Read Around the Rainbow: Do you have a writing plan for next year?

This month we are writing about our writing plans for next year!

Ugh. Well. You can ASK about them. It’s a good question isn’t it? Last year was awful for us, given we had Ally’s Gallstone Summer and then Littlest’s Respiratory Illness Autumn. I did pretty well writing to begin with I think—in March I released Out of Focus, the first of the Theatr Fach novellas; and then in May I released Warning! Deep Water, one of the Naked Gardening Day stories (they’re now in a box set!). I had a while whilst I was hopped on morphine after my hospital drama where writing seemed to come very easily; so I wrote another Theatr Fach novella, Second Wind; and Sleeping Dogs, a Celtic Myth short story for Halloween; plus a couple of other things that are for a side-project that’s not up and running yet.

After that, Littlest was poorly and everything fell apart a bit. Erm. A lot.

So now, 2023 needs a plan and I’m the person to knock it in to shape! I have invested in a Bujo, courtesy of my early-morning office friends Ofelia and Nell. And I am sketching out All The Things. See all the blank pages Frenchie is looking after, ready for my thoughts and plans!

Having said that…I’m rubbish with deadlines. We have such a lot going on family-wise that I find them really stressful. I loathe the idea of letting other people down and I like to organise my life so if I miss a deadline it doesn’t impact other people.

The only thing that’s time-dependent at the moment is that I am on the verge of collaborating with some friends over a Valentine’s Day short story giveaway that’ll be on Bookfunnel if it comes to fruition. We are just voting on what theme we want to do.

I also really want to do another collection with the Naked Gardening Day Team (Holly Day, Nell Iris, K. L. Noone and Amy Spector). We have yet to settle on a topic though! It’s likely that it’ll be a ‘day’ again though, so that’ll be a hard deadline too.

Then…I want to do another Theatr Fach story set in Llanbraduc; another Celtic Myth story; and I want to get my teeth into the third and final one of the Bradfield Village novels. That’s a year overdue now on my personal schedule and it’s bubbling along in the background. After that, I really want to revisit the 1780s and write a companion novel to The Flowers of Time that either explores the relationship between Edie Merton’s brother Henry and his friend Bennett Carruthers, or is another story featuring Edie and Jones. Perhaps a mystery? I don’t know yet. I do know I want to go back to that time period though.

I didn’t write anything long or anything historical in 2022 and I’m missing it. I feel like I really overdid things in 2021 and retreating to shorter, contemporary stories has been lovely, very refreshing and a great deal of fun. I’m starting to feel the pull of historical settings again now though and yesterday a book about the East India Company fell off my bookshelf and landed on my foot; so perhaps the Gods of Writing are giving me a hint! I aim to write about a thousand words a day when I’m in the swing of things in The Morning Office with Ofelia and Nell, whatever project I’m working on.

I’d also like to get the audiobooks of the Bradfield Village trilogy underway; but that’s finance dependent as well as narrator dependent and has been hanging in the wind for over a year now as I’ve been too tied up with family things to organise anything. (A quick punt at this point for the audio of Lost in Time, which is 99c at various places until the end of the month!)

Whatever your projects and professional or personal goals this coming year I wish you all the best with them. Thank you for staying with me through what’s undoubtedly been one of the toughest years of my life.

You can catch up with my fellow #RAtR writer’s plans by clicking on the links below.