My Challenge Update…

ABOUT WHERE I HAD HOPED TO BE…

The challenge I set for myself from November 10th, 2025 until November 10th 2026 is to publish 75 major books in my 75th year.

As expected, I had so many learning curves, my year started off slow, and we were still dealing with the last of the legal crap which has now cleared completely.

And my goal was to get all my short fiction finally together and in ten-story collections. Organizing years of not being organized and finding hundreds and hundreds of short stories turned out to take most of the winter. But I got them all together in 50 collections (500 stories… no repeats). It might go to another couple of collections as I find more stories lost in my disorganization and remember others.

So now I have 19 books published so far and have a schedule set up to do a minimum of 12 collections per month for the next four months. I hope to pick up speed the last two months.

Again, I am doing everything, from the covers to pulling all the stories together to the Vellum files and right now I am getting them up on Bookfunnel because a lot of these early ones will be sent to Kickstarter backers this month. I will be putting the rest up electronically wide later in the month. And paper and hardbacks as well.

Going to be one really cool set of paper and hardback books, that’s for sure. Basically The Collected Short Fiction of Dean Wesley Smith up until 2026.

So, one book behind my hoped-for pace at the moment. The next four months is when the rubber hits the road on this challenge.

I will do updates regularly here…