Happy new year! I meant to write and post this in December, but procrastination snatched the time right out of my hands. That's ok; better late than never! As my mom recently reminded me, the Prophet (ﷺ) once said that even if the end of the world is quite literally happening, but you still have time to plant a seed, you should do so.  ​Or, as one of my favourite quotes puts it: The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. (The attribution of this proverb is not precisely known).
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And now, because my memory is like Swiss cheese (full of holes), I thought it would be enlightening (for myself, mainly, though maybe you'll find it helpful too, dear reader) to take a look back at 2024, writing-wise.

 So......I am shocked. Delighted. Bemused. And baffled.

I wasn't feeling LofM's latest start (what else is new) and I could feel that the plot & premise was almost, but not quite, right....so i went scrolling through my hundreds of pages of drafts and snippets and scenes and--

I have some good stuff here! Ten years of working on this wip has left me with some fantastic fragments that I can cobble together and polish into something I'm really, really excited to write.

​I'm so glad I rarely deleted anything! I just now have to hunt through everything I have for what I want to try and patchwork into one single draft. But ah! this is so fun! and makes me feel so much better about the insidious voice in my head deriding me for having worked on this wip for 10+ years with nothing but pieces to show for it.

Hello hello and happy December! It's nearly the end of 2023 and I have some updates for you from the writing front!

First off, Tinyletter is closing as of February 2024, so I will be moving my newsletter...elsewhere. I haven't figured out where yet, but if you have recommendations, do drop them below! (Not Substack).

Secondly, and more excitingly--I finished drafting Legends of Mourra, Vol. 1! My goal for the past several years has finally been achieved! All thinks to a little something called zero drafting, introduced to me by a writer I follow over on tumblr called @bebewrites. Here's what she had to say on how she zero drafts:

Hello hello and happy November! It's been a hot minute since I've posted directly to this blog (I'm much more active on tumblr and send monthly updates via newsletter, which you can sign up for here), but I wanted to share a few things in longer form here.

Firstly, I'm doing NaNoWriMo! Or rather, my version of it, as per usual. What that means is, I'm not aiming for any specific wordcount and I'm not even aiming to write for any specific amount of time. Rather, I'm aiming to just write daily and to work specifically on LofM before I work on anything else.

Initially, I'd had the highly aspirational (and highly unachievable) goal of focusing solely on LofM from the beginning of October to the end of December, in the hopes of finishing the second 1/3 of this novel. That...didn't pan out. But I'm happy to say that my 'chill NaNo' goals are mostly being met. There have been two or three days so far where I haven't written, but those days coincided with a pet emergency, family obligations, and getting sick, so I'm taking it easy on myself.

Speaking of LofM though - on November third I had a crisis about it brought on by 1) being sick 2) being stressed and 3) being stuck on the WIP. I am now 1/3 of the way through the manuscript, and I was not liking how it was panning out, for reasons that have nothing to do with it being a first draft and therefore understandably rough. ​

Reflective of my headspace of late, I've taken to writing short excerpts for Glitch wip and [mostly] out of order bits for Oracle wip. I've also done some brainstorming for my Reaper wip and written odds and ends for wips that don't exist yet. Here's everything so far, in case you missed it.

in which there is a cyborg named sacha and a shapeshifter named cipher

.01 -- sacha’s jerked rudely and abruptly out of stasis, which immediately puts her on the alert because fitz may treat her like a thing, mostly, but he wakes her like he would anyone, with a nudge to the shoulder and not a zap to her temple port.

her eyes fly open and she’s met with a figure dressed in and masked by glitch-wear, which only heightens her alarm. her arm whirs as it calibrates, the pump in her heart picking up speed and filling her with adrenaline. she doesn’t swing immediately only because she doesn’t have enough intel on what’s happening to know if that’s the right move.

the stranger raises his hands palm outward in that universal sign that means ‘i’m harmless’ and also ‘don’t attack’.

I made a post like this for 2021 and I thought it would be nice to do the same this year too. I have a hard time remembering and/or focusing on the positives rather than the negatives, and an overview is usually pretty uplifting. So let's get into it!

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It's November, known to some as National Novel Writing month and I...will be participating, albeit in my own way. Rather than aim to write 50k this month, my goal is to write for 15-20 minutes a day at minimum, and to write specifically for Legends of Mourra, and hopefully have a whole (if undoubtedly raw) draft completed by December!

Writing sprints have always worked well for me, and this way I'll be relieved of the pressure of trying to meet a word count. Sometimes, writing 1000 words is as easy as breathing, and sometimes it's a laborious and disheartening undertaking that inspires temper tantrums and dramatic declarations of hating writing, myself, and the world.

But I'm excited about this! LofM feels ready to be told, and I feel ready to tell it, and I got started this morning on the way to work, scribbling away in my notebook. I have no concrete plans; I wasn't even sure who's perspective to begin with, or where in the plot to start, but what ended up flowing from my pen was something folktale-esque, something you might expect from Arabian Nights and other legends, and I'm thrilled about it. It's already showcasing some of my world building and I can already visualize a neat little segue from 'legend' into Plot Happenings™.

You can expect excerpts from me at least once a week.

Are you doing NaNo this year? How are you making it your own, if you are? What other project are you doing/doing instead? I'd love to hear.

Oh, and before I close this, I wanted to mention a couple of things.

Firstly, I've restarted my writing tumblr, and you can find me here, where I collect inspirational posts, writerly advice, fellow writers' works, and talk in a more shorthand and informal way about myself and my writing. There will be some cross-posting but for the most part my tumblr and my site will remain distinct spaces.

Secondly...I sort of failed at Fictober this year, obviously. I don't like the word 'failed' but I did not end up writing every day this month, as was the goal. However, I did write for half the month, and wrote more original work than I had all year, and had fun doing it, and refused to pressure myself with it or get down on myself about it when life events and my health served as barriers to writing, so I will say all in all it was a good, solid effort, and I'm proud of myself.

I hope you're doing well! Happy reading and writing!

​In a world of magic that runs like lifeblood through the very earth, Ro is a rare outlier: a null. Magic doesn't affect her or work for her; she instead cancels it out. This comes in useful; as an assassin, Ro slips through all magical defences and snares easily.

When two different contracts come her way, requesting that she assassinate Queen Alyss of Miraré's oracle for a truly obscene amount of gold, Ro happily, eagerly accepts the assignment. For one, she's never killed an oracle before. For another, the reward is practically a king's ransom, and Ro loves nothing as much as gold. 

It takes months, but eventually Ro gets herself into the perfect position to kill the mystical oracle...only she hesitates. Not out of any moral quandary, but out of ​curiosity.

And that single hesitation has far reaching consequences for an entire universe, because the oracle isn't an oracle. He is something else far more influential than that, whether he knows it or not...

Well, I'm back after another long absence. Raise your hand if you're surprised. No hands in the air? Yeah, I didn't expect there to be. You know the drill: I had a crisis, shut everything down, ran away until I felt better, and came back, shamefaced but determined not to pull the same stunt again.

Anyway, you're not here for my personal woes, you're here for writing! Presumably. I don't know if anyone's still around, actually, but if I shout into the void, perhaps the void will shout back a welcome. 

So. You may be wondering what's with this post's title. Well, it references both my recent mental state and also the states of two of my wips: Chronicles of Mourra and Wonderland. 

Guess what! The plans I had for both? Shattered. On purpose. I picked up both wips, threw them at a metaphorical wall (aka my debilitating writer's block), shuffled through the pieces, picked up the shiniest, prettiest fragments, got a new frame and some glue, and made two different mosaics.

This extended metaphor is getting away from me, so let me speak plainly. Neither of these wips were working for me, so I took what I liked best of them and made something new. Wow, that sounds way easier than it actually was. In reality this took me literal months and serious angst to do.

Let's jump right into it, shall we?