Life, Writing, Weirdness

Or, things I worked on this month, the January 2026 edition.

Plotting. In the background, I’ve been slowly doing character development and plotting of the first of five novels centered on Valkyr Station, an early warning hub maintaining a stationary north pole-ish point relative to the Sun, set three decades after a repulsed alien invasion. I’m going to at least rough plot (to the approximate one sentence per scene level) before the books get put into the rotation for actual drafting as a set.

The first draft of four Flash pieces, varying in length from 337 to 902 words. In writing order:

• “The Wooly Unicorn” (Fantasy, 902 words)
• “Business Venture” (Science Fiction, 460 words)
• “Leafy Evolution” (Science Fiction, 337 words)
• “Times Past” (Science Fiction, 598 words)

I seem fond of flash in recent years, both writing and reading, not to the exclusion of other lengths but in addition to.

The first draft of three shorter than novel things, although two of them count towards a novel which is more like a sequence of shorter pieces to form an overall narrative. Almost all of them can stand alone, but they fit together, too.

• “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” (Fantasy Novelette, 8406 words) the last of the main Hauntings of Fiona stories for what is either a single volume or the first volume. I haven’t decided yet. Not a fairy tale retelling.
• “A Full-Time Student” (Fantasy Short, 1402 words) sort of self-contained, but it mentions events in several of the main stories in Hauntings of Fiona. I think about it more as a denouement or a coda.
• “Cold Sleep” (Science Fiction Short, 6518 words), a story that had been sitting half-complete for several years but had notes for where I wanted the second half of it to go. Adjusting some of those notes, I did some of the work last year and finished it in January. According to my current count, I have 29 more short stories in a similar state (started, but still lots of drafting to do).

Worth noting that the entire group of stories coming together for The Hauntings of Fiona comes in at 50,132 words on the first draft. By the time it winds its way to final, historical data tells me it will probably come close to 60k.

Oh, one more first draft thing. I finished the first draft of the scripts for episodes 8, 9, and 10 of the first season of an audio drama currently called Distant Early Warning. It’s a three-season story arc with (probably) 10 episodes per season, taking place in the same universe as the Valkyr Station books. Smaller scale, much smaller cast of characters. Shooting for 8-10 minute episodes.

On the editing side,

• Last year, I pulled out “Shakespeare’s Sisters”, an 11k SF novelette I’d drafted in 2013 that I was never happy with, and tried to do a second draft. What I found was that I’d really only written the beginning and ending of the story and there was a whole big chunk in the middle that really needed to be told. A little plotting and some additional drafting stretched out over a few months, and I have three scenes left to write as it approaches 20,000 words. Hopefully, I’ll have that done by the end of February.
• I finally finished the first draft of Arena, first book in the Troll World quintet that started as a NaNoWriMo project in 2010. It’s seen some heavy revisions, particularly during the period of 2018-2019 when I wrote the first draft of the other books in the set. I did the original second draft of this book in 2016 and then the third in 2018 after I’d finished plotting the rest of the series and had drafted books 2 and 3 (which were originally one volume that got out of hand). Final draft completed on 14 January and now comes in at 64,559 words compared to the original first draft of 50,690 words way back when.
• Shrine, the second book in the set, had its final draft completed exactly two weeks later, coming in at 60,038 words. I’ve started on Forest and expect it to go quickly.

The Troll World set has been a long time getting to this point. From the original first draft of Arena in 2010, to the consecutive first drafts as a group of Shrine, Forest, Palace, and Battlefield in 2018 to early 2019, I went immediately into revision notes for the last four novels, finishing that round by the end of 2019. Second drafts happened in a blur of writing activity in the summer of 2020 while COVID kept me away from the job that would eventually package me out, and third drafts happened across most of 2021. And then I went back to school, winding up in an honours Physics degree and all of the writing goals got rewritten over and over again. Trying to get back on track now.

Considering poetry, I’m not actually sure how much there is for January. I’ve been trying to slip into a haiku-per-day habit and that’s gone well so far, but there are a handful of other things I penned in January, too. And I literally mean penciled, really. Poetry tends to be a handwritten thing for me, finding its way to the computer later and none of January’s has found its way to the computer yet.

No submissions or publishing in January, though I have three ebook refreshes done that I’ll revise online soon. But I think I’ve previously mentioned that I’m going to work on a 4:1 rule. If I haven’t, that means every four refreshes, I get to publish something new, so that should be soon.

From a word count perspective, January was solid.

• 15,602 words of new fiction,
• 5,683 words worth of net change while editing things, with a lot of these words coming from the gradual beefing up of “Shakespeare’s Sisters”.
• 3,719 words of plotting all on Valkyr Station Book 1,
• 18,997 words worth of non-fiction, split between the Memory Project and blog posts.

I’ve also made adjustments to the way I’m pursuing my writing right now, narrowing the number of things I’m working on at one time, but I’ll write about that another day, probably next week. This post is long enough already.

Be well, everyone.