I tend to do most of my reflective and prospective thinking around the solstice, which always felt more like a natural turning of the seasons than the arbitrary turning of one of many calendars across the world, but this year I'm running a little behind on a number of fronts.. This year, I had a lot to be grateful for, and I wanted to share some of that with you.
First of all, I’m thankful for all of you. I never really imagined that people would actually read my books or my blog, and your interest in my writing has absolutely warmed my heart over the year and been motivation in those periods where the words don’t flow as easily and the books are resisting me.
I’ll be the first to admit I haven’t kept this blog up as much as I’d intended over the year, so there are a number of things I want to get to here at the end of the year. Now, as far my own writing is concerned, this year was remarkably productive, regular blog posts aside. I finished publishing my first series, The Lakeside Adventures, in April, and—to my delight and surprise—I’ve even had a couple hundred people pick up copies. One of the greatest joys of my life was the day I walked into my local library and found my own books there on the shelves, though not all of them, as some had been checked out. My experiments in marketing the series have been met with mixed results, but I’m hopeful about some new avenues to pursue in the new year. Suffice to say, the skills required to write and edit a series are markedly different from the skills required to market said series.
As far as my current writing is concerned, this has probably been my most prolific year as a writer. I finished the first draft of six different books, over 660k words. To be fair, I’m just blitzing through this first draft of the series, The Chronicles of the Coherence, not going back through and editing the books as I go. Still, at the beginning of the year, I was hoping to write four books this year, thinking it was unrealistic to expect myself to write as many as I had last year. I like a lot of what I wrote this year, and I know I’m going to have to end up cutting a lot of it when I go back through the thing from beginning to end. I wrote half of the series proper this year, and the end is in sight.
It was fun working through the story arcs I was dealing with this year, as the story escalated from a local story set in Seattle to encompass a national empire and global quests. I’m so appreciative of all the work past-Ryan did fleshing out the world building for this series when I was first imaging all of this a decade ago. I literally can’t count the number of times I’ve gone back to notes I took back then. Turns out having already detailed an intricate two hundred thousand year history of a covert Court of semi-immortals comes in handy when the narrative reaches the point when the Court actually enters the picture.
This coming year is likely to feature fewer actual books being written. I have two books left in the Chronicles, which I expect to take the first handful of months of the year. Then I plan to go back through the series from the beginning, making sure things are appropriately paced, foreshadowed, coherent in tone and diction. I gotta be honest, I have absolutely no idea how long that is going to take, with thirteen books each coming in around 110k words.
Beyond the pure craft of writing, rewriting, and editing the series, I also really need to refine my marketing approach. I’ve toyed with things like TikTok and paid newsletters and Amazon ads, to varying degrees of success, but I want to try some different things in the coming year. One thing I can tell you won’t be happening is a podcast. That is, I won’t be starting a podcast. If one of you has a podcast and you want me to come talk about my books, I’m definitely open to the prospect.
Overall, I’m incredibly pleased with the work I got done on the Chronicles this year. I’m so excited to be so close to the end of the series, even knowing all the work I still have before I’m ready to move to publishing. I had dreamt of the end of this series before I wrote a single word over a decade ago, and I’m so nervous about being able to pull it off.
Now, as a reward for catching up on my plans for the coming year, I’d like to talk a little about some books I’ve loved this year, other people’s books.
Malka Older’s Mimicking of Known Successes is a delightful sic-fi novella. Set in a post-earth apocalypse Jupiter, MoKS manages a remarkably vivid world with a compelling mystery and an understated sapphic romance in a scant hundred and seventy pages.
T. Kingfisher’s A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking is a Middle Grade fantasy about a young girl with a magical talent for baking in a city increasingly hostile to any magic whatsoever. Darker than some Middle Grade works, AWGtDB is nonetheless whimsical and uplifting. Prepare to fall in love with a sentient sourdough starter.
N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became is a fantastic New Adult novel, wherein a collection of superhero awakening to their powers stories are deftly interwoven with a love letter to New York City with the kind of love and attention to detail that can only come from years of loving the city.
Myth America: Historians take on the biggest legends and lies about our past, is a collection of essays by expert historians setting the record straight on a number of popular misconception about American history. I found Ari Kelman's “Vanishing Indian” entry to be particularly compelling.
As an indie choice, my good friend Allison Skoda has published a book called Unskilled, a journey through the life of a retail worker that lays bare a lot of the ugly truths about our society with a pointed sense of humor that keeps the narrative afloat.
All that being said, thanks for coming with me on my little writing journey, and I wish you all the best for the coming year.
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