2025 is upon us, and it crept up on me quicker than I thought possible. Here we are, already in February and I’m only just now working on this review. But because this is my first year-end review of my writing, I make the rules, and I say February is more than acceptable for this post.
I had a lot of personal wins this year, but I want to focus on my writing specifically. I spoke a bit about this here, where I talked about my writing focused New Year’s Resolution of more writing freedom. And 2024 is what gave me the inspiration to do that. But I didn’t explain in that post the happenings that led to me realizing how trapped I felt in my current cycle of writing.
Around July of 2024 I started feeling a nagging in the back of my brain. If you’ve read my mental breakdown post in late September 2024, you know that I likened my ability to write to a brownie that turns into a boggart if I don’t indulge it.
“My ability and desire to write is many things. I think I’d name part of it a brownie. No, not the delicious chocolate dessert, but the naked little fairy creature of old, mischievous and proud and sensitive. It wants to be treated well, it wants to be cultivated. It wants to be loved and respected. And if not, it turns into a boggart. It crawls into my bed at night and strips me of any rest or peace. It claws down my back and breathes hot and foul breath into my ear, growling out its displeasure at being forgotten, unloved, abandoned.” – I Shall Have 5 Bodies and Minds with Which to Write 5 Stories at Once: The Existential Dread That Comes from Having a Mind Full of Ideas: Or Bloviating for Dummies
And so I was tortured in my waking hours and my sleeping ones with the overwhelming desire to write, but for some reason my normal outlets weren’t working. It was akin to having an itch on the inside of my body, impossible to scratch and driving me to the brink of insanity.
My realization that I was trapped in a cage of my own making slowly started to dawn on me when I started getting nagged by ideas that simply wouldn’t work in my established world of Feiradyr. The horrible guilt of leaving behind my world, my characters, stopped me from digging into these new ideas. But I was miserable. I couldn’t even call on my desire to write as often as I wanted. I was plagued by dreams that bombarded me with ideas. I was standing on the edge of Feiradyr, gazing through a foggy veil into a mystery.
Funnily enough, it was while I was reading that I stumbled upon the kindness and freedom I would begin to allow myself. I was seeing other authors writing not only multiple series, but gasp, in multiple genres. George R.R. Martin wrote not only epic fantasy, but also horror and science fiction. Nora Roberts dabbles in romance, fantasy, and suspense. There were no rules, written or unwritten, for what I could tell stories about. The only thing holding me back from realizing my own potential was me.
I would say this was a difficult or painful realization for me, but that would be a lie. I think I actually closed the book I was reading and rushed to my office to drag out a brand new book binder. I wrote on it with a sharpie in clear script, My Best Friend’s a Zombie. I had this name, and two lines in mind. One opening line, and one closing line.
“I always shoot zombies twice. Just in case.”
“I always hesitate to shoot zombies. Just in case.”
And with that I dove into a brand new genre I’d never written in. Dystopian fiction. That’s technically a lie. I had written a handful of fanfiction chapters when I was much younger, namely my own self insert falling in love with Gale while Katniss was in the Hunger Games. (I felt he deserved better during the second book.) But I barely counted it as it didn’t have zombies like what I was wanting to write, and those few chapters focused almost entirely on the romance. Maybe someday I will plague you all with the details of my fanfiction writing, although I would never share the actual writing itself.
Anyways, my new zombie fiction book allowed me to reclaim my passion for writing. I had a full plot outline in mind in no time, something I’ve only ever been able to do one other time (in the book I’ve technically completed.) My Best Friend’s a Zombie is a book that I want to say something with. I have a lot of complex and interesting themes in mind involving leadership, grief, fear, toxic positivity, anger, and sacrifice. It is very much a work in progress, but it gave me my freedom back, and that’s the important part, at least for now.
Confidence in my writing is a struggle I’ve had my entire life. Actually, confidence in general, but we are focusing on writing right now. As far as my knowledge is concerned, I could talk about writing, criticism, and media for hours without batting an eye. But believing that my writing is actually good enough is a separate struggle entirely. This is something that is absolutely not unique to writers. In fact, you’d probably be more hard pressed to find a writer who thinks their writing is good enough than one who thinks it’s trash most of the time.
I believe I have talent. It’s actually pretty much statistically impossible for me to still be terrible at something I’ve done for multiple hours a day for almost 15 years. But creating a finished product that I believe is good enough to go out into the world and be consumed by other people is another story. Which, is a hilarious barrier for me to have erected considering the caliber of media presented and encouraged in this day and age. It’s never been easier to publish a book and gain fans. Which, by the way, I consider a good thing. As long as there are still people out there who are willing to dive deeper and consume media in an analytical way to discover its faults and merits.
And yet my fear holds me back, but my ability to shatter the shackles I snapped on myself through writing a new kind of book has helped me harness my confidence more than I think anything else could right now.
The fantasy genre is far from restrictive. Which is the logic I used to trick myself into never escaping it. But being able to explore new tropes, types of characters, styles of writing, and unique tones has allowed me to really stretch my writing muscles in brand new and exciting ways.
And then I realized I could go even further…
In much the same way as I broke free from self inserts in my stories by writing a character that was the complete opposite of me, I decided to try out a genre that old me would have never written in.
My first potential contender was sci-fi. I’ve always disliked the genre, with its usual lack of animals, (something I absolutely love) excessive presence of machines, math and science talk, and the kind of gray, vast similarity of appearance that tends to span across the genre. They kind of all blend together for me. I just don’t find the genre super interesting. So I decided against it because I thought trying to write something I was so disinterested in from the jump would be setting myself up for failure, even if my goal was to simply pilot new genres.
The next option was, scary.
After all, if I screwed things up there would be an army of booktok girlies on the horizon, brandishing their shadow daddies and monster boyfriends.
But I took the plunge, and my witchy dark romance was born.
And I have never in my life had so much fun writing a book…
If new me had tried to sit old me down and tell her she’d someday be not only writing an erotic romance, but a dark erotic romance at that, she would have stared at me like I just birthed an alien. And not only am I writing it, I’m having an absolute BLAST. It’s not that I’m not taking it seriously, but epic fantasy can be very stressful to write. There is so much to keep up with between lore, history, languages, races, famous legends, magic system rules, and a plethora of characters to consider, understand, and place in your world. Being able to simply relax and write a more low-stakes story with fewer characters and the pre-existing history of earth to draw on is pretty refreshing. I’ve switched up world building for the time being with studying the history of witchcraft, tarot, magick/magic, and the occult because my main character happens to be a witch who accidentally turns a devil loose on herself. And I’m sure that you can imagine what happens next…
I’m thankful for last year’s revelations that led to this year’s resolutions. I’m thankful that I now have the confidence to move forward knowing I won’t ever abandon that world I’ve crafted, but that I’m allowed to take a vacation from there sometimes. Taking a vacation from your own head can be a difficult thing to do, but not only is it a positive thing, it’s needed sometimes. So if someone uses this post as a reason to realize they’ve been caging themselves too, that’s awesome. And if you just read through this whole post thinking I was insane, that’s also appreciated. Thank you so much for reading either way, and I will see you all in my next post!
Happy writing!
Writing My World 