I am thinking of taking a leaf from Brandon Sanderson’s book and making my birthday include a state-of-writing update/lookback. But to do so, I need something to look back to. So:
As of my birthday in 2024, what’s the current state of my writing? I have one novel, tentative title Chasing Stars, ready for a 5th draft. I’m working on the first draft of tentative title Astronautica. I have a novella, Prayers of the Princesses, complete at 25k words and looking for a home. Turns out the paying market for a fantasy novella by someone without publishing credits isn’t huge.
Chasing Stars is a project I started during covid for NaNoWriMo from compiling a lot of my idea notes into something coherent and also trying to build a world that just felt generally kinder. Obviously that’s not a world without conflict- people are people everywhere- but the structure of the world around them doesn’t always have to feel hopeless.
Astronautica is fully developed from me looking at the story “Jason and the Argonauts” and wondering why no one had, to my knowledge, done “Jason and the Astronauts.” I got a lot of interest just from that pitch at the LTUE writing convention. The world is, by necessity, harsher in this one to make a faithful (well, eh, recognizable) adaptation. I’ve been having a lot of fun with the worldbuilding but realized I needed to stop the pre-work and start on the draft to answer a lot of my own questions about the world.
Prayers of the Princesses is a retelling as well, of the Twelve Dancing Princesses. I thought this was a super well-known story but have run into several people who have never heard of it which blows my mind mildly. I had an interesting time writing this one. Turning dance into a method of prayer was really fun to write but ended up with me exploring a little bit of my own experiences and thoughts on faith in general. Which meant in turn I needed to be careful of not being heavy-handed. I also had an interesting time putting possibly too much in it. Let’s start with the fact that I kept all the princesses and added in two brothers so that’s 14 named characters off the bat. Trying to give them all personalities that showed up well while also trying to keep it to novella length, and none of them were even the main characters… Well, it was an adventure. I had a whole fantasy element that, after talking to my editor, was too much to learn in one book with 2 “magic systems” already so I’ve learned quite a bit about trimming there, I think. Ironic then that this is the longest paragraph.
And then of course I’ve started a blog on my website! This is honestly the content-generating, keep-me-going, proto form of what I eventually want my website to be. But it’s here and I’ve updated every week so far (only late once!) and that’s the main goal of it at present. But I’m hoping it will have evolved by this time next year.
Thanks for your time and for reading, have a picture of a baby minotaur.
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