Author Life Updates: January 2023

Life update: Last year, it was all about bread and other things, but mostly bread. I’m feeling like this year a lot of my life updates will be park and trail-oriented. Here are some snaps from a few recent hikes and trail runs.

Author Life News

Entering year five of the blog (!!!) and with a lot of my history as a writer stored here, I’m always wondering how to change or update the blog to meet my life. I’ve taken on a lot, both career and life-wise, so I’ve decided to move to post only once a month. Those posts will all be author life updates, since they are the most important. Every now and then, I’ll do a How I Write post because those are also important to my vision for this site.

While I won’t be posting as much here, I’m still writing and publishing a lot!

Speaking of writing and publishing a lot, 2022 was a great year for me! I worked on almost 100 different stories that ended up getting published in places like Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Writer’s Digest, and more. If you’re a voter in the Hugo’s, Astounding Award, Nebula’s, or any awards this year, here’s a link to my award eligibility Twitter post, and I link to all my 2022 stories in my End of 2022 blog post.

I think 2022 was my best publishing year yet. I got into magazines and publications I’ve been dreaming of working with since I started my journey to become a professional writer. As I published more and wrote more, I felt more recognition building for my skills, stories, and craft. There are moments where I think I want 2023 to be just like 2022, with me publishing all the time and leaving the year with 100+ new pubbed stories under my belt. But I know 2023 is going to be a year of a lot of learning, studying, and trying new things, which takes time and is slow work.

I spent a lot of time over the past couple of months thinking about how I wanted to spend my 2023 as a writer. As always, I created a goals and intentions post for 2023 for people to check out and watch me update throughout the year.

My goals and intentions for 2023:

Apply to MFA programs
- Iowa Writers’ Workshop
- Warren Wilson College
- Brown University
- Bennington College
Study history, science, and psychology
Study world-building and description
Write 2 new stories a month
Approach publisher about editing an anthology
Query horror novella till September
Rough draft horror thriller novel
Get more involved in speculative fiction writing community

As for publishing, I’m excited to have several stories and articles coming out in various publications throughout the next few months, including a short story in the anthology Monstrous Futures, Interzone, Baffling, The Writer, Writer’s Digest, and Strange Horizons. I’m also editing up two short stories. One about fish people in Seattle and another about driving along the coast and burial recovery.

On the querying front, I got the final rejection back for my science fiction novel. Now, I put it on ice for a little while focusing on other projects. I have my horror novella still out on query and submission with several agents and publishers. I’m working on revamping my query letter for the horror novella to hopefully get more interest in the manuscript for my next round of queries.

I’m also in the research and reading stages of working on a new standalone horror thriller, which will involve extensive research into the genre, world-building, characters, and masterworks. I’ll be taking most of the year just to research, develop, and outline the novel. There are a couple months carved out at the end of 2023 for me to draft the novel based on my outline, but I’m also keeping myself open to taking the whole year to do the research if the novel calls for it.

And like last year, I’ll be spending this year doing a deep dive into two craft topics. This year, it’s all about description and world-building. Last year I started a copy work of Mongrels I so humbly believed I could finish within two months. I’m taking it deeper with me into the year and will continue typing up the novel for the rest of the year and examining Jones’ style of description. I’ve also got a few books and exercises slotted for the next couple of weeks to help me practice my world-building and descriptive writing skills.