In my first post on this blog, I said there would be big things happening with my writing this coming year. Big, terrifying, exciting new things. But I neglected to say what those things were because I wanted to wait until this new year had begun and I’d firmly gotten started on those new things. It is now six days into the year 2022 and not all, but many, of my plans for the coming months have solidified. And so here I am to share these plans with you and show you the amazing things headed our way, this year and beyond.
This is the first year in some time where I’m here at the beginning of January knowing there is no “for sure,” concrete publication I will be a part of this upcoming year. And that is frightening. But also exhilarating. Because while nothing is “sure” many things are possible and I intend to do everything I can to make those possibilities reality.
The first of these possibilities are two separate submissions to the fabulous Air and Nothingness Press. The first submission call is for their anthology Orpheus and Eurydice Unbound, which already has submissions open and for which I am already over 700 words deep in the piece I will be submitting. I am considering this first submission a birthday gift to myself, given submissions close on my birthday and I am enjoying the whole process immensely.
Submission number two is for Air and Nothingness Press’s The Librarian anthology, which will open for submissions May 1. I don’t have a story for this submission call thought out yet, but I adore the concept of the book and hope to have a complete story in time to submit it. We have time, and that’s the important part. We can’t make possibility reality unless we try, and try we will.
While I would love to say there are other submission calls I plan to write for this year, at the moment there are none on my agenda. I could spend time on submission calls, but I have other things in mind.
One of which is still a little bit of a secret, until details are properly sorted out. In the meantime, as I can’t give too much away, let’s just say it has something to do with a book. And superheroes. Or… perhaps more accurately, antiheroes. The space between “good” and “bad” is sometimes muddied and gray, and that is a theme which might be intertwined throughout this little secret, not-for-sure, but very probable, project. Are you excited? Because I am.
The last uncertain but hopeful project of 2022 is the big one. The tiny bit terrifying one. On the second of this month, I submitted a book proposal to the glorious Balance of Seven. A proposal for a book that would be strictly my work. Or in other words, a proposal for my first ever single-authored book. Is it a novel proposal? No. It would be a collection of pieces of my short fiction, but that makes it no less of an accomplishment. Even if the proposal is ultimately rejected, I can still say I submitted a book proposal this year. And of course, there is always the chance the proposal will be accepted. All we can do is cross our fingers and wait to find out.
And at the end of all these uncertain projects and plans I’m putting time and effort into this year, there is one thing I am doing that is very much going to be a reality and a “for sure.”
I’m writing a novel.
I don’t have a publisher for it yet, or an agent, or any idea of how I want to attempt publishing this book when it is finished. But I’m writing it. It will be done this year, and when it is I'll find a home for it. At the moment, I am using the working title Sir Jake the Magical Coffee Boy. I might change it later, but Sir Jake is already sticking in my head and we’ll see when we get that far. This little literary adventure is a modern retelling of the Arthurian myth “Sir Quawn and the Green Knight,” and already sits at a little over 7.6k words halfway through the second chapter. If you’re curious what you can expect to hear about in these writing updates over the next few months, you can count on Sir Jake showing up here a lot.
I’m hoping all or most of these goals might be finished off sometime in June or July. There is no way to know for sure, but that is a theme this year, right alongside making possibility reality. We’re going to make it happen. One day and one sign post along the road at a time we’re going to cross these goals off the list.