In previous years I’ve done an end-of-year roundup post.
2018 didn’t deserve one.
Let’s move on.
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Hey, it’s me, I’m back.
I’m feeling pretty jazzed and energetic right now, partially from getting an early night (10 minutes of fireworks and then straight to bed) and partially from finishing off a big writing project from last year.
That was LEVIATHAN, an Australian bio-horror espionage campaign I co-wrote for Greg Stolze’s Reign 2E RPG. Yes, game writing; I tried to give it up but Greg asked nicely, and also offered about double the usual payrate. Hard to turn down a friend, especially if the friend will pay your car insurance and registration bill for the year.
Anyway, I wrapped LEVIATHAN up yesterday and submitted it. Look for it as part of the Reign 2E release in August this year. Writing it was fun, and has given me a burst of word-energy like a stallion that I want to keep riding until it dies under me oh no the metaphor went dark.
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New Year’s resolutions are bullshit.
Me, I have an agenda.
ONE: Finish and publish The Obituarist III: Delete Your Account. Yeah, I know I said I would do that before the end of 2018, but the contract for LEVIATHAN came through a couple of weeks later. I tried alternating between projects but wasn’t getting anywhere. so I had to go with the one that had a deadline (and would actually earn me money). Now the half-finished O3 is back on my to-do list, and I’ll be working on it solidly for the next 2-3 months.
TWO: Re-edit Raven’s Blood and find it a home. I made a lot of fruitless attempts in 2017 to pitch Raven’s Blood to agents and editors, and that failure was one of the things that sent me into a depression hole that year. But I’m well out of that hole now, and it’s time to give it another try. After I do some rewrites to tweak the themes and characterisations in the book, I’ll pull out my big spreadsheet of agent details and start firing off queries. I can’t control whether that will work out, which makes this more a hope than an agenda item, but on the plus side I can do it while working on…
THREE: Write a new novel – or at least make serious progress on one. If Blood had a publisher I’d get back to work on the next instalment, Raven’s Bones, but it’s foolish to keep building on an uncertain foundation. Instead I’ll get to work on The Squared Circle (draft title), first in a YA series about professional wrestling, 17th-century witch cults, dream demons and teenage romance. A more sensible author might pick just one of those genre ideas and run with it, but where’s the fun in picking anything but the narrowest and least attainable overlap in Venn diagrams, I ask you.
FOUR: Be a better blogger. That’s a vague statement, but vague is probably best right now. Mostly I want to have a blog worth reading on a semi-regular basis, rather than posting one entry full of vagueness, self-flagellation and unfulfilled promises every few months. There’s a few ways to do that; I’ll try a few of them and see what sticks.
That’s it for the year – four tasks/priorities/whatever. Four should be an achievable list, even for an all-mouth-no-trousers slacker like me.
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2019 isn’t going to be any better than 2018 if we don’t work at it.
Let’s do that.
I’ll go first.