ALYSSA LOST IN SPACE

Well, it has been a while.

Long time, no speak, friends! But I’m back after an arduous couple of months and an unexpected hiatus as I took care of some health issues. I’ve also mentioned that I was having some doubts about what direction I wanted to take this blog, and the website as a whole was itching for an update. I think it has a much cleaner, more streamlined look, but I’m sure I’ll tweak it here and there as it gets put to use!

Aside from the blog, I’ve been thinking a lot about my writing journey. 2020 was meant to be the year I self-published my first book, and in retrospect, I would have ended up publishing the wrong one for my particular brand and journey. It feels like so long ago, but I’ve always been a fantasy writer at heart, so publishing a sci-fi as my debut could have been a real branding bungle. So the chaos of this year has served a purpose in some capacity, at least.

I’ve spent the past several weeks not only tweaking my blog, but trying to figure out what to publish next year because I have learned so much in 2020. So much about myself, and so much about what I want to do in the future. And I know I want to publish my first book in 2021.

The next question, of course, is what?

Camp NaNoWriMo in July proved to me that the project I was undertaking was going to be a big one. You see, I loved the idea of writing different book series following different characters, but all in the same massive, sprawling world. Kind of like Star Wars, the MCU, and the Cosmere. The idea of a perpetual, living world that is explored through these short narrative bursts was fascinating to me. And I’m just a big sucker for lore. The world-building that would follow was incredibly overwhelming. But I also knew I was fleshing out a concept that had a lot of potential avenues to explore. Deciding which one was a problem I would worry about later.

Now here I am, in the later, and trying to decide what will be the first project to kickstart this sprawling new world.

This is where the old book comes in.

For a while, I’ve had this older draft sitting around that I’ve been meaning to rewrite. If you ever travelled to my WIPs page, you would have seen a small entry for The Wolves of the Far North, a high fantasy novel I finished in early 2019. I knew I would one day return to this draft because I really enjoyed the world and the characters, but it needed a lot of world-building to anchor it. There were gaps in the narrative and flaws in the logic that I couldn’t figure out at the time. It dawned on me that this new world I’ve been building, with a few tweaks, might be exactly the architecture this story needed.

It will still need a complete rewrite, of course, but the bones are there, and the more I think on it, the more I see the connections that were just waiting to be made. And the more connections I make, the more I realize that this new world I’ve just loved building was the glue that the story truly needed.

So rather than waste more time trying to find a starting point, I figure I’ll work a little smarter and see what I can do with the work I already have.

Anyway, now that the book and the blog have been sorted, it’s time to get back to work! Wow, does it feel good to be back!

Let’s Chat

How has everyone been holding up for the holidays? Are you excited to see this year come to an end? Oh, and let me know what you think of the new blog in the comments below!