Projects and Drafts, February 2021

Well, that’s one month down in 2021. Weird.

I don’t know that anyone actually reads these posts, but I figure it’s useful if only to keep myself accountable, so I’m gonna keep doing them anyway. And you can’t stop me. Hurray!

Right, so where are we and where are we going?

I expected that January would be kind of a quiet month for a few reasons – it’s the start of the new year, which means recovering from Christmas, getting back to work, and still includes a bit of time off and stuff, and it also happens to be the month of my birthday – and I was… right, sort of.

I actually pretty much took the last ten days or so of January off writing altogether, and I’m glad I did. I love writing, but I basically just took it off the table and gave myself one less thing to worry about. Not that it’s something I worry about, but I think it’s good to sometimes take a break even from things that are super important to you so that you can actually appreciate it a bit more. I got some time to just relax and focus on other life stuff, and that was good.

That said, January certainly wasn’t a completely nothing month: I finished the first draft of A Taste of Misadventure, which is the new working title of the thing that previously had the even-more-working-er title of Friends Close, Enemies in the Toaster. That ended up at around 40,000 words, which I think makes it a reasonably long novella or a very short novel. I quite like it, actually! Not sure when that might see the light of day – it’ll need some revising, and then I guess I’ll either self-publish it or see whether Skullgate would like to take it on. We’ll see.

That brings us to…

… the plan for February!

Honestly, I’m not sure how much I’m gonna be able to do. Work is hectic right now, and I’m in the middle of a qualification for work that’s going to end up taking up some writing time, which is… I mean, I guess it’s a good thing, but it’s also mildly annoying. This is the problem, see: there are Many Good Things, but All Things require Time and as such Time develops a certain paucity. Maybe it’s because I’m getting old (I mean, I’m not, really, but I just turned 27 and aging is weird and I’m always hovering around the borders of an existential crisis anyway), but I’m really feeling a lot of sadness associated with the knowledge that there just isn’t enough time to do all the things I’d like to do. Eh.

Still, I guess I can only do what I can do, and I can only do that by doing one thing at a time. So the thing for February is, I hope, to get a decent chunk of Chronicles from the World of Guilt revised. If I can get that done soon-ish (and then consider publication options for it), those’ll be happy times.

After that, I’ll have the dilemma (good problem to have, I guess) of picking the next thing to do, and I think it’ll be either revising A Taste of Misadventure or beginning A Multitude of Lights in earnest – that’s a progression fantasy series I’ve had knocking around in my brain for a while, but I’ve recently started using World Anvil to properly develop the setting and I’m itching to get going on it.

In the meantime, of course, there are other publications featuring my work! The New Normal released in January, and Bright Neon Futures just came out on the first day of February; there’ll be one more anthology including a story of mine this month, and another in March. I’ve set up a new page here to keep track of those things as they release, so check it out!

And that’s the update. Stay safe, be kind, and review indie books.

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