We’re very nearly at the end of 2018, so time to wrap up the year’s to do list and try not to despair at the things left undone.

Edit and publish The Theatre of Shadows: The Vasini Chronicles II.

At the beginning of the year I said:

It’s written. I’ll likely wrap up the second draft in January. It will then be a year of more and more drafts until it’s in a shape I’m happy to publish. The hope is to publish it by the end of the year, but there’s a chance that it may be early 2019 instead.

Hope is a wonderful thing until it meets messy reality. The editing continues. As I mentioned back at the beginning of November, it’s currently out with others who will take a look at it before I work on the next draft. It won’t be early 2019, but it will be published as early as possible next year.

Edit and try to work out how to publish a long novel.

This was the one thing on my 2017 list that I failed to do, so it’s back on the list to do this year. Maybe as things progress with The Theatre of Shadows, I’ll be able to invest more time in this.

This is a supernatural noir novel that had been floating around in my mind since I was 17.

I was kind of expecting to fail to do anything with it again this year. Turns out I was wrong. Although it had to wait until the last few months, I’ve finally managed to turn my attention to editing. I hadn’t realised how much I’d missed the characters and story. Hopefully, hopefully, I can get some more work done on it and it might even end up being in a place to be published. One can hope.

Write and edit the next Tales From Vasini.

I’ve written one of the novellas that will make up the next Tales From Vasini book, there’s one more to write before I can start editing and then publishing it.

It’s taken longer than I’d hoped, but I finally finished writing the first draft of the second story for Tales From Vasini II today.

I won’t say too much about it at the moment, other than that one story is based in the Outbounds – the not-so-safe farm belt around Vasini – and the other one (the one I just finished) is set within the Wildlands between the city-states, the wild and dangerous lands, filled with the ruins of the civilization of those who worshipped the deities.

Finish writing and then edit a novella.

I’m currently working on a non-Vasini related novella. Fingers crossed, I’ll finish it around the end of January. Then onto editing it and deciding how and when to publish it.

This is the sequel to The City Between the Books currently under the working title of The Signal (it will likely change titles, possibly more than once, between now and publication). I’ve done some editing on it. There’s some more to do. It will appear at some point. Probably sooner than other things on this list.

Write The Vasini Chronicles III.

So after I’ve finished the novella I’m currently working on and the second novella for the next Tales From Vasini book, it’s back to writing The Vasini Chronicles.

Although I never got to actually writing The Vasini Chronicles III, I have been doing research in preparation for both The Vasini Chronicles III and Tales From Vasini III. Come the New Year (or maybe a little bit sooner), I’ll start outlining the both of them in more depth, so hopefully I’ll actually start writing it in a few months time. It’ll be the Tales From Vasini III stories up first as they’ll be set before The Vasini Chronicles III.

Read at least 36 books and cut down my backlog of unread books (now at over 340 books).

Last year I originally planned to read 26 books, by the end of the year I’d read 62. However, only 24 of them were after my daughter was born. Based on this, I should be able to get through 48 books. However, given there a few 800+ page books amongst those I’m planning to read, I’m going to aim for 36. This may still be quite ambitious. It does mean that, based on this target, it will take me 10 years to get through my backlog (as it stands).

I ended up declaring 60 on Goodreads with another eight read that I didn’t list on Goodreads. That’s less than last year but more than the 2016. I even managed to get round to writing my first review on Goodreads, something that I may do more of (although I doubt it will become a habit).

The better news is that my backlog is now down to 308 books. I may get through the entire lot in another five years or so.

The highlights have been Saga Volumes 8 & 9. With Saga now on hiatus, though, I’m not sure what I’m looking forward to reading most this year.

Time to rest and let things go ready for the New Year and a fresh resolve, even if the 2019 To Do list isn’t as fresh and new as I’d hope.

Happy holidays. I hope 2018 has treated you well and you’ve managed to do everything you wanted.