Launching Foreign, our third-born child and perhaps the most tumultuous, came at a strange time for a lot of our team. You’d think the third time around we’d have this publishing a lit mag thing down pat, but safe to say that a lot of hurdles appeared that we did not expect.
At times, we felt as foreign as our theme, disconnected and running to always try and catch each other in between new jobs, weddings, writing and publishing Christmas-themed novellas and festive holidays. On the other hand, it couldn’t have arrived at any better a time–a point in our lives where all of the team found ourselves thinking about our own writing journeys and how we might move forward into 2025. It has been nearly four years since we graduated from our Masters degree, eager to launch ourselves into the literary world on the heels of a slowly lessening pandemic. The goals we had then are both the same and yet different from the ones we had last year and the ones we are looking forward to making this year.
So with all we’ve achieved over the last year, something we’ve discussed a lot is how do we learn from 2024 and set realistic goals for 2025. Some of us are writing novels, others are editing them, but I would like to think that all of us are trying to reconnect with the joy of writing. And for many of us, that is a Foreign notion (forgive me my intentional punning and maybe read it if you have time!).
I truly believe that is probably the most important thing to think about when setting writing goals in 2025. Does it spark joy? Are you having fun writing?
There are going to be adequate times to be tearing out your hair and cursing characters who wrestle the story away from you, but after a full year of trying to push through writing a novel that was clearly not working (and over a decade of writing FanFiction), I have made, perhaps the slightly controversial decision, to focus on the joy writing and my characters bring me. I want to finish that damn novel this year (and an epic FanFic that has been years in the making), but I also want to remember why I wanted to write a novel in the first place.
It’s about the feeling as much as it is about the quantitative goals.
So, I’m not focusing on word counts, chapter numbers or act breakdowns this year. I’m going to PLAN (because I’m terrible at that), and write when I can and hope to find the joy again in being creative.
Maybe, finally, that’ll be what helps me breakthrough the writer’s block and allow my stories to finally flourish.
Rach