It doesn’t seem five minutes since I was posting my goals for 2024, and now it’s time to do the same for 2025. The past twelve months have certainly thrown up some unexpected plot twists on the world stage, but it hasn’t been a bad year for my writing. I didn’t achieve all my goals — but, on the other hand, I achieved some that weren’t planned. So that’s not bad.
What Happened in 2024
Like the previous year, 2024 was to be “the year of the short story”. Progress in 2023 had been painfully slow, since I’d been finding difficulty carving out times when I could get stuck into writing. Towards the end of the year, though, a friend recommended taking the approach of simply making a commitment to write 50 words a day. I’ve largely stuck to that through 2024 (with the variation of 200 words when I’m revising) and found that I’ve invariably far exceeded the target. It’s a great psychological trick to play on yourself.
The first task was to get the unfinished Shadows in the City finished. I did so early in the year, rounding it off at 30,631 words. And that’s just the first draft. Both my own thoughts and invaluable peer critiques have left me realising that it needs a lot of work, and will most likely end up closer to 40,000, near the longer end of the novella scale. I haven’t written anything before in that slot.
After that, my goal was to write five more stories, not counting flash or drabble piece. I got drafts of the first two done before the end of March — The Forbidden Library about recurring characters Kari and Fai, and The Demons of the Past, about a new (hopefully) recurring character, known as the Maimed Warrior.
Then I got sidetracked for a while. Fantasy-Writers.org, the online writers group I help run (and affectionately known as FWO), decided to get together a second anthology — only ten years after the first. We chose for a theme the stages of the classic Hero’s Journey, so I ended up writing two unplanned stories for it — The Shape of a Legend and Wyrmbane. I’ll be blogging more about this over the next few months.
Back to plan, and I wrote a new story about my young thief Loshi, Smoke and Mirrors, and then I returned, after a very long gap, to my comic fantasy series about Sam Nemesis, private investigator to gods, heroes and monsters. I wrote the first three in 2011 and 2012, and two were quickly published, but I hadn’t been back to it. I wrote two new ones — The Case of the Missing Eye, about Odysseus and the Cyclops, and The Case of the Forty-Two Pieces, which takes on the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris — Sam’s first venture outside Greek mythology.
That was going to be all, but I added another unplanned story. Secrets of the Black Cape is a sequel to my novella The Lone and Level Sands, which was published by Musa in 2013, though now out of print. This is archaeological fantasy, in the Indiana Jones tradition but set in a secondary world. It was planned on being around 10,000 words but ended up over 17,000 — and the second draft will almost certainly be much longer.
There were other bits and pieces. I wrote six flash or drabble length stories, as well as expanding a very short flash piece into a longer story. This was The Other Stars, one of my rare pieces of pure SF. I also came across a story called The Omniscient which I wrote in 2011 and never did anything with. It’s an extremely weird story (maybe I didn’t know what to make of it) but I liked it and revised it into a usable shape.
The aim was to write all the first drafts in the first half of the year and then move onto revision — but that didn’t quite happen. I got both the anthology stories completely revised, but otherwise it was the end of September by the time I had all the first drafts done and could start revising.
By the time the year ended, I still had the final polishes to be done on The Forbidden Library and Smoke and Mirrors, while I’ve done nothing yet on The Tower of Zeka-Zomi (left over from 2023), Secrets of the Black Cape and Shadows in the City. And I certainly haven’t done anything about revising the current novel yet, as I’d hoped.
I was also targeting 52 submissions (I made 64), 52 critiques on Fantasy-Writers.org (I did 69) and post 12 blogs (I did 11). As far as acceptances are concerned, not counting the anthology I’ve had three drabbles and two flashes published, as well as one longer story — Gerda and the Darkness in a Harvey Duckman Presents anthology. But still no book. The publisher that has Echoes of Ancient Magic in its queue has been having problems, and I’m not sure it’s actually going to happen.
Goals for 2025
My 2025 goals are straightforward enough. The earlier months of the year will be devoted to getting the remaining stories submission ready. That’s started well, with The Forbidden Library already done, but the three last stories (The Tower of Zeka-Zomi, Secrets of the Black Cape and Shadows in the City) are likely to be the most time consuming, and I don’t anticipate those being finished till late spring or summer.
Then, finally, I’ll be back to the novel. It currently has the working title The Empire of Nandesh, but I’m considering calling it Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tongue. The phrase is from King Lear: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is/To have a thankless child.” This is because the novel focuses on a series of dysfunctional parent-child relationships — some literally a parent and child, some an analogous relationship.
The novel is a sequel to At An Uncertain Hour, but I think it could be understood reasonably well without having read that. The main action (though there are plenty of scenes at earlier times) is set over eight hundred years later — and, just to keep me on my toes, it features four separate first-person narrators.
Based on both the feedback from colleagues on FWO and my own feelings, the second draft is going to need some major surgery, so I’m not counting on being done before the end of the year. If I am — well, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it (which is, of course, the only time you can cross a bridge).
I’ll be carrying on with the aim of writing at least 50 words or revising at least 200 words every day, and I’ll also be targeting 52 submissions, 52 critiques on FWO and 12 blogs — ideally nicely spaced out at one a month, but maybe that’s too much to ask. And I’ll redouble my efforts to get a book published during the year.
And, speaking of books published, there’s also going to be the publication of the FWO anthology. Although I’m not primarily responsible for that, there’ll no doubt be a lot I can do both to help make it happen and to work on publicising it. So you’ll see more about it here — watch this space.
And I’ll see you in January 2026, to find out how I got on with it all.
The Fantasy Worlds of Nyki Blatchley 