Bringing in the New Year

Well, the holiday season is over, having whizzed past as it does every year. This was our first year with a child old enough to be expecting gifts from Santa and he seems to have been satisfied with his haul! It was lovely seeing his excited face and getting to bring the magic of Christmas to his world – as a fantasy writer I’m all for having some magic to light up your childhood.

New Year for us was a quiet one, largely hoping for the kids to go to sleep at a reasonable hour so we could get some board game time in without being too knackered the next day 😴

And now, here we are, already more than a week into January. I’ve given myself a lot to do this month – there are two short story contests that I plan to enter, as well as a novel contest which requires up to 10,000 words, and all three have deadlines before the end of the month 🙈 I don’t really have high hopes for the novel, my most complete novel is an urban fantasy about a traumatised werewolf. There’s the possibility of it having a decent audience when fully finished – if I can snag an agent and publisher and all that jazz – but I’m not sure how likely it is to do well in a contest. I mostly saw the contest as an opportunity to motivate myself to start the editing process, which I never find as fun as the initial writing stage.

In addition to these self imposed deadlines, I’m also starting Keeping in Touch days with work, because my maternity leave is soon coming to an end 😔 Thoughts about work are starting to creep in to my head and it’s no longer distant enough to just forget about. My job can be very rewarding, but it also takes up a lot of headspace and doesn’t always leave much mental energy for anything else. Perhaps that’s why I’m trying to do so much with my writing right now – a last push before work starts distracting me again! I dream of coming into money in some magical way and just being able to give it all up and live in the multiverse that exists in my mind. In the meantime, I guess I just have to keep writing what I can 🙂

You can check out my published work here