It looks like 2012 is shaping up to be a pretty intense year for me. So many changes have been happening on all sides, and it’s been pretty hard keeping up with everything. To an extent, I find it difficult to cope with some of these changes, but when I sit down and really think about it, all of them are really for the good. I’m not going to elaborate on all of them, of course, but let’s just say the end result was of me quietly setting my work-in-progress aside and working on something that was completely unplanned but now has given me a very specific goal to shoot for.

I blame my ex-coworker, Herbert, who recently retired to focus on his art, for giving me a major kick in the (non-existent) ‘nads and forcing me to get off my whiny, sluggish butt and go for what I’ve always been pining for the past couple of years. On the publishing front, all of my usual go-to places for book reviews no longer review and/or have gone off to pursue other things. Which leaves me kind of stuck – a nasty place to be in if you’re a small press author who’s constantly struggling against the status quo in your market as well as your niche.

What I’m taking away from all of these is the necessity of adapting, and while it took me a while to come to terms with certain possibilities, I find that things really aren’t that scary.

I’ve been writing and publishing LGBT YA fiction since 2008, and now that I’m at a crossroads – or more like have taken a step down a path that I never thought I’d ever take in a million years – I wonder if this means I’m at the twilight of my career writing as Hayden Thorne. Mind you, I still have Helleville to complete as well as the next Masks sequel, and it’s very likely that my output under this pseudonym will be limited to novel-length fiction, though for how much longer I’ll be doing this remains uncertain, and I don’t want to jinx myself by making guesses. It’ll certainly be a while before I give up the ghost on LGBT YA fiction; however, my output will go back to the way it was when I first started publishing, which means two novels a year.

My new goal is to supplement what I currently write with fiction outside what I currently produce (hopefully cure me of my burnout this way), and I hope to self-publish those stories under a new pseudonym. Or maybe I’ll use my real name for a change. Who knows? I tried writing those stories in the past, and every time I did, things fell apart on me, and I couldn’t find it in myself to continue. I’ve blogged about my experiences before. If anything, I convinced myself that it was useless, and it was a sign that I was “meant” to write what I write and nothing else.

But with my experimental story, which I’ve titled “The Nightingale of St. Barthélémy”, I managed to prove myself wrong. Happily, in fact. Today I finished the first draft of the novelette, and it requires several revisions and edits. Then comes the usual kind of nightmarish process of hiring an artist for the cover as well as the formatting for upload at Smashwords and Amazon. Oh, yeah, there’s also the inevitable marketing horror, but since it’s not LGBT, I’ve got a broader arena to play in, and it’ll be interesting to see what’s out there.

I honestly have no idea where this’ll take me, but seeing as how I’ve been wishing for this kind of change for some time now, it’s a great feeling, getting over that first (psychological) hurdle.