So I have some very exciting writing plans coming in 2022, starting with publishing my first book, Steel Princess, a YA fantasy novel with both futuristic and fairytale elements about a teenage android who discovers she’s from the Steel City of Elysia, a Queendom ruled by a cruel android Queen. This book has been nine years in the running, and it’ll be ten by the time the book is released, because I started writing it when I was studying for my A Levels. But I’ve been planning the self publishing process for a year or so now, after watching some friends and editing clients going through it, and since I’ve had my cover designed, it’s all felt a lot more real. I have to send my manuscript to my editor for January 3rd, and then there will be a two week wait to receive it back before I can make any more changes. But it’s exciting! And then it will be time to get the thing ready for release. I’m aiming for a July release but if I can get it edited and formatted beforehand, it may happen earlier than that.
I also have a couple of other novels that I’m excited to get back into as well. In the meantime, I’ve been reading through and outlining a rewrite on a Snow White retelling I fell in love with writing during NaNoWriMo a couple of years ago. It has witches and curses, and involves the man in the mirror and his connection to the evil queen, and his daughter. It’s a lot of fun to write and I plan on whipping it into shape over the next year, so perhaps this will be my next release if all goes well.
As Steel Princess is the first book in a series of four, and I have outlined the next one, Tinker Prince, and I’m excited and nervous to write it. A fair bit of the plot I had in an original version of the first book will be going into the second, so I will have to learn to bring it in and make it make sense! But I’m really excited to see how that goes.
Another book will be Monstress, another YA fantasy story. But this one needs a lot of work because it was originally a retelling of Medusa with some King Midas stuff in there as well, but a writer friend of mine quite rightfully told me it was wrong to bring in the old myth with a secondary world you’ve created. So I will probably keep a lot of the original story in the book, but change the main character’s abilities and intentions. Basically, it’ll take a lot of rewriting and I’m not sure I’ll get there in 2022, but you never know! On the Greek myth side of things though, I do have another novel I wrote a few years ago called The Unfortunate Ending of Heidi Gerrard, about a girl who dies at the beginning of the story and first ends up in Purgatory before meeting the daughter of Hades. I’m thinking of making this one a bit different as well, so perhaps she will become the daughter of Lucifer!
I also want to carry on with the fairytale retellings series as well, so I have a lot of projects in the works!
April Grace 