My 2022 life and creativity recap – what I’d like to achieve

Well, here we are at the end of 2022! As usual, the year went all kinds of crazy places I didn’t foresee, as years tend to do.

At the beginning of the year, my resolutions were to work in the yard and update my blog more. Ha. Ha.

Well, I worked in the yard, got it into good enough shape for the kids to play in. We got the terrible leak under the house fixed, which required a scorched-earth replumb of the entire house (it’s a doublewide so it’s not actually that difficult). However, the leak has led to the foundation shifting, so we have to get the trailer leveled NEXT. Ugh, cascading house repairs.

On the creativity front, I published three books in 2022:

Sanctuary is the eighth book in the After Atlantis series, which is sort of urban fantasy and superhero adjacent. Song of the Rose is Beauty and the Beast in space, and Stars and Ashes is Cinderella in space, same universe. They’re little novellas and I love them both dearly. Especially the giant stone spaceships that eat asteroids for fuel and argue with their pilots. Marek is the goodest boi frigate.

In June I started doing art commissions, and that consumed the rest of my year, all the way into November. I think I slightly over-committed, lol! I was totally burned out and closed commissions until March 2023.

I wrote an entire After Atlantis book that I had to scrap because it didn’t work. It didn’t work on so many levels. What it really is is the first book of the spinoff series I’ve been planning to write, where a kid and his robot companion solve mysteries in a world with superpowers. So I shelved it until I can ACTUALLY finish After Atlantis, then I will revisit Max and Zero and give them the series they want so badly.

Meanwhile, I sat down and wrote the REAL book nine, tentatively called Irregulars. It’s completely finished and just awaiting edits, and I’m quite happy with it. James is hunting the elemental aspects, as he was told to do in Mercurion. He has all of them except Air because the air elemental is dead. He reaches out to Jayesh, who in turn reaches out to the shard runner kids Jayesh befriended back in Bloodbound. Their efforts to befriend a girl with a nascent air aspect shard wind up taking them all kinds of fun places, eventually to the throne of the Emperor of Atlantis, himself. I’m hoping to publish that one first quarter 2023.

I also have a little sword and sorcery book in the hopper called Blade and Staff for Hire. It’s basically set in 1400s fantasy Spain, where a warrior with a huge sword and a young but powerful healer go on a road trip to find wives. Of course, finding girls isn’t that simple, and there winds up being all kinds of action and monster-slaying, and the warrior’s girl winds up being a delicate badass you just want to wrap in bubblewrap. The book just needs a couple of rounds of edits and it can hit the shelves, too. I just didn’t have the attention for it while trying to finish Irregulars.

So, for 2023, I want to get both of those books published. I’m writing the tenth and final book of After Atlantis, the big war for the Atlantean Islands that the series has been building to. I’m sorry, my readers who suffered through Sanctuary, it will all be worth it in books 9 and 10.

Let’s see, resolutions for 2023 … I’d like to play more games with my kids and husband, maybe stream some. I need to get my oldest kid driving (screams in terror), and get this house finally fixed up. I also want to plant a big garden and do some canning this year. I don’t really want to plan anything more than that, because life is always so crazy and unpredictable. We’ll see how I did when I check in at the end of 2023!