Weird title for an end of the year wrap-up, right?
Let me explain that briefly before we start the end of the year wrap up. Back in 2016, I titled my senior portfolio in creative writing From the Fool to the World in relation to the tarot card deck and the various arcana the Fool’s journey represented. The collection centered around various stories with the themes of the major arcana being a basis for what each story was about. At the time, it felt like an appropriate to show my development and now more than ever it still does. Most days I still feel like a fool trying his best to survive in a weird world.
So, anyway, let’s get to the meat and potatoes of this post.
2020 was a fun year. I spent most of it traveling to new places and going to conventions including and not limited to Worldcon, Boscon, Balticon, and so many others. I met a lot of new friends in the writing community, got to sign tons of my own books for the first time at these conventions, and…alright, alright, I’ll stop the charade. 2020 was a nightmare for a lot reasons, so I’ll actually talk about how it was.
Early 2020 was spent primarily on me doing edits for book 2, The Two-Faced Queen. Frankly—and I know how lucky I am—book 2 was fairly easy to write. The most extensive edits I made on it were in the beginning —anything about 50% of the way through was more or less unchanged. And even the early edits were focused around speeding up the action and figuring out how to start a book without rehashing too much from the first. Along with making sure it wasn’t inaccessible for those who started the series with book 2 rather than the first. Tricky stuff, but I think I ended up with a nice blend of everything. If you read The Two-Faced Queen without reading the first, let me know what you think! I’d be really curious to see if dropping into the story with the sequel worked for you or not.
Anyway, it’s a weird thing having two books under my belt and being able to see my strengths and weaknesses in writing more plainly. I don’t think it’s a surprise if I say endings are a strength of mine while the beginning of stories are something I still need to work on. I tend to write stories that require a lot of build up for the endings which inevitably makes the start of those stories suffer. The Two-Faced Queen’s beginning is better than The Kingdom of Liar’s was, but I’ll still need to improve this aspect of my writing moving forward. I’ll never stop learning and oddly enough that gives me something to focus on. I do better with goals. Maybe it’s a carry over from my sporty days.
So, that was the start of the year, and for the rest of the year I worked on book 3 and, honestly, dealt with the aftereffects of having The Kingdom of Liars come out. And…well, it was an interesting launch. Pandemic issues aside—including another delay in its release, overall stress of debuting, two separate launch dates, and Michael Kingman’s very unique ability to piss off a lot of readers—it was a fairly rough time. I lost a lot of confidence in my ability as a writer after seeing people’s very mixed reactions to Michael’s voice. It led me to question what I was doing and how I was. Now isn’t really the time to talk about this in length, but for as often as I was writing…I was probably spending as much time rewriting, not happy with what I was creating. And that’s without mentioning all the other ups and downs in my personal and professional life . I felt outside the writing community and other communities I had once liked participating become stress inducing. For a long time, I didn’t really know how to get over that mental hump.
Thankfully, I’m in a better place now. I know what kind of writer I am and believe I’m only getting better.
So all of this leads me into talking about how book 3 is going. As of right now, I’ve written and cut more than 250k words from various drafts of book 3. It’s easily the most challenging thing I’ve ever written, but as 2020 comes to an end, I’m starting to get a better handle on it. The current draft I have if something like 150k or maybe 160k. I think? It’s hard to tell since it’s spread out in a few documents as I piece things together. Thankfully, the various delays for book 1 gave me a lot of room to go down wrong paths and grow as a writer. I still don’t know if I’m good as a writer as I need to be to pull this book off, but I guess we’ll find out together, eh?
Ideally, I think the word count will be somewhere around 190k. Or I hope it does at least. Going over that 200k word count sounds like a recipe for getting calls from my agent and editors asking what happened and if anything can be cut…
Other than that, I’ve been working on a standalone novel that I absolutely adore, but since it’s not under contract yet, I can’t say anything about it. Well, maybe I can tease it a little bit. It’s the story of a surgeon who tries to kill his daughter in a deathless world. I’ve been having way too much fun with it whenever Michael’s voice became too overwhelming.
Anyway, in a nutshell, that’s been 2020.
Here’s to 2021. Thank you for everyone who has been with me so far. I hope I live up to your expectations moving forward.