An End of the Year Post

I look forward to seeing the end of this strange and tumultuous and oftentimes painful year. (I am operating under the naive and idealistic hope that 2021 will be gentler with us all)

I promised myself that I would not journal about COVID, but it really has cast a long, dark shadow over the year, hasn’t it? Checking in on sick friends and family, worrying over those who went to the hospital, and grieving for those who didn’t make it to see today.

This year left me introspective enough to return to blogging; I’ve always found comfort in keeping a journal. I quit years ago for a lot of reasons — focusing on photojournaling — but also because I find it difficult to organise my thoughts into words (a fact which may seem strange for a professional author, but there it is).

But a few months back, I remembered how much I once enjoyed reading author blogs. It’s not lost on me that the two authors whose blogs I enjoyed most were Ursula LeGuin and Rachel Caine, who have both passed on now (Rachel just last month, and I miss her presence on Twitter deeply). As far as I can tell, Rachel’s old blog is gone, but Ursula’s is still there, and her very best entries have been published in the book No Time To Spare.

So I figured if I found comfort in the journals of other authors, perhaps someone will find it in mine. So here I am, and here I will continue to be in 2021.

My biggest professional bright spot in 2020 was the release of Seven Devils. After some difficult life issues, I took a two-year hiatus from publishing, so I was thrilled that readers embraced my shift in genres and this book that Laura Lam and I spent 5 years working on. Seven Devils hit the Sunday Times Bestseller List here in the UK during an extremely difficult time in publishing, and I’m immensely grateful to the readers who picked it up and recommended it to their friends.

On that note, you might notice a little something different about my project tracker . . .

Yes! In the final days of 2020, Laura and I finished Seven Devils 2. Earlier in the summer, we finished a zero draft that was unreadable (par for the course; it is, basically, a draft that asks the question: does the story we’ve plotted work?). Then we redrafted a lengthy chapter-by-chapter outline to further iron out plot and character arcs. After that, we wrote the current draft and then combined our voices in the edit, which we’ve just sent to our editors. Currently, Seven Devils 2 is 140,000 words, which is the same length as Seven Devils.

This book was both easier and more difficult than its predecessor. Easier in that Laura and I had the worldbuilding and characters down, but more difficult in that we wrote 7 POVs (in contrast to 5 in book 1). It was . . . hm . . . a learning experience? Okay, let me just get this out of the way: I am never, ever, ever, ever writing 7 POVs ever, ever again. 🙂

Ever.

But on that note, I think these books made me a better writer and challenged me a great deal, and I am immensely proud of them.

You’ll notice the other two books on my project tracker are still in progress. Garden Book is going to be my January project while I wait for editorial notes on Seven Devils 2. I’m not completely confident that the story is there, but it’s been my uncompleted project for the last 7 years, and it’s time to jump in, or I’ll never finish.

Additional thoughts and farm things:

• In the photos below, you may notice bags and chicken wire around the base of trees along our river, and that is because of THE BEAVER.
• I think the most POVs I will ever do is 4. And even 4 might be Too Many.
• It appears we are on lockdown for the foreseeable. The UK has a COVID variant that’s apparently more easily spread, so Mr. May and I will be remaining on the farm until things get better (or until we’re called in for the vaccine).
• Earlier in the year, our two resident pheasants (they’re not really ours, but I have decided they are), Lord Flyron and Lady Featherington, went off to have children. We are now blessed with a roaming pack of pheasants — as far as I can tell, three females and four males. I will now have to think of more posh bird names.

More later, much love,

xx