Dumped my agent this morning.

Funnily enough, she replied to that email really fast, which is nice, since she's ignored the two I sent her in April. I know it was the right decision, but I can't help feeling a *little* grief over it. There's zero guarantee I'll ever get another agent, after all, and it feels like I'm back at square one. On the bright side, I got hold of my "royalty" statements (it will be a WHILE until I actually make royalties, if ever) and it's nice to know I've sold well over 3,500 copies. Not enough to set the world alight, obvs, but it means that possibly some 4,000 people or so will have read the book. That's pretty wild, for a book I started writing as a homeless teenager.

I have felt so ill all week, because heat + chronic illness = migraines.

I'm slowly coming out of it, but I've been so mad about it. I always get mad about this stuff, because I haven't done any of the things I wanted to, and it makes me feel lazy and wasteful even though I know there's no point beating myself up about it. Oh well.

In brighter news, my friend is recovering well from her surgery, and everything's going well for my audiobook stuff. My publisher has confirmed in writing I can use the same cover design as the paperback, which is great. I'm excited! Also my vampire book is with an editor (not a commissioning editor, unfortunately, this is one I've hired to get it as good as I possibly can) and since I haven't had a reply from my agent in over a month I've drafted my resignation from our contract. I'm going to send it on Monday, and the plan is that in about August, when I've had time to put my line edits in place, I'll start querying elsewhere. I've got an un-claimed week off in July to get myself prepared and psyched up. I'm also aiming for 1st August to release the audiobook I think, which would be exactly 2 years after the book came out, and also it's Yorkshire Day, which suits my very Yorkshire accent reading out my very Yorkshire novel. At some point in the midst of all this, I'd also like to get the rest of my alien novel drafted, but who knows if I'll achieve that!

...I have news.

Last week I was in my hometown, cat-sitting for a friend while she was in hospital doing something heroic and sainthood-deserving. For my part, I sat on her sofa for a week covered in purring kits and editing my vampire book, which is less impressive, but y'know, I enabled her heroics, so surely I get some praise???

Jokes aside, while I was there I took the opportunity to reach out to some audiobook producers, and I will be recording my audiobook at the end of June. That's right, I'm doing an audio! I'm pretty pleased/excited/proud of my poractivity. I'm going to be narrating myself, which is the more expensive route but gives me a lot of control (plus any royalties from downloads, such as they may be). I'm not expecthing this to make me rich - I said to the producer that my reasons for doing this are twofold: one, because it's more accessible. Why should people with ADHD like my partner who struggle to focus on books, or people like me with chronic migraine, or people with visual impairments, have fewer options of stories to consume? And also, two, it's a vanity project because literally no one has asked me for this.

But like, when else might I have chance to do an audiobook? So that's nice.

I wasn't sure when I was going to write another blog, but luckily a couple of things have wound me up this week and it's sheer coincidence that it's basically a month since my last post.

I'm mostly going to complain TODAY about AI, again, and in specific the insistence of some companies in pushing it on ALL THEIR EMPLOYEES.

Like. I have a day job, obviously, because you'd best believe I don't make enough money from writing to live on. I'm very lucky, I LOVE my day job. Do you know why I love it? Because it allows me to use all the things I think I'm best at: active listening, building relationships, desk-based research, coming up with creative solutions to problems, writing and delivering workshops, ETC.

So WHY am I currently in a 2 hour 'all staff meeting' in which some woman is urgently pushing us all to use CoPilot more often? Why is she saying things like "really it's just like talking to a child, you just have to be really specific when you put your prompt in" for one thing, I DON'T WANT TO WORK WITH CHILDREN. I quite enjoy working with my entirely adult colleagues, thanks.

Currently the cost of compute needed to use generative AI tools like Anthropic and ChatGPT is higher than the cost of hiring people. So, what is the benefit to us as an organisation right now? Presumably (and I have precisely zero evidence to back this up, it's just the only thing that makes sense to me) someone somewhere in the hierarchy has signed a contract to pay an abscene amount of money to Microsoft, which is why they're so keen for us all to use CoPilot. And I sort of get that, but...

In what other context would I be SO heavily encouraged to use tools that have stolen my intellectual property in order to exist, to do the parts of my job I LIKE DOING MYSELF THANK YOU VERY MUCH? I swear to god - if we get to the point where I'm being told I HAVE to use generative AI, I will be asking for some specific and in-depth changes to my job description. And then I'll probably leave.

Can I be fucked figuring out why the formatting on my site is suddenly not working properly?

No, I cannot. I will get round to it, but I'm sort of hoping it's only me having this issue and it will resolve itself.

Anyway, I've been playing a LOT of Cyberpunk 2077 this past week - I've been off work because I work for a university, and they shut for a week over Easter and so also Steam had a sale so 2077 was only £17 and I did not think I was going to even like it (I'm not a Big Boy Gamer, you know? I mostly faff about with interactive fiction and cosy bullshit) but guess what? Love it. Starting to get a LITTLE bored now, but only because I've so throughly knackered my sleep schedule during my extended stay in Night City over such a compressed time frame. There's a lot of really excellent environmental storytelling involved, and those lovely little episodic stories in the side gigs you can pick up along the way. It's a great example of what I think can make video games SO compelling - it's an entire immersive world, which can lead to a real richness of storytelling that can't really be matched in any other medium.

It has also got me thinking about my own cyberpunk-inspired (as in, cyberpunk the genre, not the game) world. Which means I am pretending to myself that I have stayed awake until 7am playing this game for ***RESEARCH REASONS*** and not because I'm in my mid-30s and clearly never learned self-restraint. I've had the idea for my proper cyberpunk, neo-noir detective-ish series for YEARS, but I've never sat down and just written it, and I think it's because it's always felt too ambitious. Like, the world-building involved, the convoluted storylines it would involve, the fact I want to put self-acceptance and romance and found family and trauma from bio-family at the heart of it even as the city crumbles around my characters... it's always felt like a LOT to balance.

I've never been the kind of writer who draws maps or makes character sheets or any of that stuff, partly because I tend to let stories percolate in my head until the characters start talking to me and then I binge-write terrible first drafts - and then I build the world around the plot and the character relationships in the edits. I'm not saying that's the best way to write, I'm just saying it's significantly quicker for me. The problem is, I have two stories (this cyberpunk one and a medieval fantasy one) that are like... MASSIVE and it's hard to get the characters to speak over the hubbub of the world already in my head. Like, these are the places I go to daydream, and disentangling a coherent story from that can be tricky.

All of which is to say I think I might have figured out how this neocities site will benefit me, aside from just being fun and nerdy. I called it an archive when I set it up, but I didn't really know what I meant by that - and now I do. I want to take a leaf out of 2077's book, and create and archive of... snapshots. You know, if you've played Cyberpunk 2077, like the memory shards you can find all over the city that help fill in some of the lore? Like the Thorton User Manual, and the cargo manifests and the news articles about Bartmoss and how Night City was founded, and the war. I wanna do something like that, to get the snippets from my head to the page. It means this site might end up being like a personal encyclopedia of the world, which might mean I can then more easily focus on the story of my one particular character, Lira.

There's something really lovely to me about finding stories where you don't expect them, you know? Like that forum thread from someone on Money Savings Expert that you keep going back to check for updates on after binge-reading a stranger's journey out of a terrible marriage, or the blog you stumble upon on neocities that is not especially groundbreaking but just has something really compelling about it. I think that's the vibe I'm going for.

Oh, hey. Anyone would think I'm actually intending to update this blog regularly!

And I will... right up until I get bored and/or forget. Right now though, it's a Friday night (I live a WILD life) and I have nowt better to do, so oh, hello!

Since we last spoke, all of 5 days ago, I have had a meeting with my agent and I'm feeling pretty reassured. Like, it's still going to be YEARS AWAY before I get another book on shelves, but I have a much better plan for how to edit my vampire book. I've got a writing retreat with some friends in April so I'm hoping to use that time to make the bulk of the changes. There's like, one pretty significant plot through-line to change, which will have lots of knock-on effects, but I've been able to keep some of the stuff that really matters to me about the story.

Oh, also, one of her notes was 'make [redacted character] more like Brendan Fraser', so, I guess I HAVE to re-watch The Mummy and George of the Jungle this weekend...

Also my mum's coming to stay, and there was a rat in my living room last week. That's not a joke, it was under the sofa. We had to trap it under a bin and shuffle the whole thing outside. I think it sneaked in when I was getting the post, I don't think there are rat holes in the flat (it was still NOT IDEAL). Anyway, bye!

I am having what many would consider 'an okay weekend', I think.

Like, I haven't done any writing yet but I did make a new image for the Felix game, and I also tinified all of them so that hopefully the game will still be nicely optimised even though I'm using neocities for the image hosting. They don't need to be mega high-quality, it's a prototype CYOA-style story. I've still got maybe... 4 or 5 I'd like to make? And then the game will be more or less ready to go.

I also spent several joyful hours playing video games yesterday. Honestly, I'm like that meme that says 'weekends are cool because you can either do chores or the things you love but either way it's the wrong choice.' When I play games or read or write, I get so swept up that time just PASSES and before I know it, it's 2am and I've renovated a moonbase so all the animals I adopted from the Pets DLC have somewhere nice to live. Which, to be fair, has inspired a potential sci fi romance story. Because clearly, I'm a very serious person.

Speaking of sci fi romance, I got longlisted for a competition with a very silly sci fi romance/erotica short story this week! It's a competition my friend and her podcast co-host run, but I entered via pseudonym and they were all judged blind. It's a very Zoey Draven/Ruby Dixon inspired vibe, and I had a lot of fun writing it, even if writing ~the spicy scenes~ is a new and unsettling skill for me.

No real update on the trad pub side of things. I did email my agent but I think she misunderstood what I was trying to ask for, because she replied with some reassurances and chat about how all authors need to be edited. Which I was a bit frustrated by, because I know this, and I never want to be one of those writers who can't accept feedback - and I don't THINK I've ever given her reason to think that of me? So, I've replied and again and tried to be more clear and direct while still being polite but she hasn't replied and it's been almost a week so maybe she's done with me now. We'll see what happens, I guess.

This is going to get super long if I'm not careful, but interestingly I saw a post by Fair Play United, an arts org who raise awareness of issues working class artists face, and it was about like, the mental gymnastics people from working class backgrounds have to do to make art, and I can't help wondering if that's feeding into my feelings about trad pub. Like, I want to and am prepared to work hard around the confines of the day job that actually pays my bills, because I expect this to be a lnog game. I expect I will have to give up evenings and weekends to meet a publishing schedule, and I am prepared for that, more than I'm prepared to slowly waft through the world waiting on other people's timeframes. I'm probably too impatient, I suppose is what I'm saying. But also, I don't have the luxury of just aesthetically 'being a writer'. I want to actually be one, consistently. I have no idea if that makes sense, but it's what I think is bothering me with this whole agenting thing.

There's a special kind of malaise that comes with being a writer sometimes - and yes, I know that's an incredibly wanky way to start a blog post.

February has not been wildly productive, so this whole 'I'll work on a new project every month! It'll be great!' stuff I was spewing in January didn't take long at all to go down the pan. I have done *some* stuff, like I've been tweaking the HTML in my Felix game, and I've been messing about with pixel art in PixelStudio, and of course I've now made most of the collage/Affinity game art for Felix.

But I haven't done a lot of *writing*, really. Part of that's some stressful personal stuff - my best friend was meant to be going into hospital and I was due to travel to cat sit for her but the surgery got pulled last minute, which obviously wasn't ideal for anyone involved and that threw a whole heap of spanners in my works. Also last weekend I stayed awake for more than 40 hours total playing Promise Mascot Agency, which was obviously a stellar use of my time. (No, it kind of was, I loved it so much and I wish I could play it from scratch all over again)

I've also had a couple of back and forths with my literary agent and I'm feeling... not great about it, actually. Like, I don't know what it is about this industry that authors just don't seem to be trusted with transparency and clear, sensible timelines for when they can expect to hear back about anything. It's not far off a YEAR since I wrote this book, and I think it's great, I really do think it deserves to be read, but my agent still wants it editing again - and like, that's FINE, except that NOW she's offering to do me some inline notes for what she wants, but where was that five months ago when we did this whole rigmarole before? BUT also she's a very busy agent with a lot of clients outside of me and I've never done this before, so like, I think I just need to figure out how to work with her in a way that works for both of us.

Anyway, today has been a pretty good day. I booted up my adult romance novel, the one I'm potentially considering self-publishing under an ~assumed name~. I've already written a short story under that name which is going in an anthology later this year, so that's me soft-launching this idea, and today I... deleted 4,000 words of the novel.

But! But! That's a good thing! I stopped writing it in November because I was losing steam, and I think in the time since then I've worked out why - the stakes weren't high enough, and the sort of choreography of how the main couple make it from 'not having seen each other for 15 years' to 'deeply loving and protective of each other' wasn't clear enough. Today I think I fixed some of those issues! Going to do some more on it tomorrow too, and then if I've had a whole productive weekend I might even regain to momentum to finish it.

Shame I can't work on it on Monday too, but I'm going back to my lovely school for a 2nd visit on Monday, and I'll be there or travelling to/from for most of the day. BUT I am going to visit my mum at the back end of this week, and I'm crucially not telling anyone except my parents about it, so I may get time to do some writing while I'm there too. Maybe. We'll see.

...I did not rewrite the Eurydice book.

I *thought* about it, but it was kind of overwhelming. I've made decisions about what I need to do with it, which includes making the whole thing third person, rather than first. It will be a better book for it, hopefully a little lighter and more appropriate for a teen audience (it was a bit grief-heavy in this draft). But I haven't *done* it. And what's more... I don't think I'm going to work on it in February either. It's too big a project for a month with 28 days in.

Instead, I'm going to attempt to improve and possibly finish a draft of my dragon romance book, which is for a new adult/adult audience. I'm more than halfway done on wordcount and I've already had an epiphany this month that will hopefully strengthen the conflict/tension between my two love interests. And I re-read some of it the other day and... I still like it! Which is not always the case!!

the school visit went incredibly well, the Y7s were SO kind to me and the school have even asked me to come back to see some Y9s later this month. They want me to do the same sessions again so there's not as much prep work this time, and it's really flattering that they liked me enough to ask me back.

Game update - I've finished the storyline in Twine, so now I need to make up some collage-art graphics in Affinity to make it look a bit nicer before I unleash it into the wild. It's been a lot of fun, and although I don't think it's good enough to advertise on like itch.io or anything, I'm happy with making it a free game here as part of the Rimean Archives. It's... a hobby I don't necessarily need to monetise (since I know what monetising novel writing did to my mental health). I've got ideas already for the next one - so, Rime as an idea centres on a character called Lira, and the Felix story was a sort of trial run of the setting, but I think I might be ready to go all in on Lira's story now. Originally it was going to be a novel, but cyberpunk feels a bit too close to reality right now, so I don't necessarily think waiting the standard 2+ years I would need to for traditional publishing would work. I like the idea of being able to go almost chapter by chapter and release it for free here as I go!

Delightfully, I have a half-day's author job coming up in a couple of weeks - it's a school visit, in which I'll be delivering 3 back-to-back, 1 hour each sessions... to a Year 7 group, a Year 9 group and... some others unspecified so far as they're coming in over lunch so they're being invited especially.

Not that that's in ANY WAY TERRIFYING. (jk, it absolutely is. Y7s are the scariest people on the planet.)

I'm also a little bit... not cross about it as such, but like, the book I wrote is 14+, it's very specifically not for Y7s. So I guess I won't be doing a reading in that session. It doesn't really matter; they're paying me, and I deliver careers workshops to students nearly every day of my life (got an excellent compliment today that a student 'wasn't bored even once!' in my LinkedIn session, which is hilarious). I can wing three sessions in a school library.

One of the things I'm going to do is a game about communication styles. I've done it before, for my university students, but I used Mentimeter for that and in a school I do not imagine the kids will have their phones with them, so I've turned it into a Twine (v1 is up on the site front page now). I'm really proud that I got the Harlowe to work for the game mechanics, and also /most/ of the styling is doing what it's meant to as well. For v2 I'll probably find some examples that are more Y7 friendly, I guess

It'll be the most money I've earned from directly my writing since I last got an advance payment, which was in 2024, so I'm certainly not complaining, and it gives me a chance to playtest some of my activities so I can offer this to more schools in future. I'm really hoping that with the Year of Reading 2026 there might be a bit more call for it.

In the meantime, obviously, I've got my January project to crack on with, which is a FULL REWRITE of the Eurydice/YA book. It's a LOT, but I've had some good ideas for new scenes, at least...

I have too many ideas, and it drives me into spirals of Not Doing Enough, so I've developed a PLAN. It is NOT, I repeat NOT, a New Years' Resolution, because I don't make those. Christ, I put enough pressure on myself without adding in a series of rules to live my life by every year. Plus, all those years I said I'd lose weight and here I am, still fat, so they don't work anyway. For me.

Back to the POINT, I have too many ideas. I've currently got 4 what I'd call 'active projects' (including relearning to code for this website and the interactive fiction games I want to start building on here), one 'inactive' which just means I haven't quite worked out how to tackle it yet, and about seven or eight ideas which have storylines plotted out but no further action taken.

I suspect that in the long run it's a good thing to have loads of ideas - it means I'm never going to feel at a loss for things to write, and writing is probably the most enduring part of my identity, so that kinda matters to me. But obviously, in the short term it feels like a massive weight of WANT and NEED that I also need to balance with my day job and my other hobbies and, I guess, socialising with people who love me and whom I also love. Or something.

So... to balance this, my plan is to give every month a job. I already tried this in December, when I edited the book I privately call my Whitby Vampire novel. It worked! Having an arbitrary deadline gave me more drive than I might otherwise have had with it, and since that's the book I actually need to send back to my agent it made sense to do that one first.

In January, I'm going to make a start on a HUGE rewrite of the YA book I wrote in Oct-Nov 2024. It's got some quite heavy themes and I want to lighten it up, so I'm currently making a plan for how I can do that and then I'll look at the overall structure. I won't get it all done in Jan, but no one's waiting for it (my agent is aware of this project's existence but the WV book is the priority right now). I'm hoping that at the end of the month I'll have got enough done to feel good, but then STOPPING and giving myself at least February to work on something else (probably the Fantasy Dragon book, or the IF game) will hopefully mean I don't burn out on it, because I am absolutely having some second book syndrome.

If I was going to make anything close to a New Year's Resolution, it would be to give myself a bloody break when it comes to the trad pub stuff. I've slowly internalised that my career is over before it really began just because one publisher chose not to give me another book deal, and I don't REALLY think that's true. I just like to be mean to me, sometimes, but in 2026 I want to focus purely on the writing, because that's the bit that brings me joy. So, a loose goal for the year is to DRAFT at least two new books, and EDIT at least another two, as well as developing at least one short, complete IF story (even if it's just the core HTML and not nicely formatted until 2027). I know I can do this, because I do write quite quickly (the WV book was initially drafted in 11 days flat) but overall the POINT is just the creation, for me.

I don't really know why I'm doing this; I do already have a blog I regularly fail to update, and that's on a website I pay like £30 a month for. But one of the things I really like about neocities is all the faintly unhinged blogs, so maybe this can be a place I keep some of my more 'not fit for general consumption' thoughts.

Like, for example, the fact that it's currently 03:16 and I'm not only still awake (I spent all night making that Felix graphic on Affinity), I'm thinking about the David Walliams thing. Which, if you don't know, is the fact that he's FINALLY been let go by Harper Collins, after LITERAL YEARS of it being basically an open secret in the publishing industry that he's a(n alleged) predator.

I'm absolutely confident something major's going to come out of the Telegraph investigation in the next few weeks and it will become woefully obvious the publishers were just trying to get out in front of it. It's depressing, knowing that EVERYONE KNEW for years and years but no one felt they could say anything, and all the while, young women were warned in whispers not to let themselves be alone with him.

It's too late at night for really deep, insightful thoughts about any of this, except that it's all so fucking obvious. I am in my mid-30s, and I can't even begin to count the number of times I've seen this happen in my life - famous men with some sort of power or cultural capital managing to blithely continue their evil ways while women desperately try to get someone to listen, until EVENTUALLY it happens, but usually so late in the game that a ton of other women (and men as well, in lots of cases) have also been harmed. When I was a teenager, the obvious big one in my sort of arena of knowledge was the Ian Watkins thing. I remember there were pages and pages of online forum posts of women explaining exactly what had been going on, how long for, and where the proof was - long before that sick creature got charged for any of it.

It makes me feel really gross, as well, that I'm even tangentially a part of the publishing industry. It makes me upset that I'm someone with no power - like, I'd love to say that if one of the young women of publishing had confided in me about Walliams or someone like him, I'd have stood up for them - but who the fuck would have listened to me?! And at the same time, I WISH I had a plan that meant I could tell the industry to do one, because I don't love that even after all this, if HC offered me a contract I would feel like a FOOL if I didn't take it. Because if I didn't, someone else would, and because they're still one of the biggest names in the game and if I ever want to be a name in the industry I have to be ambitious and yuck, yuck, yuck. Don't love it. Hate it, actually.