Hello folks!
Welcome to 2026, I hope the first fortnight has been fantastic for you!
I have jumped in to 2026 with as much enthusiasm as ever, I’ve been streaming three times a week over on Twitch (not to ruin the magic, but that is actually when I am writing this post) so my word count for the year is off to a good start. According to 4thewords I’m already over 10,000 words! Of course most of this is for brainstorming and world building, but I need to work my way through the bad words to get to the good ones, so they’re all useful.
One of my goals this year is to read more. I burned myself out very badly last year and I hope that by reading I can feed my brain so that it doesn’t stutter out. To help this along, I have started a new Youtube channel where I will be posting reviews! I’m still dithering over whether I want to do full length videos, or stick to shorts, but you should be seeing some more coming out this week. Probably going to stick to shorts for now because then I can spend most of my time reading books, rather than filming and editing.
My writing goals for this year are pretty nebulous, but I have one or two things that I KNOW I want to do.
I will be publishing the next story in the Londinium Dragons series this spring, hopefully on the Ides of March (March 15th) because what other date is as famously Roman? This story should be about Antonia meeting her in-laws, though I cannot promise that I won’t throw all my plans into the air and have them attacked by highwaymen on the road or something.
After that my plan is to work some more on a murder mystery, though not the one I was working on last year. Thanks to some dramatic events at one of my favourite LARPs last year, I was inspired to start writing a story set in the world of Profound Decision’s Empire LARP. I’m planning on writing a chapter or so for each event this year and taking them along to sell to folks in character. I think it will be fun to dip my toes into serial writing, and who knows, maybe my LARP character can become a famous novelist!
Recently, one of the in world armies was enchanted with a winter ritual that meant a thousand winter spirits accompanied them into battle. Unfortunately, the army was barracked by a major city at the time, so those thousand or so winter spirits lodged themselves in the dead of the nearby city and walked off. So, of course, I have to write a murder mystery with that as a plot point, right?
I also want to continue the series I started with Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss last year. I had a lot of fun writing that short story, but I did overcomplicate things rather ridiculously. I started out writing one story, then wrote a bit of a prequel, then went back to the main story, realised that the main story needed more time and words than I could dedicate to it in that time frame, so went back to the prequel and wrote that for the challenge. But I am really pleased with the story that I came up with for GGG, its about an ancient goddess who guards the gates of the immortal realm. Leonora gets the time between the solstice and the new year off from her duties, and we follow her on her latest holiday. It was really fun to think about world building from the point of view of a goddess out of sync with humanity. It also meant that I could include a lot of what I have learned about spinning wool, because an ageless, sleepless goddess has a lot of time on her hands and the traditional thing to do when you weren’t doing anything else was to spin. Of course it ends on a massive cliffhanger, and I am hoping people will forgive me for that – at least enough to want to read the series that comes next.
Because, yes, I am planning on writing a series. I haven’t worked on it since the new year started, though, I am trying to get through everything else first since those have a more defined deadline. But hopefully that will be coming out later on in the year!
I think I’ll work with multiple points of view, and to make it extra tricky I will be writing in a different subgenre for each of those characters. It will all come under fantasy, of course, but as I was writing it the first time I felt like there was something missing. So at least one more point of view (maybe two?) and I’ll be able to push the idea of the unreliable narrator which is one of my favourite things in fiction. Especially when the characters aren’t lying, they’re just wrong. Though to be fair, I also love characters who lie to themselves and the reader.
But anyway, lots of plans for this year and hopefully I might even hit a few of those targets!
Let me know what your plans are, and if you are also swinging for the stars, hey if we miss we can hang out on the moon together, right?
Stay safe out there,
K
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