Hooray! On November 30, close to midnight, I “won” my ninth NaNoWriMo. Nothing like leaving it til the very last minute 😂 But I hit just over 50,000 words on my NaNo project, which will be the companion novel to The Snow Queen’s Daughter. It’s not finished yet, but the story is weaving together, and once it is fairly complete, I’ll go back and expand The Snow Queen’s Daughter a little, and release them both this year.

Congratulations to all the writers who took part, whether you hit 50K, 100K or 5K – whatever your word count, you created something magical – and no doubt learned something about yourself too. Thanks to all my writer buddies for the encouragement and support, and sharing the adventure, and especially to K. A. Last and Vivienne Lee Fraser for the final push – we spent three days together at a writing retreat in late November, and encouraged/inspired each other to pull off stupidly large word counts in the final couple of days. Maybe next year we won’t leave it til the last minute. Or maybe we will. Grace under pressure and all…

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) takes place every November, and writers set out to write 50,000 words in 30 days. I first tried it in 2012, after Witchy Magic was published, as I wanted to see if I could write a novel. I figured if it was terrible it wouldn’t matter, as it was only a month wasted. But that 50,000 words became Into the Mists, and every year since, I’ve written another 50,000 words, that became the start of a new book.

2012 – Into the Mists
2013 – Into the Dark
2014 – Into the Light
2015 – The beginning of a Rose book
2016 – Into the Storm
2017 – Into the Fire
2018 – Into the Air
2019 – The beginning of a faery tale trilogy
2020 – The beginning of The Summer Queen’s Apprentice (working title)