who the fuck thought it was a good idea to do performance evaluations at the end/beginning of the year, it is fucking Winter and i am simply Not in the headspace to think about a ~career~ lmao

oh hey you're still alive! good! missed you!

how's your various books? i swear you were writing at least one. and i dont mean the fics.

Hey :) I'm always happy to hear from you. I suppose now's a good a time as any to give a general update about what I've been up to creatively for the past two and a half-ish years.

As you all probably know now, I've stepped away from fanfiction to focus on original fiction in the hopes of launching my dream career as a novelist. That means I've gone from about a 30/70 original-fanfic ratio in 2019 to about a 95/5 ratio now, in terms of what I'm putting out. I'm super happy with those numbers! As far as total output, I wrote 500k in 2020, and about 560k in 2021, and while I'm probably not going to manage quite that much in 2022 (shitty Life Circumstances are shitty), I'm still well on course to have a great output this year too.

The Series - My "novel" that some of you know I finished in June of 2021 actually turned out to be a complete seven book series! That means that I have full first drafts of all seven books. Additionally, in the last year, I've completed both a second and a third draft of Book One. My current goal with Book One is to pick up the fourth draft this winter, and then to query it in the spring with agents, which is super cool. The first draft of The Series was 665k words, all seven books together, but Book One now comes out at exactly 200k, so it's a real epic. Genre is on the very literary edge of contemporary, with some sci-fi and alt-history elements and some inspiration from superhero fic, but that's about all I'll say about it here ;) Keeping my fingers crossed for good luck in the querying process.

The Fantasy Novel - Additionally, I have been worldbuilding a fantasy world since I was in elementary school, which means that I am now in year eleven of its development. What began as a blatant D&D ripoff now has a fully realized world, a language, deep lore and history, and about eleven failed novel attempts in my drawer. But after I finished draft three of Book One, I started a new attempt at Fantasy Novel, and it's flown off of my fingertips in a really exciting way. I'm still in the first draft, but I'm about 11/17 chapters in, which feels like a really good place to be. Not sure how long that is yet, cause I'm drafting on paper oddly. My goal is to finish Fantasy Novel's first draft within a month or two, then set it aside for a while.

The Horror Novel - After The Series and The Fantasy Novel, my next most successful project from the COVID era has been a really cool horror novel that I started in the summer of 2021, right after I finished draft one of The Series. This one is about 60k deep, but it's very complicated from a research perspective, and due both to Life Circumstances and revising Book One, I've stalled a bit. Despite that, though, I think that Horror Novel probably has some of the best prose I've ever written, including one chapter that is decisively the best thing I've ever written, so I will publish this one at some point in my life. It's too good not to. I may take a while to finish it, though.

The Autofiction Novel - I started four novels this summer after I finished draft three of Book One, and this was the first of them (Fantasy Novel is the third). This one's currently sitting at about 24k - it's cool in that it toes a really interesting line between memoir and fiction, but the tone is pretty dark, and it gets at some pretty heavy stuff I've gone through in my life. Wasn't really in a good headspace for it after the Life Circumstances, so I've set it aside for a bit.

The Romances - I've made three stabs at these since the pandemic started, one a summer, and none have gone much of anywhere. The first was a silly, kinda campy concept in 2020, and it didn't manage more than a chapter (granted, it was about jet skis, mermaids, and Florida, so what have you). The second was about baseball lesbians and shitty relationships with intimacy in 2021, and that went about 14k before I started attempt eleven of Fantasy Novel, the one before the current, so that petered out quick too. The third is very recent, novel number four on the summer, at about 12k, kind of a fun play on your typical amnesia plot, but given how much else is going on in my life right now, not sure if I'll take that anywhere.

Other Stuff - I wrote a poetry chapbook and a song in the fall of 2021. I wrote 6k of a dumb, campy fantasy novel about lesbian vampires after I watched First Kill (novel two), which should tell you everything you need to know about that. Never gonna see the light of day. I wrote a cool short story for my Japanese Literature class as a trans take on patriarchal romance in the Tale of Genji - pretty proud of that. I'm currently working on a really long piece of philosophy, which we'll see where that goes. Some fanfiction too, I guess - just some silly Twilight and Harry Potter crack, plus I've managed a chapter or two of my Ranma fic. Otherwise, well - I mean, "That's all?" That seems like a hell of a lot to me. It would make more sense how much all of this is if I told you about the Life Circumstances, but I'm not about to traumadump that shit on the interwebs.

Anyway that's what's up with me - your latest update from your friendly local writer-who-really-wants-to-do-this-for-a-living Allison Illuminated. Check in later for "oh my god oh shit oh fuck how did she write more novels."