Being a creative person means constantly thinking up ideas, regardless of the amount of time or mental energy that you have to dedicate to them. I adore the thrill of a new idea when it takes root in your mind, and the creative flow when it’s fresh and exciting. I have so many ideas that I want to turn into professionally published pieces, but I’ve learned that I need to narrow my focus to only a couple projects at a time if I want to steadily progress with any of them.

Faeblood (working title) is a fantasy novel that will be the first book of a duology. I will possibly market it as YA, depending on whether that continues to make sense for the story or not.

I’ve been working on this story for many years, and I have been learning so much about the process of writing a novel, and developing my skills, as I’ve worked on it. I have restarted the story from scratch several times until figuring out what really worked for how it needed to be told. The idea for this story came from a recurring day dream that I had about waking up in a different world, and meeting an elf who became my guide and showed the world to me. When I decided that my day dream was cool enough to be novel, I separated myself from the protagonist, and developed her into her own character. Nallasha is still similar to me in many ways, but she definitely differs in many other ways, including in some surprising ways that she herself discovers throughout the course of the novel.

Nallasha is an artist who struggles with imposter syndrome and confidence issues. At the start of the novel, she has just finished her official schooling at university, and has a final practical exam in the form of doing a commissioned piece of art for a client outside of the university, which has to be approved by a professor, who will then sign off on her application to the Artist’s Guild, at which point she will be a professional artist. Nallasha has been bullied by her classmates, put down by several professors, stopped creating art for fun, and feels trapped in her dream career. She dreads the transition from student to professional artist. While visiting with her first client for her commission exam, her curiosity leads her into a magical portal, where she travels to a different part of the world. During her adventures there, she learns more about herself, her skills and strengths, and gains confidence in herself.

Faeblood takes place on opposite sides of a large continent, with vastly different cultures on either side. Nallasha begins the novel on the western side of the continent, in the Wexlan Empire, where humans are the only known race, magic is not believed to exist, and there have been technological discoveries such as steam power. Nallasha is from Kantaboor, an island that has been recently annexed by the empire. The Kantaboorians have traditional stories about faeries, elves, other mythical creatures, and magic, which Nallasha fell in love with as a child. Any belief in these stories as real is ridiculed by the rest of the empire, and increasingly in Kantaboor as well.

After travelling through the portal, Nallasha arrives in the Rythsal Forest on the eastern side of the continent, which is elven territory. There, Nallasha discovers the existence of faerie tale creatures that she was taught did not exist, along with further discoveries that she hadn’t heard about in stories as a child.

I am currently over 50,000 words into this novel, and about three fifths – two thirds of the way through the plot for my rough draft. I have plotted out where I want the novel to go, but I am not sure exactly what will happen during the climax yet. Nallasha has a big decision to make, and I’m not totally sure what decision she will make, or what her motivations for that decision will be.

I can’t wait until I complete writing and revising this novel so that I can publish it and share it with all of you! I’d love to tell you more about it, but that would be giving away spoilers.

From Seed to Tree: The growth of a poet (working title) is a collection of metapoetry, organized in chronological order of when I wrote them. Metapoetry is poetry about poetry. I first thought of the idea to do this project when I was taking a poetry workshop course in university, and realized just how much metapoetry I had written since I had started writing poetry. Most of my earliest metapoems were about having writer’s block, and how frustrating it was. My later poems about writer’s block were far more poetically interesting, and when I compared my earliest metapoems to the ones that I was writing at that time, I could see a clear example of how I had grown in my poetry writing skills. I had become interested in publishing a collection of poetry at some point, and a collection of metapoetry seemed like a unique idea. Since then, I have consciously continued to write more metapoems to add to the collection, including even a poem that reflected on the fact that I was deliberately writing a collection of metapoetry (I felt like I was inside the movie ‘Inception’ when writing that one).

At some point, I need to decide that the collection is complete, or full enough to be published. It’s hard to know when I’ve reached that point since my potential to write more metapoetry is infinite, and I always want to keep on developing my skills further. I think that it’ll be a very interesting book of poetry to read, and I’m curious to see how people respond to it.