So, the year 2025 comes to a close. A Universal Year 9 in the world of numerology, closing the nine year cycle that begin in 2016. It has been both a quiet and eventful writing for me, with conclusions to some projects being made, to make the way for new adventures in 2026. Here comes a summary of the most notable take-aways/ experiences and achievements I have made this year.

In a workshop I attended recently, one of the other writers shared a piece of insight into the writing process she’d learned from working with Canadian writer Michael Winter. A story, he said, has eleven drafts. No matter how long or short it is.

This was an interesting for me to think about in relation to my own work – specifically my second novel. I have spent five and a half years working on it, going through several complete and vastly different drafts. It went through six rewrites before I finally had the story where I wanted it to be, after which I soldiered on with finer edits, ironing out grammatical mistakes, fine tuning characterisation and little droplets of exposition.

It’s been a hot minute since I last posted. Travel to Sweden to see family, festivals, getting married (also in Sweden) and starting to teach at university have all pushed the Substack to the backburner for a while. Settled in at university, making progress on my third novel and polishing up my second novel, I feel like I’m back in the head space where I can post here regularly. I will aim to post every Wednesday, sometimes it may be every other, but I do want to be consistent moving forward, as I’ve realised there is a quite a lot I want to say.

Writing less can seem like a counter-intuitive goal for a writer, yet it is something I have been thinking increasingly much about in the past few months. In December, when I submitted the manuscript for my second novel to my editor, it had seen tis way through approximately 7 drafts, with some parts probably having been revised and rewritten ten times. The amount of words that have gone into this novel since I started it five and a half years ago has probably surpassed half a million by now, and I know that more words will be added once my editor returns her edits.

It’s been another little while since my last post, the editing and re-writing of my second novel being the major reason why. Looking back through my posts to check when my latest update was, I realised I’d never mentioned that amidst the blog tours for Embers, I finished my teaching job in Scotland, moved back to Sweden, and started applying for PhD positions in literature here. All the while working on book two. Simply put – a lot!

This week I logged onto my twitter for the first time in a long while and found out that Embers has been included in a list of 10 debut novels to discover in 2022.