2024 is over, and a new year is upon us. I thought I’d write a brief overview of what I have planned for 2025, with the proviso that nothing in writing ever goes entirely to plan, and that projects I might confidently summarise here could easily be dropped in favour of anything that announces itself more forcefully to my mind. With that caveat in place…
The main thing of course will
be the publication of my debut novel, The Unrecovered, on 13th
February. The book launch will be at Edinburgh’s Golden Hare Books on that day,
chaired (in something of a coup!) by Mary Paulson-Ellis.
Tickets for the launch,
redeemable against a copy of the book, can be ordered here:
Pre-orders for signed and
dedicated copies are available here:
And here’s a link to
various other places where it can be preordered: https://linktr.ee/richstrach
It goes without saying
that I’ve never had a book launch before, although I’ve been to plenty of them
in my time. To say that the prospect fills me with raw terror would be an
understatement, but I’m just pushing all the anxieties to one side for the
moment. Hopefully it can be something I’ll actually enjoy once it’s up and
running. Either way, I will finally have a proper novel out there in the wild.
Other than that, I’ll
have the general round of edits to do on my second novel. I submitted the third
draft in mid-December, and no doubt there will be lots of work to do on it
during the year to get it into shape. It’s changed quite a lot since the first
draft, but I’m comfortable with where it sits now.
I’ll also be trying to
finish the first draft of a third novel, the final volume of a tentative
thematic trilogy all about war, British history, archaeology, landscape and
myth. I made a pretty good start on this in the second half of 2024, and
hopefully I can get this into some vaguely completed form by summer 2025. After
that there will be the usual rounds of intensely self-critical editing and redrafting
etc before I can submit it.
Assuming that all goes to
plan (see above), I want to spend the second half of 2025 looking over and
redrafting a novella and some short stories for a possible collection. Most of
the short stories have been published before, in various magazines, but the
novella is something I’ve never managed to place anywhere. I’m intensely proud of
it all the same, it’s like the distilled essence of every subject and style I
care about the most. It was around 60,000 words the last time I checked, and
ideally I’d get it down to about 35,000. The collection would be a bit more
formally experimental than the novels I’m currently writing; less character and
plot, more style and imagery.
On top of that (and already
this seems a ridiculous amount to try and pack into one year), I want to start
some very early sketches and notes towards a short novel I’ve had percolating
in my head for a while. Again, this would be a more formally experimental
piece, but of everything I can dimly perceive in the future it’s the work that’s
most insistently demanding my attention. I wouldn’t start work on it properly until
2026, assuming my interest in it doesn’t flag, but I want to start outlining
and researching and thinking about it when I’ve got the time.
Of course, none of this
takes into consideration the usual unexpected life-events that always throw
your plans off-track, and I’ve got a few events pencilled-in around the
publication of The Unrecovered which will take up some time. But if I can get
into a pretty steady work rate, I think much of this will be achievable. I’ll
look back over it on New Year’s Day 2026, and that hollow laughter you’ll hear
will be me contemptuously scorning my optimism…
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