Non Hughes

It’s no secret that I love a good ol’ retrospective. Both in a team and as a solo event, retros are a useful tool for framing the past iteration of a project/goal and working out what you need to do next.

I’ve experimented with weird and wonderful retro formats in the past, but today I’m keeping to a classic:

• What went well
• What didn’t go well
• What I learned
• What still puzzles me

I will approach the retro from a caring viewpoint, knowing that all through the year, I did my best with the knowledge and skills I had at the time. This follows Norm Kerth’s Prime Directive for retrospectives, as laid out in his book on the subject. This is not about beating myself up. The purpose is to assess the time I’ve spent so far, learn from it and work out how to action those learnings positively.

The state of my books

Gotta start out the retro by looking at the data first. What did I actually achieve this year? What progress did I make on my book projects?

Working Title / Genre	Status start of year	Status end of year	Word count
No Telling the River / YA Fantasy	First draft complete	Edited, queried, set aside	91k
No Words for a King / YA Fantasy	Outlined	First draft complete	75k
No Footings for a Bridge / MG Fantasy	Outlined	Re-outlined, writing based on new outline	15k
How the First Skateboard was Invented / MG Historical	null	Outlined, writing	20k
Camp Ivy / MG Horror	null	Outlined, writing	30k
Can Cyntaf y Cadnoid / Welsh-language MG Fantasy	null	Outlined, writing	1k

Those are the notable projects, anyway.

I’ve outlined 12 other books not listed above, and stop-start written around 30,000 words between them, though I doubt I’ll work on any of those further. They include a mix of genres from cli-fi to contemporary romance, noir and adult fantasy. I threw a lot of spaghetti against the wall this year.

Judging from the list of projects that’ve stuck, I seem to have landed on middle-grade as the age group I like writing best, though I’m still writing across genres (and languages).

All together, I wrote around 175,000 words, not counting the rewrites and edits I did on No Telling The River. That probably takes me over 200k words written in 2023.

I completed most of this writing in meetup events online, often while hosting them. I’m a SUAW (Shut Up and Write) organiser for my ‘local’ online group, and I host 5-hour marathons with the non-profit group OCC (Online Creative Collective). This led me to join 347 writing events between the 1st of January and the 30th of November – averaging just over one event per day! If nothing else, it shows dedication, right?

What went well

• I joined writing groups and met lots of lovely new people who support me and want to see me succeed
• I showed up throughout the year and maintained a vaguely consistent writing habit
• I started this blog/newsletter (thanks Evie!)
• I made my first ever ‘finished’ book draft, aka written, beta-read and edited
• I got a lot of good feedback from readers and had the confidence to do my first ever rounds of literary agent querying

It’d be easy to look over the last year and call it a failure, since I’m not an agented author at the end of it, but I think I’ve made strong steps towards that goal. Almost every successful author has had to go through a phase of painful rejections first. It’s a reality I had to accept and walk into, but which I was avoiding for years. Now I’ve stepped properly onto the path, and that’s not nothing.

What did not go well

• Querying resulted only in form rejections, with no useful feedback or manuscript requests, so I’m left only with guesses as to what went wrong and what I need to change moving forwards
• This resulted in decision paralysis in the second half of the year, doubting and abandoning every project I started working on before the first draft was finished
• Writing consistently around a full time job is really tiring, and I feel at risk of burnout despite still being far from my goal

A predictable series of events, I suppose. I came into 2023 full of hope. In Dec’22 and Jan’23, I finished the first drafts of two fantasy novels back to back, and was super ready to edit them and dip my toes into the querying world. After a few months of getting generally good feedback from readers on the first book, and actioning the bad feedback to make it stronger, I genuinely felt ready. Then I found out why they call it the querying trenches – it was slow, anxiety-inducing and demotivating. It really crushed my spirit.

In the second half of the year, I stepped back and took a hard look at the book and query package, and recognised a lot of problems. I can’t be sure that these are the same problems the agents saw, but I realised I’d been willfully, optimistically ignoring them all along. So I turned to the second book to see what I could do with that, and the same fundamental problems showed through that one: protagonist not driving the plot; slow start; saggy middle with a lack of interesting sub plots; and a distinct lack of romance despite the YA fantasy genre… in a year when romantasy was THE thing.

So I pulled up some of my other outlines to fix, or else wrote up new ones, and started writing the next book, and the next, and the next… without finishing any of them. I haven’t suffered from this kind of doubt-induced project-hopping before. Sure, I tended to have multiple books going at once and didn’t really finish anything until those two, but that was from a lack of time and focus, from boredom and plot bunnies, or from not knowing what happens next and needing to leave the story to stew a bit. I haven’t stop-started projects from self doubt before. 0/10, would not recommend.

It’s been a huge struggle to push past, and one I hope to put behind me in 2024.

What I learned

• How to write an ok cover letter
• How to write a really solid one-page synopsis
• How to re-outline a book and do basic developmental drafts
• About pinch points and b-plots, and how to use extra story threads to naturally push the protagonist into acting on the main plot
• How to be patient and get on with other things while waiting weeks/months on email responses
• That I need to be more thorough with editing the next book, and honest with myself about said book, before querying it

This is the meat of the year, and what I really need to keep in mind moving forward. I learned a lot. It doesn’t look like a lot in bullet point format, but each of those points was a saga. Hopefully I’ll look back on 2023 again one day and see that it was the Act 2 I had to suffer through and grow from in order to reach the climactic scene. I’ve battled obstacles – rejections, doubt, pants feedback or silence, or else the betrayal of finding out the good feedback I had was hollow, that good isn’t good enough. I’d like to say that I’ve had my Dark Night of the Soul, but I’m 99% sure things will get worse again before they get better.

I have to believe that it will get better eventually though. If I work hard enough, improve enough, and resist the urge to put away my keyboard, I will one day carry Frodo up Mount Doom so he can throw the ring into the lava. Or become represented by a literary agent and not have my book die on sub or on the bookshelves. Either-or.

What still puzzles me

• How to get my confidence back and finish a project again
• How to balance the day job with my daily writing without compromising either

I’m this close to hiring a life coach, because I have no idea how to solve these problems. I’m certain that if I keep finishing projects, keep learning and keep iterating, I will become so fabulously awesome at writing and querying that no agent in the universe could turn me down… in 5-10 years. Which sounds really good for 5-10-years-older me, but what about now me? They are tired and afraid, writing after work every day, and they can’t type more than a thousand words without convincing themself that this new book will also fail, and they should throw it away and start over. I don’t know how to get out of that mindset right now. Hopefully I just need a holiday.

What I certainly don’t need is burnout, so going into 2024 I should work out how to write consistently but sustainably, with a positive (or at the very least, neutral) mindset.

To that end, I will write SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) goals for the coming year. This is one of my least favourite activities in the world, so I’ve taken a couple days off work later this week to give myself the time and headspace to do it properly. Wish me luck!

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At the end of the day, I believe in my stories. I believe that they’re awesome, that the world I created is beautiful and that the characters are important and wonderful. Even if I sometimes I don’t believe in myself, I believe in that world and I really, really want to share it. I hope that 2024 will be better than 2023, but even if it’s not, I will keep going. 2025 is going to be my year, I can feel it!