The 2021 Plan
2021 is here, and so far it’s sucked. In addition to the world being on fire, last week, we lost my beloved childhood dog, Aggie. So with 20 days of 2021 already behind us, I’m already over it.
That being said, it is a new year, and I hope the worst of the emotional damage this year is going to hold for me, because I was not expecting that one (I saw my dog at Christmas and had no idea).
Unfortunately, life goes on. Day by day, I get a little closer to death, too. That’s another post for another day, though. This post is to talk a little about what my writing goals are for 2021. I have two big goals, along with several smaller goals.
In 2021, I want to experiment with my writing and the way that I deliver it to y’all, my readers. With books in my main series, The Cassie Morgan Series, those will still be published on Amazon through KDP. That leads me to goal number one.
Publish Justice and Lies
This will involve a few rounds of edits and maybe a round of rewrites, but I’m going to publish this book this year! I’ve mentioned this before, but Justice and Lies and Hit List happen back-to-back, so I always wanted to publish them back-to-back, but now I think it’s better to publish them one at a time.
If I wait to do both, it’s still at least another year or two to get both of those, so I’m trying to split them up in my head again. While the two books are very connected and share an overall narrative that was started in The Assassin, they have separate plots, too. Given how long I’ve been working on these books off and on, I know I could keep going and going, trying to tweak these stories. I think focusing one at a time will actually get me to publish the books and getting the book finally out.
This is the year! It better be, because it’s been five years this year since Double Played came out. It’s time, I’m ready to show y’all where Cassie is at in her life. It’s pretty wild, what’s happened to her. Then again, what’s happened to me in the last five years is kind of wild, too.
While that is my biggest focus of the year, I don’t expect it to happen until the second half of the year. The other big thing I want to do is write a new story.
Write a serial story
I mentioned earlier that I wanted to experiment with my writing, and I’d love to try writing a serial. If you aren’t familiar, a serial story is a little like a TV show season. Each part has its own story, but is part of a bigger story. Back when I was in college, I was told that people could envision my stories being TV shows, so I think a serial would be a fun thing to try. As I write this, I’m just at the beginning of planning anything, I don’t have a concrete plot (there’s one brewing in my brain) or even characters fleshed out. We got a lot of work to do to get this out of my brain and onto my computer.
It will be a creative challenge, but I think I’m ready for it. After feeling like I’ve struggled in this pandemic, I want to try something new to get my creativity going again.
While these are my two big writing goals for 2021, I’m still thinking about other stories to come in 2022, or 2023. Obviously, I have the fourth Cassie book to release, Hit List, but I would also love to go visit Emily Burnet again. One thing is for sure, my brain dreams faster than I can keep up.