2025 Update

This is my 2025 update, and my very first update, really. At this point, I have been writing seriously for about six years. I picked up the metaphorical pen (which looks suspiciously like a keyboard) when I first started suffering from chronic illness in 2019. Back then, writing was an escape in two senses: it was an escape from the gut-wrenching reality of being mostly bed-bound, suffering from near-impenetrable brain fog; and it was a chance to escape from what I thought of as the never-ending slog of salary work. If I wrote — if I was successful in my writing — I thought perhaps I might craft a new life for myself.

But these things aren’t so simple. At the time, I thought of my first few books as being perhaps not fine works of art, but certainly well-crafted. With the benefit of greater experience behind me, I can see that they were anything but. I was learning, and writing so many books gave me a really solid foundation from which to build. I self-published them, which — while it didn’t do much for the stereotype of self-published fiction being sub-par — gave me a much greater understanding of and respect for audience needs.

At least I had the foresight to publish these books under a pen name, keeping my real name unsullied. I think I knew, deep down, that these novels weren’t of the quality I wanted or needed them to be. After three years, I relinquished this first pen name in favour of another, and I got a fresh start. With this new pen name I focused on a growing sub-genre: progression fantasy.

Since writing in this new genre, I’ve had more success with every release. I published my first such web series on serial-hosting site Royal Road, and was surprised to have almost 500 people actively ‘following’ my story. I am still, to this day, very happy with the first book in this series. While I now know that it isn’t perfect, there is a lot to love, mostly because I allowed myself to have fun with it. The sequel was not as popular, perhaps because I did not properly telegraph the protagonist’s corruption arc.

Negative and often dispiriting reviews of the second book caused me to put the final book in the trilogy aside for the time being, and it remains unwritten as of this day in early March 2025. I pulled myself out of this discouraged state, reviewed what I’d learned about the genre, and began work on a new progression fantasy series.

I wrote this new four-book series with a comedic slant, which allowed me to have fun with it — as, without fun, can a book really be a success? Only a wiser writer knows the answer to that question. I didn’t always have fun, and the nature of serialisation (and its regular chapter releases, two or three a week) sometimes made writing seem like a chore. I swore that if I were to serialise my next project, I would have a huge amount written before launch, so that I didn’t feel deadlines nipping at my heels.

After this series generated a much larger audience on Royal Road, I submitted it directly to four small publishers in the progression fantasy space, and was both ecstatic and honoured to have two of them respond with an offer. The first book in the series doesn’t come out until July, so I can’t yet speak for how this series has sold, but I was given a financially significant — if not life-changing — advance upon submission of each of the four books.

If someone had told my 2019 self that this would happen in the next five years, I would have been over the moon. But goalposts shift. Now, I’m looking to make fiction writing a full-time career, and so I need to grow my web serial readership on the next project, and secure a better advance.

My challenge now becomes to retain this sense of fun in my writing, without letting matters of financial burdens push me into writing uninspiring copies of other successful stories. I am planning two more projects under my progression fantasy pen name, but sooner rather than later, I am going to shift my attention to The Structures and This Bitter Ink — two books that I hope to release under my real name.

We’ll see how this year goes.