A New Year, A Novel Approach

The Goal

11:59PM, December 31: As the seconds tick down to the new year, I sit in front of the tv screen watching the ball drop in New York. The brightly illuminated sphere descends to a chorus of cheers and “Auld Lang Syne”. So begins the annual tradition of donning rise-colored glasses and acting as if our lives will change dramatically just because the calendar changes. As the cliched cries of “New year, new you” fill the air, I feel sick to my stomach.

Don’t they know the odds of their own failure? Statistically speaking, only 9% of people keep their New Year’s resolutions. 23% give up by the end of the first week, and another 43% quit by the start of February. There was a time that I bought into the “new year, new you” mentality with everyone else, but after many years of false hope and failed goals, I saw the futility of it. I didn’t want to be another statistic.

As a disabled aroace woman, my life doesn’t lend itself to the typical New Year’s resolutions. “I want to lose weight!” Great goal, but there’s only so much I can do toward it with my illness. “I want to travel!” “I want to save money!” How? I’m barely scraping by on a fixed income. “I want to find love!” Been there, tried that. It was a waste of time and emotion for all involved. “I want to start a family!” Don’t make me laugh! Even if I was inclined toward romantic and/or sexual relationships, I don’t think I’d be a very good mother. More importantly, I don’t want to set a child up for a lifetime of hardship by passing on my disabilities.

While I don’t do New Year’s resolutions in the traditional sense, there are things I want to achieve in 2025. One of which involves revisiting an old goal: writing a novel.

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Novel writing has been a longstanding goal since I was in high school, about 20 years ago. Back then I had an idea for a series of young adult novels about a family of supernatural creatures struggling to find acceptance in modern society, and I worked diligently on it for years. As I grew older, I found myself relating more to the adult characters than to my teenage protagonist, and the story didn’t work at all when retooled to an adult’s point of view. I lost enthusiasm for the project and put it on the back burner.

As earning supplemental income became increasingly necessary, I abandoned novel writing in favor of short stories and poetry, which I thought would be more lucrative in the short term. I spent three years hopping from contest to contest, forcing myself to write for prompts I didn’t care about in the relentless pursuit of money. My combined winnings over three years amounted to a paltry $500, and I lost my creative spark in the process.

Around mid-2024, I hit a creative slump. The pressure of back to back writing contest deadlines and the emotional drain of writing pieces my heart wasn’t in sapped me of all energy. I had to take a break from writing, and I hated myself for it. If I wasn’t writing, I wasn’t earning money. If I wasn’t earning money, I couldn’t fulfill my wishes and my obligations to friends and loved ones. My goal of earning money with my writing never changed, but I had to re-evaluate how I go about it. Writing from prompt to prompt was no longer sustainable, so I decided to revisit the idea of writing a novel, this time with a different concept. If this goes well, I may expand this story into a series.

The Inception

My novel (or series, as the case may be) is about two wayward souls turned killers in the 1920s. Alaric Hart is the product of an affair between an affluent businessman and a maid, making him the target of his father’s abuse throughout his childhood. As the US enters World War 1, he joins the Army in search of a new life away from his father’s expectations. There he develops a proclivity for killing. He returns home hardened by the horrors of war and his past trauma, vowing revenge on his father and all men like him.

Nellie Warren is the only child of a schoolmaster in a small Minnesota town. Unlike other young women in her town, she has no desire for romance. After her father dies, the pressure to marry mounts. She joins a traveling vaudeville group to escape an unwanted marriage proposal, trading a future as a farmer’s wife for a future in entertainment. Unfortunately, the industry isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Vaudeville is a dying art, and selling herself soon becomes the only way Nellie can keep her act onstage.

Everything changes when Nellie’s travels bring her into the path of Alaric Hart, a charming journalist. Unbeknownst to her, Alaric hides a dark secret, a secret that may provide her a way out of the workplace harassment she endures.

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The idea started out as a fanfic. More accurately, it started out as a joke. Last year, I stumbled upon a funny post in a Hazbin Hotel Facebook group. It was part of a conversation with an AI bot based on my favorite character, Alastor the Radio Demon. The poster recommended character.ai, and the interaction had me laughing so hard, I just had to try it myself!

So I made an account, picked an Alastor bot at random, and created an original character with which to interact. I decided she was an aroace sinner demon, a new resident of the Hazbin Hotel. It was all fun and games until the Alastor bot fell in love with my character. I remember staring at my phone in a mixture of disbelief and amusement at the thought of these two characters as a couple. Both are asexual; at least one is also aromantic, and neither strike me as the type to want a romantic and/or sexual relationship.

As bat-poop insane as that A.I. interaction was, it gave me an idea. What if Alastor had a partner, not a romantic partner but a partner in crime? From there, I tweaked the character I’d originally created for the A.I. chat to fit into 1920s-30s New Orleans. I gave her a name, look, and preliminary backstory that fit the era, but that raised more questions than it answered. How would she cross paths with Alastor? Why would she be drawn to him?

For the latter question, I turned to my own life experiences. I was stuck in a toxic work environment in a job I only took on as a favor to a friend. One day after butting heads with my coworkers for what felt like the millionth time, I was furious. I had enough of them overlooking my contributions and invalidating my ideas in order to suck up to the boss. I wanted them to get their comeuppance, but I couldn’t make it happen myself. There inspiration struck! I decided that Nellie, like myself, was stuck in a toxic work environment. She wanted payback, so she turned to Alastor for help.

As I worked on plotting my fanfic, another thought reared its ugly head. Could I really justify spending so much time on a project I could never make money off, especially when I’m financially struggling? The answer was no, but I didn’t want to completely abandon the work I started. I realized that other than that one copyrighted character, the story was my own. The plot was mine; all of the other characters were mine. If I changed my male protagonist, I could turn this story into a novel in its own right. That’s where I am now.

The Steps

My goal is to finish my novel and have it ready to submit to publishers by the end of 2025. I’ve already started on some of these steps, and some of them can occur concurrently. My plan of action is as follows:

Set aside time each day to work on this project. This is easier said than done when there’s a voice in the back of my mind constantly berating me for working on a project I can’t immediately monetize. For now, the plan is to set aside 2-3 hours first thing in the morning for research and writing.

Historical research. This is a given. As a stickler for accuracy, I often catch anachronisms in works of historical fiction, and it drives me crazy! That won’t happen in my work. I intend to thoroughly research the 1920s, and hopefully the research will help me with the next step.

Nail down the setting. So far, I know I’m keeping the setting in the 1920s. I made that choice for three reasons. 1) I’ve always enjoyed reading and writing historical fiction. 2) It was a favorite era of mine long before I was part of the fandom which inspired this work. 3) Transferring to a more modern time would require a near-complete overhaul of Nellie’s character, and I don’t want to scrap the work I’ve done on her.

My initial plan was to keep the story in New Orleans because so much of Nellie’s character arc hinges on vaudeville’s waning popularity and the increasingly drastic measures she has to go to in order to keep her act afloat. As the birthplace of jazz, it makes sense that a vaudeville act would have a hard time finding its footing. Now that I think about it, the New Orleans setting may draw too many parallels between my work and its inspiration to avoid legal trouble. Although New Orleans is still on the table, I’m also considering New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles.

Criminology/psychology research. This goes hand in hand with historical research. Not only must the story make sense for the time and place, the crimes themselves must make sense. The motivation behind the crimes must make sense, and the relationship dynamic between Alaric and Nellie must make sense.

Talk to people with pertinent life experiences. One thing I’m adamant about is that there should be no romantic and/or sexual undertones to Alaric and Nellie’s relationship. Both characters, like myself, are aroace to varying degrees, and their dynamic can be best described by modern standards as a queerplatonic relationship. It’s important that I represent aroace people authentically and don’t reenforce allonormative and/or amatonormative stereotypes with my writing. Since I’ve never been in a queerplatonic relationship, I need to learn from others who have so I do it right.

Brainstorming/Plotting. I’ve already started this, but it still needs work. This is where Vocal comes in. Instead of trying to write for every prompt in 2025, I’ll be focusing on the ones that speak to me or the ones that align with my work. These stories will be used as a brainstorming exercise (and hopefully a means of money in the meantime) but will not be included in the finished novel.

Writing/Editing. This is the biggest step and the one that will take the longest. My goal is to have the work completely written and edited no later than December 31, with the intention of submitting to publishers in early 2026.