This Year In Retrospective

2018 was a difficult year for me, with real life interfering a lot with my writing. It didn’t look like it at first, but in the middle of March, things began changing for the worse. My mother fell terminally ill (although we didn’t know that at first) and died on the 1st of April (of all days…). I moved into a new flat, so my father could later on move into mine, organizing my move in less than a month (I moved end of April), so the floors in my old flat could be changed before my dad moved in. A hot summer made working hard for me, since heat isn’t a favourite of mine. And in autumn, when things were slowly getting better again weather-wise, my dad learned he had to get a heart surgery. The surgery and its consequences have kept us both on our toes and from really relaxing for the last two months of this year. And I paid with a long cold for most of December - something I would have been rid of in a week at the outmost, had I not been under that much stress beforehand.

What happened work-wise, then? Not all that much. I still have several stories to edit, but I didn’t write much - although I managed to finish a second volume of John Stanton. That one worked out, because while I was working on “The Case of the Horrid Hellhound,” I was already having ideas for “The Case of the Goddess’s Assassin,” and while I was writing that, I already had ideas for “The Case of the Deadly Documents.” The wish to write the next story pushed me along. Besides, a novella is not an intimidating project - it’s about eight chapters minimum, unlike a novel with at least twenty chapters.

I do still have writing projects on the horizon, though, provided this year is a little less full of stuff than the last one was. I have another Knight Agency novel planned which currently goes by “Ignition Rites.” I have a third Black Knight Agency novel waiting to be written which currently is named “Grey Eminence.” Sometime in the future, there will also be “Two for Joy,” the second Magpies story. In additions, there is a Swenson & Carter novella which I plan on writing, so I can publish three of them together. It’s not as if I have completely stopped writing.

As you can see, life can cross your plans very well and the real art is not to let this disturb everything forever and stop writing, just because there’s too much to do. I kept up my blogging (although I wrote my posts in bunches and then scheduled them) and I plan to do so in future as well. I also did some writing, although I didn’t produce much to publish (two fan fiction stories came out of it). In addition, I did a lot of reading, which will help me in the long run as well. Storing up new creative energy is as important as being creative and it’s a good thing not to forget about that.

Life goes on as I look ahead, into 2019, and I’m looking forward to a new year filled with new stories and other new things.