My 2024 Summary

2024 Summary,

This year has certainly been one of the most incredible and amazing for so many reasons but of course I'm sure many of you can guess one of those ;)

The year started straight away with a new character and world coming into life as on New Years day Ayiana and the concept for a new shorter format story about like in the wild west came into being. While I openly admit I haven't made as much progress with it as I would have liked but I am very pleased with the overall development that has taken place, especially as I had to learn how to model horse hair, yeah, never using horses again any time soon. Though I have somehow lost Taddy during my computer move, so I have to make him again, but in truth I wasn't fully happy with him, so maybe it wasn't such a bad thing?

Shortly after I started working on Ayiana's storyline another idea came into being, a very different idea and concept, one that taps back into the mythology and folklore elements of fantasy that I guess in some ways I felt like I had lost during the last two years. Isla was all but a freak accident that happened sometime around April as an idea about a story centered around those lost folklore elements came into being, under the same format theory as Ayiana's of being a much shorter story but one that focuses more on the often missed magic of life. Isla has been undergoing a lot of development and I'm hoping to get into writing more of that fair succinctly.

Of course on the 24th of May, my first book, Life Downside Up, finally went on global release, I cannot begin to tell you how proud I truly am that it and Fae's story has been enjoyed by readers around the world. The release of Life Downside Up overshadows just about anything else that has happened this year and in some way I still haven't quite fully come to terms with what I have achieved by doing so, it was a long and hard three years to get it out for sale, but a lament that I will willingly endure over and over again! I have no plans to stop writing stories anytime soon.

Speaking of Life Downside Up, I also started working heavily on the sequel, as Savena's story has finally started to take shape and I have worked out the exact flow and made a few additional characters along with bringing a few back from the the first book, I will unveil those in the New Year. Savena's story is quite interesting for me as not only is it told through both the real and digital world, but it also is the only story I'm currently working on that isn't historically bound and it's nice not having to make an endless list of props, plants, buildings or clothes for at least one of my worlds!

The development of this story has led to one of the hardest decision I have ever found myself making as a creator, of course that being the decision that the time had come to let Evelyn be retired. That still haunts me but the more I tried to work her into things the less she made sense anymore, make no mistake I haven't abandoned her completely, she is still my hallmark and brand executive if you will, just seeing her will become quite rare. So simply put, this isn't the last you will ever see of Evelyn, just it will be far less often than before.

Scorpio of course is a very different matter, that story and world has become like the gift that keeps on giving, continually evolving and growing but I have made a lot of progress again with her this year and I plan to do some much more decisive work with her and her story in the New Year.

I would like to take a moment to thank everyone for their support during 2024 and hope to see you in 2025.