My End of Year Round-Up

So we are at the end of another year that has been a ride to say the least. I’ve been thinking about all the aspects of my life during the year but now I’d like to do a little reflection on the writing side because you can’t know where you’re going, you don’t understand where you’ve been.

So I'm doing a round-up of my writing this year.

I began a romantic fantasy at the start of the year in January. It was about a wizard in training who falls in love with his new apprentice but then he has a vision where his apprentice kills him and destroys the land. So a whole bit of angst and magic. I was inspired by Beth Crowley’s song In the End. I had an outline and a part of a prologue but never went on with it because then I decided to just focus on editing To Cause a Reckoning which I was still in the middle of. To be honest I actually forgot about it until later in the year.

Then I began to focus on completing To Cause A Reckoning the final book in the To catch a Rebel series. It wasn’t a complete breeze but then I got it done and out in the world.

After reading a Beauty and the Beast retelling, The Rose Gate by Hanna Sandvig and eagerly waiting for the then to be released As You like it retelling, Foul Lady Fortune by Chloe Gong I decided to write my own Beauty and the Beast and As You Like it retelling with the fae. It was a story I began after I finished releasing To Cause a Reckoning (you can tell releasing To Cause a Reckoning was one of the highlights of my year) and it was a fun project. I wrote a couple of chapters of the first draft but then I found that it wasn’t really going anywhere even with my outline. I found I was relying too much on the source material and I wasn’t going anywhere so I decided to shelve it too.

Then coming off that. I decided to think smaller and write a novella instead of a whole novel. It was inspired by a whole lot of things, a Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, the Otome game Obey Me, and the anime Black Butler. It was about a girl whose family had made a pact with a demon without considering the consequences so years later the girl and the demon have to find a way to break the pact. I got quite far with this one further than all the other projects I had abandoned this year and it was the most fun because it was based in the neighborhood in London where I was living so I didn't need to do much imagining. The only thing missing from that story is the ending.

Then for my favourite part of my writing year, Nanowrimo, when I began drafting a young adult science-fiction novel, something I had never done before. I had a couple of ideas for a sci-fi novel in the past but never chose to work on those ones. It’s about a girl who discovers she can’t die and gets recruited into an agency for others with powers like hers and discovers that there are those who would use their powers for their own good.

So even though there were quite a few unfinished projects more than I would have liked personally but it was productive too and the most important thing is that I learned a lot and improved and that's not nothing. So here's to an even better 2023.