2023
Is March too late to post a 2023 looking forward and 2022 wrap up blog? Yes. Will I do it anyway? Also yes.
I started my 2022 blog post by stating that I’d been on auto-pilot for too long. Now, a year later, I can confidently say I’m finally flying the plane (no more aviation metaphors from here on out, I promise).
So, what did I achieve in 2022?
I started studying towards an MA in Publishing at UCL
I hit my 2022 reading goal of 50 books
I started writing another book
I got an internship at a literary agency (semi-cheating as this is as of February 2023)
I landed a literary agent
In my 2022 blog, I talked about work, reading, writing, and how Covid-19 monumentally screwed with it all. In hindsight, and in short, losing my job in 2020 as a result of the pandemic was probably the best thing that could’ve happened to me because it made me realise that I had nothing to lose by pursuing a career in publishing, and was the catalyst behind me applying to study an MA in Publishing. It also reignited my passion for reading and rewarded me with all the time in the world to write for a few months.
Something I didn’t mention in my 2022 blog was how I’d started feeling abandoned by Wattpad. It was a singular message that changed things. My first romcom had garnered interest from the platform’s Paid Stories and Studios programmes in Spring 2021, and I’d been discouraged from removing the story (and others) from the platform due to a new initiative they couldn’t talk about yet (the Wattpad Creators program). Months passed without any progress on my romcom beyond that initial interest until I reached out to Wattpad, and I got a reply to say that while they were still interested, nothing would happen with the story until 2022. At this point, 2022 was around 6 months away.
In fairness, I get it—Wattpad was undergoing major change with their Navar takeover, the Wattpad Creators program was brewing, and they were managing a bunch of other stories. I simply didn’t want to wait 6 months, and after being buttered up and encouraged to keep my content on the platform, the sudden indifference stung. I decided to pull that romcom from Wattpad, edit it to make it better suited to traditional publishing, then started querying it in January 2023.
Six months later, this romcom (METHOD ACTING) landed me a literary agent.
So what laboured point am I trying to make here? Sometimes the path to success can be disguised as gut-wrenching rejection. If things hadn’t panned out like they had with Wattpad, I never would’ve queried the story that landed me an agent. If I’d not been made redundant in 2020, I never would’ve pursued a career in publishing, applied to UCL, and gotten a literary agency internship.
Was 2022 perfect? Far from it, but it finally felt like I was taking control of my own future, and I’m determined to keep up the momentum in 2023. I’ve already had some pretty major curveballs thrown at me so far this year, but I‘m not as terrified by them as I might’ve been a few years back, or even in 2022.
Things will work themselves out, and if they don’t, I’ll make them work.
