A 2022 Re-cap

It’s the end of another year, which is kind of baffling! This year has gone by super quickly. Let’s take a look at what I’ve accomplished this year, for my own sanity!

In January-ish I made a post detailing my goals for 2022. The TL;DR of that post is:

• Finish a draft of Alabaster
• Futurescapes 2022
• Query TFK
• Figure out what’s going on with The Zombie Book queries
• TQA draft (Creation Saga 3)
• Query White Wedding

Oof, why did I set so many goals? Needless to say I have not hit all of these. I didn’t even hit most of them. I did make it to Futurescapes and had a great time there and made a lot of great writing connections. And I’m officially querying TFK, which deserves some self-congratulation. So I’m very proud of both of those things.

Alabaster is…Alabaster, and is nearly done but needs a full rewrite. The story is broken, folks, which is why it’s taken me so long to finish it. (That and the sheer darkness of the narrative.) Anyway, I have made progress and I’m happy to have managed anything, to be honest.

The Zombie Book is trunked for now. I love the story, and maybe at some point I’ll consider other publishing options for it. I always saw that book as the first in a series — maybe a really long series. But it’s very different from a lot of my other stuff and would probably be published under a pseudonym.

I made some progress towards a draft of TQA but I realized I don’t have a really good idea of how some of the character arcs in this series end. So I am re-reading and revising The Creation Saga between other projects in the hope that it will provide me a bit more connection to my earlier work. Since the series sold really poorly (and the last book was published five years ago now), I’m planning on a relaunch of the whole shebang in conjunction with the release of the final book. I do not have firm timelines on that, I am sorry to say. Having a dayjob and a desire to make money and not spend money is still a barrier to getting everything done that I want to get done. Not to mention this year has been a mess of personal stuff and recovering from other personal things I hadn’t fully processed in 2021.

I don’t know why I thought I was going to query White Wedding this year. That was bananas. I’m expecting to start looking for betas on that project in the next months, but I’m taking a break from revisions for December to work on making new words.

I did start a new WIP this year! And I really love it! It’s slow going between everything else, but it is really delicious and closer in line to the subgenre of stories I’d like to publish going forward, since I have several ideas that might be considered in a similar vein. So we’ll see.

Stats-wise, this year is lagging behind previous years, which isn’t a surprise at all. But for fun, here’s the list:

• 1 revision pass completed
• 20 queries sent
• 22 short story and novella submissions
• 40,000 new fiction words
• 14,000 new blog words

Anyway, what a year. I am exhausted just thinking about it. Send hugs. But we’ve already got some great stuff lined up for 2023 — more on that to follow! Thanks for all your support, and I look forward to next year!