Happy New Year everybody!
It is surprising what you discover about yourself as a writer when you take time out to organise things and make spreadsheets of all your projects and so forth!
I have done that during the Christmas period, I have put down only 26 writing projects I have into files and made a spreadsheet about them and I am surprised to see (outside of the vampires I write) what my main themes and tropes are!
My spreadsheet shows I am mostly a fantasy author and secondary dystopian author; I am more likely to write about angels and demons or mutants than anything else and I tend towards tropes of survival, redemption and isolation. The main sceneries are cities and subterranean, as opposed to what I thought was a more of a forest like leaning, and I am more of a standalone novelist, rather than a series creator.
This is a huge revelation to me, because I thought that I mostly concentrated on forests and mountains, dragons and giants and themes of war and revelation – I felt that I was mostly a steampunk and horror author above everything else, but no, I am not. I also felt that I was writing too many series and sagas, but again, no, it’s a small margin in comparison to the majority of my work.
I was also surprised at how many of my stories are in water based sceneries too, I never imagined that would be the case; it is astonishing, as I have never really felt I was a person who had such a big connection to water before. But water scenes are very common in most of my stories and my main characters are most likely to be predominantly female.
I am also surprised at how diverse my characters are in comparison to the average books I read from other authors, this is not intentional, but it is a good thing to note and I am more prone to comedy in my stories thus far, than I had first thought.
What did I include in my spreadsheet?
Genre
Title of project
Main creature race
Main scene
Is this a series?
Main theme
Are the characters diverse?
Main character gender
I didn’t include any of my vampire novels in the spreadsheet, because I wanted to see what I am as an author outside of them.
I haven’t put every project into the spreadsheet because I only wanted to waste about half a day on this type of thing as I need more time to organise my files for revision. I fully intend to send work to agents by the end of autumn of this year and I plan to send around four books out, before the winter and I am assessing which ones I feel are the best polished works.
I have done it this way quite deliberately; I have many alternative stories of most of the work I am proud of, so that I can test the water of each with any agent who sees me as a promising colleague. If ever I have been called anything in the past by a lot of people who know me personally, they know me to be very time efficient, as well as flexible!
Thank you for reading!
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