Happy New Year to all those using the Gregorian calendar! I’ve done a look back on 2025 here, and now we’re looking forwards to what the year might bring.
2026 will be the year I:
- am a regular monthly contributor to Divination Hollow Reviews
- am a member of the British Fantasy Society (BFS)
- (HOPEFULLY) qualify as an Affiliate Writer with the Horror Writers’ Association (HWA)
Writing Goals:
- Finish one of my longform WIPs, or at least make significant progress on one.
- Submit more short stories to publications (so, I guess… write some).
- Keep going with my Ko-Fi fiction – produce 12 pieces per year for my members, plus bonus rewards. I want to get more organised with this, and perhaps write all 12 main pieces in one go, which will then help me get them posted out on time.
Would Be Nice If I:
- Go to a con. Maybe BristolCon as it’s close. Or the BFS con, which I think is in Brighton, and also easy to get to. Open to online cons and appearances as well.
- Buy a bundle of ISBNs and get my act together for proper store distribution for my self-published titles.
- Make more TikToks, I suppose?
- Publish something (if it’s at that level and ready). Perhaps the Ko-Fi member exclusive, Olly/Ricky short, Dinner For Two as a limited distribution release, like Bone Puppets. And something else, perhaps.
- Get more Ko-Fi members! Any tier! I’m at 15 in total now, and my big ambitious goal is 30 members across the 3 available tiers to cover the rising costs of postage for Family members, weather the losses of a few here and there, and to take the ads off my podcast. Family memberships are capped at 10, and there are 3 spaces left.
Primary Writing Focus for 2026:
FEED, Pagham-on-Sea novel. I want this to be an entry point into the series, not just the Book 4 continuation of the series, so I’m looking for beta readers who have never read the other books, or perhaps only one of them.
I’m also going to need beta readers who have read the other 3 books, to see if I’ve got the balance right, and they don’t find it too pandering to new readers.
The blurb needs a lot of work, but this is what I’ve thrown together and edited so far:
Katy Porter’s life is complicated: to most people, she’s a final-year University student, a bit wierd, and a bit of a loner; in fact, under her human-passing skin she’s a space-bending eldritch abomination, but you can’t choose your family. When Katy’s new (human) boyfriend Dominic turns out to be a monster hunter who wants her head as a trophy, and she’s caught eating him (in self-defence…) on a secret livestream he set up in his bedroom, her attempts to live a ‘regular’ life swiftly unravel.
Panicked livestream viewers summon Creatures from other dimensions in protection rituals gone wrong, including a ravenous Parasite God from beyond the stars who wants to claim Katy as its perfect host “when she’s ready”, whatever that means; disturbing snuff videos found on Dom’s laptop reveal a dangerous hunter is on the prowl among the undead and lycanthropic communities of Southampton, and Katy still doesn’t know what to do when she finishes University.
With the help of her oldest brother and current head of the family Wes, whose random visions give him seizures he is trying to control and whose elderly housekeeper may or may not be trying to poison him; their Soothsayer cousin Ricky, who just wants to be left alone with his sentient house and a sinister goat he found and adopted; a werewolf with irritating Golden Retriever energy she shagged once in a car park and now wants to be friends, and a maggot-riddled revenant who keeps trying to make her socialise more, Katy is determined to figure out at least one of these pressing issues, before she ends up as an eldritch trad wife to a planet-eating parasite wanting to replicate inside her.
Can she sort their lives out, save the world, AND pass her final year exams? This god may need a miracle of her own…
FEED is an irreverent, contemporary, New Adult Dark Urban Fantasy set in the South of England, for fans of GHOST FLOWER by Jessica Conwell, LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS by Rory Michaelson, and the MERCY THOMPSON series by Patricia Briggs.
If that sounds good to you, drop me a line with the Message Subject: FEED BETA INTEREST. You can also direct message me on Bluesky (@cmrosens.com) if we’re mutuals there, or @ me in a post. You can also find me on IG, Threads, and TikTok as @cm.rosens.
I’m currently at ~57K words with this draft, so I’d say that’s just over halfway, and I should have another ~40K words to go. What bothers me is that the midpoint is in the wrong place, and needs to come a bit earlier – it also feels like there’s something missing from this draft, but I won’t know what that is until I finish it and read the whole thing from beginning to end. So there’s a lot of work to do, and I am not setting myself deadlines for this, it happens when it happens.
This means I also can’t set a timeline for beta readers, so if you’re expressing interest, I’ll get back when it’s ready and if you’re not able to read it at that time, no worries at all. I’ll be putting out a call when it is ready though, so you can subscribe to this blog by clicking the subscribe button on this post, and/or to my monthly newsletter, and keep an eye out for that.
Happy New Year all, I really hope it brings you good things.
Leave a Reply