I’m at an interesting and uncertain place in my writing journey right now (though, the more I research the publishing industry, there doesn’t seem to be any stage of a writer’s journey that isn’t filled with uncertainty). For most of my adult life, and even a good chunk of my pre-adult life, there wasn’t much doubt about what I wanted to do or how I was going to go about it. I was going to be an artist, and I was going to use this hip new thing called the “internet” to get my work out there (oh god do I feel old). I had a promising start, but, well, that kind of fizzled out after the internet changed faster than I could keep up. And now I’ve made the switch to writing prose which has famously always been an industry that welcomes newcomers with open arms and doesn’t require absolutely soul-draining amounts of persistence and heartbreak, unlike art and comics.

Right?

Right?!?

I don’t like to get into my personal life online, so I will be maddeningly vague about what’s been going on. The answer is: I’ve not been in a great place for a very long time. Life has been stressful and unstable, and it’s very hard to build a creative career when I’m living in perpetual survival mode. This is precisely the reason my comics would constantly go on and off hiatus so unpredictably, and why I would just start being able to make traction and grow my audience only to have to disappear for several months and lose it all. There is, however, a big light at the end of the tunnel, and a promising future of, for the first time in my life, actual stability.

That stability is when I plan to barrel headlong into turning my writing hobby into something professional. Until then, my focus is research and building up a body of work.

In the early part of this year, I wrote a middle-grade cyberpunk/horror light novel. This was written at the request of a local indie publisher, however they’ve been very busy and completely incommunicado since last spring. I have no idea if this book is still happening, so in the eventuality they’ve decided they no longer want it in their line-up, I may have to shelve it indefinitely.

NaNoWriMo is just three days away. I’m more excited for this NaNo than I’ve been for any previous, though I couldn’t tell you exactly why – I suppose I’m just really in the mood this year. I’ll be working on the first volume of a series called Leprechaun Gold, an urban fantasy about a pair of shapeshifting unicorn boys who escape from a cult and go on a journey to find themselves. I originally planned for it to be a single novel with episodic chapters, but due to flow and pacing issues as I was outlining, that soon ballooned into a series of seven novellas of around 30-40K words each. Well, so far I’ve written 3/23 chapters in volume 1, and I’m already at 11K. So, er, looks like this will be a series of full-length novels.

Since I have to write slowly to avoid burnout, I won’t even attempt to draft the whole book in one month. Or even in two or three months. The Boy Who Shook the Earth (the kira backstory novella that I’ve been picking up and putting down since 2016) remains unfinished, burning a hole in my WIP pile, so after NaNo I plan on alternating between working on Leprechaun Gold and that until both are done. Then they’ll each sit on my shelf for a few months to stew so I can go back and edit with fresh eyes later. I want to finish both first drafts by next summer, but the best laid plans and all that.

I’ll also being taking a few breaks now and then to write some short stories and pitch them to anthologies. I just finished a horror short and will be editing and illustrating it in December before sending it out to anthologies. If there’s no takers after a year, I’ll post it up on my website. Likewise with any other shorts I write.

After I finish drafting The Boy Who Shook the Earth and Leprechaun Gold #1, I’m going to sit down and outline a whole bunch of novels. I’ve found I work best when I have a very detailed, blow-by-blow outline, and I want to get as many of my ideas into a workable state as possible so I can speed up my drafting, and so I don’t start forgetting plot points. A while ago I gave a breakdown of all my planned writing projects. The ones I plan to outline at this time are: Azrael Saves the World, Leprechaun Gold #2, The Children of Shadow Trilogy, and the untitled Dark Wings gay romance/comedy/murder mystery (at this rate I will have an entire universe of side-stories written for Dark Wings long before I get to the main novel trilogy).

The publishing world is big and unforgiving and massively confusing. As much research and planning as I’ve done, I feel like I’m running about with only the vaguest idea of what I’m doing. So right now, with my unstable living arrangement, I’m doing my best to concentrate on what I can get done, which is outline and write manuscripts.

Once things are stable, I can start to network with other writers and try out as many different publishing avenues as I can. Some books will get queried to agents, some will get pitched to indie pubs, and others I’ll throw onto online self-publishing spaces like Kindle Vella. The next few years are going to be spent experimenting to see what works and what doesn’t. Hopefully, this writing thing will go somewhere. Despite having no idea if my current publisher will work out, and being rejected from every anthology I’ve submitted to so far, I feel like I’ve already accomplished more in the last 3 years with prose than I did in 20 years of webcomics.

Or maybe I’m just flailing about, pretending that I’m being productive like I did for so long with comics.

We’ll see.