First of all, on behalf of Clara and myself, we would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year.
Going through the motions of a year, you don’t really grasp what you have or haven’t achieved. Goals that may have set down at the beginning of the year no longer applied very quickly into it and by the end of the year you’re left wondering if the next might be better because those few simple goals you started out with, failed. Just because you fall flat on your face, doesn’t mean you have to roll over and surrender. Just because you can’t see your life, or in our case our work, moving forward, doesn’t mean it’s come to a halt.
We first started writing in 09. We’d known each other for a while, and we’d written together. We weren’t very good at it, but we enjoyed doing it. It started off as an idea, perhaps a silly one from two young people, but what started as a small and silly idea has evolved over the years into something I don’t think either of us would have seen coming back then. Whatever material we had then is now no longer applicable, and the story itself has changed perhaps a billion times over the years. We’ve seen a lot of characters come and go. We’ve also seen the return of a few, finding that nagging voice in the back of our heads to be a familiar one, only to find out yet again we were never really in charge of sending them away!
We’ve had ups and downs. Moments where one or the other thought of tossing in the towel and calling a night. We’ve had moments where the story was stuck, or didn’t move. Moments where things just didn’t feel right, or lacked something but we could never place our finger on it. We’ve had moments where we were on a roll and spewed out words like a fountain of words. We’ve had moments where we thought those words were the best thing ever written, but if we’d look at it now, we’d wonder what on earth we were on back then. In comparison to all of these years that we’ve been working on this, I can honestly say that 2016 has been the most productive one.
It’s where we made our biggest leap of improvement. It was the year that we came to the harsh and cruel realisation that for two aspiring fantasy writers, we had no imagination at all. I say it was a harsh realization because we’d just spent 7 years of our lives working on something that lacked any and all imagination, fantasy or wonder. We never stopped to ask, we never stopped to think, we stuck to what we know and you know what.. We sucked. Our work, it sucked.
We got a little better but the best progress we’ve made was when we started building our world. Comparatively it’s only been a few months since we fully got into the details of what it is we can actually envision when we put our minds to it. But in that short space of time, we’ve achieved more than we have in the past 7 years. A waste of time? No, not at all. We wouldn’t have gotten here without those 7 years. Without those failures and victories, without the tripping and falling flat on our faces, and scrambling back to our feet. We’ve shared laughter, tears, happiness and deep frustrations.. but where is the fun in this if it doesn’t bring us some challenge?!
We planned on ending 2016 with a creative bang. When we took some time out, we had a list of things we still had to do. Needless to say that the holiday month leaves little room for creative input. We got a chunk done but not all that we’d set out.. But the most important part is that we’re moving forward. It’s a new day, in a new year, where all of the puzzle pieces are sliding into place more and more. We find ourselves more involved, more inspired, and more eager to get back to what we set out to do earlier, but a little unprepared. Write. Write our little hearts out and our fingers off.
Charlotte and Clara 