Mary’s Memorandum of 2020

A Retrospective and a Look Ahead

This year was unusual for everyone. I was fortunate in that Covid’s affect on my life was mild. I went from working in an office to working from home. This effectively reduced my two and a half hours of commuting a day to the five minutes it takes me to drop my toddler off at daycare. With the sudden introduction of an extra two and a half hours of freetime into my day, I got a lot of work done on my creative pursuits! I wanted to take a moment, as 2020 comes to a close to look back and take stock of what I have accomplished, and what I plan to do in 2021.

In this document, I will be discussing the various projects I started, continued, and finished this year. I have been querying a novel to agents this year, Freeing the Great Spirits. I wrote a rough first draft for a five book fantasy series Mountain Divide in an epic NaNoWriMo marathon. I rediscovered an old manuscript I found on my hard drive from 2015 Escaping Hell. I also started planning a few other ideas that I hope to dive into in 2021. In addition to my writing, I spent this year focused on reading and want to share the results of that journey.

Join me, as I look back on 2020 and forward to 2021.

The Query Journey and Freeing the Great Spirits

Freeing the Great Spirits is a 2020 original for me. It started as a simple world building exercise. My worlds often lack religions, and I wanted to write a story that could serve as a foundational religious text in one of my worlds. This idea spiraled and grew into a project of its own. The first draft of the story was written early in 2020 and after several rounds of revisions, I began querying it in September.

Freeing the Great Spirits is the story of a struggle between gods and spirits. A hero is chosen from among human warriors to fight the strongest spirit. While the spirit will come back, spirits cannot die, she will be reduced to her essence and will have no influence on the world for decades, leaving humans and the gods in peace. The warrior is willing to sacrifice her life to earn that reprieve for humanity as has every chosen hero before her. However, this time, something goes wrong, and the warrior and spirit survive. Throwing them both into the unknown together.

In addition to cold querying agents, I also participated in pitmad (tweet below). I haven’t had any success yet, but I believe in this story and will continue looking for someone to represent it in the coming year.

The NaNoWriMo Marathon for the Mountain Divide Series

Mountain Divide is a story I have tried to tell several times. The first recording I have of the idea goes all the way back to a journal from 2013. The story has changed a lot since then, switching genres and medium (I tried to tell it as a webcomic in 2016), until this November when I decided to give it a chance as a five novel long fantasy series. In December/January, I wrote the first draft of the entire story compressed into a single book, but after struggling with edits, I realized that it didn’t work in the compressed format, and I decided to commit to the longer format. After seven years with the idea, I haven’t lost interest in it yet, so I have full faith I’ll be able to stick with it through five books.

Mountain Divide is the story of Lily Beegan, an unimportant officer in the military of an imperial empire. Her homeland was colonized and subjugated by the empire decades ago, and now she is the first from her homeland to be allowed the rank of an officer and to be given access to magic, something the empire jealously guards and only bestows on the officers of its military.
As Lily plays her small part in the empire’s continued expansion, she watches as a new land is slowly chewed up by the empire to become as sad and miserable as her own home is under the empire’s rule. She believes the empire is inevitable, but struggles to reconcile that with her instinct to help and protect those around her. As Lily’s talent with magic and political power grows, she is forced to question the empire and the part she plays in its continued cruelty.

After canceling all my travel plans this year, I had a lot of vacation time saved up at work that I had to use or lose before the end of the year. This meant I took a lot of time off in October, November, and December, and I used that time to write the first drafts for all five books in this series. From October 12th to December 12th I wrote 384,000 words. This writing marathon encompassed November, and in that month alone I wrote 245,000 words, blowing away the 50k goal of NaNoWriMo. Each book’s first draft is between 75k and 80k words and my goal is to have each book be between 90k and 100k words.

Needless to say, this project will take a long time to finish. I don’t plan on querying this series anytime soon. I don’t think it would make a good breakout novel. Five books is a big commitment and I’d rather introduce myself to the reading world through one of my smaller projects. I still plan on spending time with this project next year as I love the story and the characters. I wrote the first draft of all five books at once, but I plan on editing each book one at a time. I plan to finish the first book by the end of the year.

Rediscovering Escaping Hell

I cleaned up my writing folders this summer and looked through some old projects. Most of them were best left buried in my hard drive, but one stuck out, an old NaNoWriMo project from 2015 that was never taken beyond that first draft phase. I read it in a day. There were many issues that needed to be cleaned up, but the bones of the story were good! I loved the characters and the plot complimented the story perfectly. I decided to resurrect the story and spent a lot of time editing it this year. I have cleaned up the plot and I’m only left with a few more drafts of polish before I’ll be ready to start querying it in 2021.

Escaping Hell is the story of an iron fisted ruler, Rin, who finds herself assassinated by an unhappy subject. In the second before she is killed, a mysterious figure appears and takes her away. She wakes up in a place she is told is seven hundred years in her future, a prison called Hell, where she will be forced to work hard labor until she dies and is replaced in her own time, her body de-aged with future technology and made to look as it should given the historic accounts of her death. Rin decides she must escape Hell and get back to her time.

Other Ideas and Started Projects

In addition to my three main projects Freeing the Great Spirits, Mountain Divide, and Escaping Hell, I have other smaller projects I’m working on. I wrote a novel during NaNoWriMo last year that I’ve played with, but still needs a lot of work. I have another older project, Night Vision, a YA urban fantasy, that I might work on, although I don’t read enough in that genre to feel confident writing in it. I also have a completely new idea that I want to find time for this coming year, a sci-fi novel that involves sentient robots on Mars. I’m still working on world building and plotting for that project, it might end up as my 2021 NaNoWriMo project. If I get struck by a plot idea, I’ll write it out sooner than November. I also worked on a project this year that still needs a lot of work. It’s a story called Fire Quest that involves dragons.

I also have follow up ideas for both Freeing the Great Spirits and Escaping Hell. I have written the first draft of the first book in a novella series set in the world of Freeing the Great Spirits. The novellas would be stand-alone and separate from the Freeing the Great Spirit novel. I’d like to have all of the novella’s finished before I started trying to query them. I also have an idea for a full novel sequel to Escaping Hell, but it’s still only a half formed idea. Escaping Hell can stand on its own if I never flesh out the sequel, but there is an idea there. I’m not sure if it’s worth pursuing.

A Year of Reading

In 2019, I read four books. It was the last year in a long reading slump. I decided it was time for that slump to end. In 2020 I set aside thirty minutes of reading time everyday. Most days, that’s over my lunch break. Somedays, that time stretches much longer, and sometimes it’s shortened, but I allow myself at least fifteen minutes of reading time everyday. That dedicated reading time has obliterated my reading slump, and in 2020 I read 37 books! I am so happy I got back into reading. My writing has improved dramatically and I have enjoyed discovering new worlds and authors!

As an unrepentant numbers nerd, I recorded stats on the books I read this year. My primary genre by a lot was fantasy (63% of books read) followed by sci-fi (29% of books). I also read a few classics and mystery novels. I read primarily adult books (82% of books read), with a few YA and MG thrown in. My biggest reading month was November when I happened to read a lot of novellas, and my lowest reading month was December when I read Rhythm of War, a 1200 page monstrosity by Brandon Sanderson.

The authors I read the most of were Brandon Sanderson (I discovered the Cosmere series and read through a decent chunk of it, including catching up on the entire Stormlight Archive), Martha Wells (Murderbot is my favorite), Jeff Vandermeer (I read the Southern Reaches trilogy), and Nghi Vo (a new author I love! I read the Singing Hills books).

My favorite books I read this year (in no particular order) are:

The Singing Hills Cycle (particularly When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain) by Nghi Vo

The Emperor’s Soul by Brandon Sanderson

The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

Looking forward

When I set goals for myself, I try to keep them vague enough to leave room for creativity, but specific enough that I know if I’ve succeeded. My goals for 2021 are focused on reading, writing, and drawing. I haven’t done much visual art this year, despite enjoying it, so I decided to include it in my goals. I also like to make hard goals and soft goals. Hard goals are the ones I really want to hit. They’re usually easier and more vague than soft goals. If I’m not hitting my hard goals, I have to reassess my priorities. Last year, the only days I didn’t hit my hard goals were a few days in February when I had a particularly brutal cold and couldn’t do anything but sleep all day. Soft goals are more specific. They are harder to achieve and more likely to change as my priorities and interests change throughout the year.

2021 Hard Goals:

Write for one hour a day.
Read for 30 min per day.
Draw at least one sketch per day.

2021 Soft Goals:

Query Freeing the Great Spirit
1. Do another round of edits if no interest by the summer
Query Escaping Hell
1. Finish edits and write query material
Edit Mountain Divide book 1 to a final draft
Write the first draft of at least one new idea
Edit one of my minor projects to a final draft

If you’ve read this far, thank you for your interest in my work! Have a happy New Year.