I have always liked that saying. I don’t know why. Maybe I enjoy duality. As I poke my head out of the cave of 2023 into the dawning of 2024 I am looking ahead for a great writing year. I have some great intentions, both long-term and short-term.

I will pause here and do my obligatory reflections of 2023. I’ll start with the fun stuff, I published another novel “Emergence Ascended.” I Wrote a novel for NaNoWriMo, which was a bucket list item. (Now I feel like I can legitimately say I am a Novelist.) I Did an interview on Youtube to promote my new novel (It didn’t help, but it was a fun experience). If you follow my social media accounts you may notice that I do not do the random selfie post as I prefer to stay in the background (Introvert stuff) but in the spirit of self-promotion I powered through.

There is probably more highlights of fun things in 2023 but sometimes I want to keep things for me. That being said there was some interesting things in 2023, just to keep it spicy. The big one is a series of events starting with a road rage incident, our vehicle got a nice bullet hole. Sent it to the bodyshop for repair, of which there was a break in and OUR vehicle was stolen to commit a crime. It was recovered a month later with a group of homeless occupying it in an alleyway. Toxicology report deemed it hazardous and it had to be ‘totaled’ by the insurance (we didn’t want to drive a Meth car anyway.) Replaced the vehicle with a new one from the insurance money. Whew. But that is not all. A month later a windstorm took out a tree, causing it to fall onto our home, and, Guess what?… The new Van. Yup. Lucky it was a glancing blow and our Insurance (again) fixed the repairs for that (No we did not take it to the same bodyshop) But wait there is more. Our upstairs bathtub cracked and flooded the garage. SO now we have a shiny new bath room remodel (that we are still paying for at the cost of 400$ a month)All in all, though it was a financially and mentally stressful year, we survived, and I still think the good outweighed the bad as far as 2023 goes.

Whats next? I have some very good intentions for the year coming up. First on my agenda is to finish “Yellow Man.” the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo. There are some good bones in the story, and I am working on fleshing out some details and adding things I missed or neglected in the first rough draft. Who knows how long this process is going to take me, but I am optimistic I can get it finished soonish.

I have several more stories I want to get down. Most are just thumbnail thoughts, and don’t have names yet. The “Bigfoot” story is next after Yellow Man. I love Cryptids and am excited to get that one rolling. I have two possible endings rolling around, I guess I will decide when I get there. Another one is the Will-o-the-wisp story. I want to get that one done before the BIG project. The Big Project is a storyline that will turn into a series (more than likely) with some vignettes here and there. There is a great setting that I thing I can create a small little world around with different adventures to play with. But this one I am going to give a lot of thought while I finish the other three stories. I want to get those out of the way because I predict that the big project will consume a few years (at the least, unless I get bored or distracted, which is probable)

Of course I will keep on keeping on with the blog. I will jot down some more short stories for your enjoyment. I am still compiling short stories for my book “30-minute Shivers.” A collection of short horror stories.

The Audible project, I intend to start recording (for realz this time) on Sunday mornings. I can enjoy my new “recording studio” and give you my least cringy narration to Emergence Collective on Spotify.

Thank you for spending your time visiting my blog; I sincerely appreciate it. I love interacting and building friendships, so feel free to comment and like. You can follow my socials and other projects by clicking the linktree. https://linktr.ee/jshallett