Next steps: Things to do in 2025

Prepare Blood of Old for publishing. Yes, you read that correctly! Now that the fourth draft of Blood of Old (Graceborn #1) is complete, it’s time to get this baby ready for publishing. That means final edits, formatting, cover design, and all the other things that go on behind the scenes. All going well, I’m looking at a release date sometime in 2026!

Finish the first draft of Graceborn #3. After putting this one on hold halfway through last year—my cheeky little furbaby is to blame for that—I’m keen to get back into writing Graceborn #3. I’m estimating the book to be around 220k words, so I still have a way to go, but I’m hoping to get the first draft finished sometime before the end of the year.

Prepare Graceborn #3 for alpha readers. Providing I manage to finish the first draft of Graceborn #3, I’d also like to get it ready for alpha reading (previously referred to by me as first-round beta reading). This would mainly require a full read-through and preparation of support materials. I’m not sure I’d actually send it off, but it would be great to get it ready to go!

Start the third draft of First the Song. I got alpha feedback on First the Song (Graceborn #2) back in 2023, and it’s almost time to incorporate that feedback by working on the third draft. While I’ve already got a rough outline of the changes I want to make, there’s a little bit more work I need to do before I can start writing. I’d love to get to that before 2025 comes to an end.

Read at least 20 books. Once again, I have set my reading goal for this year as 20 books. It will probably be a bit more of a “challenge” given everything else I’ve got going on, especially since I’m not off to the best start, but I really do want to carve out some time for reading. We’ll see how it goes! If you want to keep up to date with what I’m reading, you can follow me on Goodreads.