Happy New Year!
Hello everyone, and welcome to the new year! I hope you all had a lovely December with lots of holiday joy and family celebrations.
As you may have noticed, I didn’t send out a newsletter last month. I was busy working on revisions for my fourth novel Be True.
Earlier this year, I decided my goal was to finish revisions by the end of 2024. By the time December had rolled around, I still had about 50 pages left to revise. I dedicated as much time as I could to getting that number down. As I approached the end of the document, it became clear what scenes could be cut due to their repetitive nature. Before I knew it, I was sitting at only 16 pages left. Over the final days of 2024, I was able to get to the very end!
I feel very happy with the overall result. This book presented a lot of challenges, and there were many times I wanted to scrap it altogether, but I feel it’s become my best work to date.
So, what’s next?
My next step is to prepare Be True for self-publishing. In the next few days, I will contact the editor I have worked with for my previous novel Destined to Be Normal and see if they have room for me in their schedule. I don’t have a set timeline for publishing the novel, just whenever it’s ready to go, so I feel content to let it sit for a while.
In the meantime, I’m hoping to work on compiling a poetry collection. About five or six years ago, I wrote a lot of poems around the same theme, and I feel it’s time to finally get them out into the world. I like to take my time with my poetry and let them percolate. I also find it easier to edit poems many years after the time they were written. It’s easier to be objective then.
These poems were written either during the time I was editing Poems Worth Saving or they didn’t make it into Midnight. For that reason, I would consider this third poetry collection to be the last installment in a trilogy of poems. So, the cover art will most likely resemble the other two books!
I would also like to finish up a series of songs that I wrote pre-pandemic. They were intended to be a companion to a novel I was drafting, but I’ve since decided to set the novel aside for the time being. I feel the songs can speak for themselves and they tell their own story, one that I currently find more compelling than the original novel idea.
In general, I want this year to be the year of finishing old pending projects, a clearing of the decks so to speak. I don’t like leaving projects in limbo for too long, and it’s been long enough with all these projects. Once I finish up these old projects, I feel a new “era” of my writing will be approaching, but I won’t feel ready to begin exploring that until I finish what I started all those years ago.
Wait, this is different…
You may have noticed this email is formatted a bit different! I’ve decided to move on from using Substack as my newsletter platform, and have decided to try Buttondown. All my old Substack posts have been imported to my archive here, but I’ll be keeping my Substack account active for a little while longer to make sure nothing got left behind.
In short, I was finding Substack too busy with features I didn’t need, and it was just becoming bothersome to use. I hope Buttondown might be an easier platform for me to navigate. In 2025, I really just want to focus on creating.
Until next time, have a safe and happy January!
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