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 PixelStudion, 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? Honestly can't tell if she's just stringing me along, and since this is my 'secret blog' I will be honest and say it's pissing me off. (I am also hormonal, so I am aware that might be a factor).

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!

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.