… and what a year it’s been. Lots of bad things happening in the world, but for me personally 2017 has been a really good year. I got my very first novel published – yay! And on top of that I wrote the first drafts of two other novels, one of which will be published this spring. 2017 was the year when I finally became an author for real, after spending years and years struggling and angsting and trying to find out what I wanted to do, creatively speaking.

I’ve always thought that authors exaggerated when they talked about spending 5+ years on a novel or writing several versions of a story, hundreds of thousands of words that they didn’t even use in the end. And if I’d known, back in 2014 when I thought I had written a finished novel, that I’d end up scrapping all of it and starting over… I would have gone crazy. It just takes so, so much effort to finish a project like this, and I needed all those years and all those words. To practice, to find out what I wanted to do.

Just a few years ago, I didn’t think I was able to write novel-length stories. I could do short stories, but that was it. Editing was a mystery to me, and research as well. I still love writing short stories, but I’ve come to realize that novels are even better. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get through another first draft in 2018, or if I’ll have to focus on editing only, but I do hope it won’t be too long until I can start working on my next novel. Because there’s nothing better than the intense experience of writing a story for the very first time.

I’ll be finishing my current round of editing today, hopefully—after that, I’ll take a break from writing until January, and spend time with family, books and movies instead. Unless I write that Christmas short story that I can’t get out of my head…

Happy Holidays to everyone!