fucking jerk, but that’s a story for another time.

Once I had really started putting myself out there, both in critique groups and through querying agents and editors, the rubber hit the road in an entirely different way, and I got to experience another variety of shitty critique. As I’ve already blathered on about, I am a neurodivergent person. I have a history of serious abuse, addiction, and incarceration (for drugs, because I just want to banish any idea that I’m a violent criminal from people’s minds). Because of that, my stories tend to involve neurodivergent characters, drug use, and crime.

What’s the big deal with that, you might be asking yourself. A whole lot of books include those elements. Sure. That’s definitely true. But something I learned after I started workshopping and pitching my stories is those stories aren’t usually written by people who have actually experienced them. The vibe and focus of stories written by someone on the inside tend to be a lot different than those written by outsiders who are using those elements as plot devices.

I got a LOT of shitty advice given to me by critiquers, agents and editors. “No one wants to read stories about characters like this,” was a great one. “This isn’t a realistic depiction of [thing you have personally experienced],” was another gem.

Unfortunately, though, getting shitty things said to you about your writing, over and above just being rejected, is something EVERY writer will have to learn to work through, if they plan on putting themselves out there and sticking with the writing gig. The specific shitty things you’ll be told are going to vary depending on your subject matter and writing style, but you WILL be told shitty things and WILL get bad advice. You’ll also get critique that makes you better and advice that works for you. Differentiating those two is one of the major skills required as a writer.

I think we can our last three items of advice on the list from here:

5.       Learn to separate bad advice/critique from good;

6.       Develop and perfect your own personal style, and learn to trust and believe in that style;

And then, maybe the most controversial item on this list is the final one:

7.       Write for yourself.

I know not everyone is going to agree with that. A lot of people think you need to know your audience and write for them. I’m not saying that method can’t work for some people—everyone tends to have their own process in this regard. Like, I’ve heard people say they have developed an audience member as a character and they’re always trying to impress them. There are a lot of different methods for approaching this. But this is my list, and I’m putting no. 7 on there, so get over it.

What do I mean by writing for yourself? Well, it can mean a lot of things. In my case, writing is the way I process things. Writing Tales from Purgatory was the way I processed a very difficult episode of psychosis, as well as some really nasty trauma from my youth. The overarching story is about how we deal with the fact that people do extremely bad things and get away with it. It’s about Revenge and Control versus Acceptance and Peace. My thoughts on the subject are complicated enough to have needed at least seven books to work through them.

Writing for myself also means that I have to let go of needing other people’s approval. That doesn’t mean I don’t listen to critique, and it doesn’t mean I don’t want to share my stories with the world. I really do want to share them. I desperately want other people to live in my fantasy worlds with me so I have someone to discuss them with. But I can’t write for those reasons.

The end of this essay really brings that point home. I truly CAN’T write for anyone but myself.

By the time I was pitching The Other Place series, which were the 8th through the 11th books I wrote, I was starting to get requests from agents and editors. I had a lot of close calls, but they all ended up with, “Love this, but I don’t know where it would be shelved,” and “Love this, but we already have a book about schizophrenia on our list.” The last one makes me throw up a little bit in my mouth, but whatever.

I decided I was going to write a book JUST to get published. I would start with small publishers and hope to build my career from there. So, I wrote Love or Money. In my snarky brain, I decided that I would open the book with a F/F sex scene in a prison bathroom as a hook (hahaha oh shit), and the book would be your run-of-the-mill romantic suspense/mob romance.

Readers, it did not turn out as a run-of-the-mill anything, because I am not capable of writing for anyone but myself. It went off the rails, bigtime. Also, I don’t mean to say that you can “just write a romance book, they’re easy”. They’re not easy. Getting the romantic arc correct and writing good sex scenes are SKILLS. Bigtime. But by then, it was my 12th book. I had a process, at least.

I wrote Love or Money in about six weeks, took a couple more weeks to revise and edit. I gave it to a couple friends to read, and they devoured it and gave me a couple minor pointers that I can’t even remember now. Then I pitched it to two small publishers.

Shortly after my husband gave me divorce papers for being childish and writing all the time, I got offers from both of the publishers I pitched. That I was going to be a published author was the leaky raft I clung to as my life fell completely apart. After the publisher picked up Love or Money, they also picked up The Other Place series. It was a start.

My life falling apart really ended up disrupting my writing flow. I spent the next years surviving, which was a full-time job. I did get a few more books written, and a few more books and short stories published, but I had to learn to live with the fact that I’d finish a draft every two years instead of every two months. And that was still okay.

It is always okay. Your writing speed, your writing process—it’s always okay. I promise you, you’re doing it correctly.

Now, I’m having more time on my hands when I’m not in survival mode, and I’ve been writing again! I’m also finally getting Tales from Purgatory out, 10 years after it was drafted. I had it on contract with a small publisher a few years ago, but I pulled out of that contract for a few good reasons. I’ve decided to self-publish (self/traditional publishing is a completely different conversation that maybe I’ll essay on at some point). I plan on getting them all out in 2025. For news on that, check back here or follow me on Bluesky or TikTok.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you so much for reading. You can find my books and short stories here and at a lot of other fine booksellers.