Hello, lovelies! I hope you are enjoying your winter holidays! Today, I snuggled up by the fire and reflected on my goals for 2024. In July, I already did a mid-year check-in: I spent the first half of 2024 mostly on my day job and my orchestra and was determined to prioritize my writing in the second half of the year. This didn’t quite work out as well as I would have liked. But hey, there’s always next year, right?😉
Query REBEL PRINCE
I planned to re-start querying my YA fantasy, REBEL PRINCE and I majorly updated my query package, but in the end, I decided not to jump back into the query trenches because the story simply didn’t feel “special” enough to win over an agent. Sooo, I shelved Moon’s story and focused my energies on my current WIP: BLACK CAPTAIN.
Complete two revision rounds for project BLACK CAPTAIN
I did a very messy structural revision and started another round of revisions to prepare the manuscript for beta readers. I took the first chapter with me to Storytellers Retreat and received a lot of valuable feedback from my wonderful critique group. Based on that, I dove into another major structural revision. I’m currently in the middle of writing myself an edit letter and a chapter-by-chapter outline (as per Rachel Griffin’s revision course) and plan to have act one done during the first quarter of 2025.
Outline Project X
I had hoped to spend my summer break outlining my super-secret YA project about a music school and an ancient rivalry, with an enemies-to-lovers romance arc and Leonard Bernstein’s grumpy ghost dishing out crude relationship advice that NO ONE should take to heart. In the end, however, I decided to dedicate my summer to my BLACK CAPTAIN revisions. I’ve placed Project X in my “ideas cupboard” for the time being and will try to get back into it once BLACK CAPTAIN is with beta readers. This might be a while, however!
Get over My Fear of Creating a Newsletter
I haven’t created one yet, but I’m looking into the various options! Maybe next year?😉
Read 35 Books
I’d promised myself not to put too much pressure on my reading goals: I was allowed to read whatever I wanted to read, as long as I read 35 books. This worked out very well! I read mostly fantasy and YA fantasy with some NA hockey romance as an in-between pallet cleanser😊