2015—The Year of Finishing What’s Been Started

At the very end of 2014, I wanted to have a goal for 2015, but I didn’t want something general like ‘write more books’ or ‘spend more time publishing’, and choosing something realistic and specific was hard to do without knowing what time constraints I faced.

In the end, I went with ‘finishing what I’ve started’.

This might sound like an easy goal, but I’ve been writing for over twenty years, and there is a lot of stuff I didn’t finish because I didn’t have a definite profit from it, or because life intervened and I moved or … whatever. Anyway, there’s a lot to finish, and by ‘finish’ I mean complete the writing of and publish, so I had to prioritise.

This did not mean I sat down and found every piece I’d started and write it down—that’s an ongoing process and one I’d need a couple of weeks to do. I try to type up a couple of notebooks a month for that. I have already started a list and on are the older works that I’ve put the most time into and either completed, almost completed, or made a good start on, and then I added the new ideas that had arrived since starting the list.

So, the goal is to finish as many of the works on this list as I can, design covers for them, and then edit, format and publish them. There are currently 611 items on that list. This year, I have completed the following:

• Anna and the Rock Dragons: a young adult novel under the Carlie Simonsen pen name (IN FINAL EDITS);

• Basofi’s Choosing: a science fiction short story as C.M. Simpson (RELEASED);

• Ducky: a speculative short story as C.M. Simpson (AWAITING EDITS);

• Orb Wielder: a young adult fantasy novel under the Carlie Simonsen pen name (AWAITING EDITS);

• Pyrie: a young adult fantasy novel under the Carlie Simonsen pen name (AWAITING EDITS); and

• Freeman’s Choice: a science fiction-fantasy crossover novel as C.M. Simpson (AWAITING EDITS).

I am currently working on Andromeda’s Pledge, a young adult science fiction novel started way too many years ago—and I love it as much now, as I did then. After that, I have the young adult urban fantasy novel I started for NaNo last year, a short story, and a zombie compilation that I started in 2012 and have been writing on and off since then. This year, those three, at least will be finished, along with Wheelchair Mermaid, which I have been promising to complete for a while now.

So, here’s to a year of finishing what I’ve started the new, the old, and the in-between. Wish me luck and fortune’s blessing.