2023: Post-Mortem

I thought I might try out writing long-form posts again sometimes. Not many; some sprinkled snapshots, or if I have some particularly good thoughts I want to share. This is just a little retrospective (a post-mortem, if you will) on my debut year, some work and personal life stuff, and a few of my favourite reads. 

Debuting

2023 was the year of The Undetectables. It’s a year I’ve been waiting for since I was 10, and been trying to make happen since I was 14, but it still feels absolutely bonkers to think that it’s actually happened? A really real thing. 

Whenever people ask what it’s like to have a book published, I don’t know what to say, because I still don’t think I know. It’s at once both the most incredible thing in the world, and the thing that makes the most sense. A life-long goal realised with a book I’m immensely proud of in a world I absolutely adore being in, with a publisher that has been a dream to work with.

Getting to publish a book with a chronically ill main character is everything – I would love to go back to 2018 to tell the version of me who finally got a diagnosis of fibromyalgia (among other things) that it was all going to work out pretty okay, actually. I would love to tell 2018 me that they’d get emails and DMs and tweets and comments from other people with fibro who could relate to Mallory. I’d love to go back even further and tell kid me that a lifelong obsession with forensic science would be useful for a fantasy world and that readers would be just as enthusiastic. And I’d love to go back to the tiny version of me that was scared to assert their queer identity and tell them they’d get BE GAY written on the front cover.

Because I’d had no expectations other than ‘I hope this goes well’, there’s virtually nothing I’d change about my debut year. Maybe a bit less airborne virus adding a layer of difficulty to everything, but I did so many events, met readers and booksellers, signed books (and bookplates), got into a book box and just generally had a blast with a genre that doesn’t tend to sell well in my country. 

 To absolutely every single person who was involved in making this the year of The Undetectables, THANK YOU! 

Writing 

Unsurprisingly, I didn’t get a whole load of writing done this year besides what I was contracted to do. I started out 2023 working on The Undetectables edits while simultaneously working on an outline, and then a draft and another and another of what is now officially titled The Undead Complex. I started trying to untangle a first draft of a middle grade book I was writing in between rounds of edits and drafts, but didn’t get very far. I’d been practising writing drafts on a tight turnaround in the years leading up to getting a book deal, knowing it wasn’t a skill I’d want to have to develop from scratch, but actually juggling edits and drafts was a really interesting experience and one I think I can improve on next year. (It seems planning is a good 80% of it, the rest is down to my energy levels!) 

For some absolutely unknown reason I thought it would be a great goal to aim to write 12 short stories across the year, but that’s an absolutely laughable aspiration in hindsight. I wrote one and a half stories and a few paragraphs of others, but the ideas are sketched out for when I next get a chance to get them down on paper.

I also blurbed a nice handful of brilliant books and worked on some sensitivity/authenticity reads which is always so rewarding (and I’m open to doing one or two next year, authors/publishers don’t be afraid to hit me up!). Otherwise, I’ve got a handful of book ideas and documents where I’ve sketched out bits of plot, and they’ll be waiting for me when I’m ready to work on something new. Maybe in 2024, maybe later on. We’ll have to see what the future holds… 

Personally Speaking

I’m not really one for sharing private life online much anymore – I used to be a lot more frank and honest, but when I became chronically ill I found it harder and harder to share what used to come naturally, my desire to be private (and maybe not having much energy to put thoughts into words) outweighing any benefit it might’ve brought me and anyone reading about it. But this is important, I think. 

A specific event many years ago caused me to develop agoraphobia (a story for another day, perhaps) and I’ve never been quite right since. While it waned a lot by 2019, it came back with a bang in 2020, and I couldn’t rationalise it because my fears of going outside were tied up in the very real fear of getting sick and losing some (or all) of the progress I’d made in managing my chronic illness. In 2022, I moved across the country and had no real need to go very far from home, so I was happily sitting in and writing and reading and rarely setting foot outside my little village without someone with me. It was a nice place to write and read books and convalesce near the sea like a sickly Victorian child. 

Fast forward to January 2023. My book had been announced. I’d seen a rough cover. I had edits to complete and it was going to be a real book. There were going to be events. I was maybe going to have to travel outside of Ireland, but certainly up to Dublin, on a train, on my own. There were going to be other people around. It was absolutely happening.

 And I still couldn’t go outside by myself. 

I look back on the start of the year and don’t recognise that person. The original agoraphobia, despite being a huge problem, went untreated until I took matters into my own hands (something I understand is not possible for lots of people, but worked for me in lieu of anyone helping me out) and designed a way for me to go outside and do things, again and again, until it became easier. This year I tried that same method, a slow creep of exposure to other people and to places on my own – which brings us to events!

Events 

So I’d expected to maybe do, like, a book launch? Maybe do an in-person event, maybe be invited to something in England, though that was never a given, and I never really expected it to happen. I honestly had no idea what to expect aside from the nebulous sense that I needed to be ready to go places on my own by the time September rolled around.

It was certainly not a given that I got chosen as an Irish Book Week Ambassador (thanks to Sans Press, who’ve published me twice in two of their anthologies and thought I’d be a good nominee!). It was not a given I’d do events for IBW (including an event at Chapters Dublin with the SYP, and an in-conversation with JF Murray), that I’d be asked to chair VE Schwab at the Dublin date of the Fragile Threads tour, or that I’d be asked to do a panel at MCM Comic Con with David Fenne and Juno Dawson (chaired by Alwyn Hamilton), but I was and I did all of these things and it was wild and wonderful and incredible. I chaired an event in Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop in Galway with my impossibly talented friend Meg Grehan, which was my first time chairing and cemented the possibility that I could chair events – and even like doing it. 

Edit: so focused was on I events where I had to actually go outside, I forgot to mention the wonderful events I did where the eyes were on me through phones and tablets and laptops… and TVs! I did an excellent panel on writing disabled characters with Lillie Lainoff at CampYA, a Fantasy Fellowship panel with fellow Titan authors Trip Galey, KJ Dell’Antonia and Kell Woods, and appeared on VirginMedia’s What’s the Story? tv show and had a chat with Tom Dunne, where he let me ramble on about science a lot. (it was great)

I think how I see myself is not how others see me (I’ve been told this by those closest to me on multiple occasions), but January 2023 Courtney and December 2023 Courtney are worlds apart in terms of confidence in their ability to do things. It was challenging physically and mentally to get here, but while I was in the moment… god was it fun.  

Favourite Books

In spite of the wild year I had, I somehow read 133 books this year. (Lots were research books, or for the purpose of me studying craft, and this list does not include books I’ve blurbed for next year!) These were some stand-outs across adult, YA and non-fiction. 

Fiction (adult):

The Last House on Needless Street – Catriona Ward

In Memoriam – Alice Winn 

Floating Hotel (March 2024) – Grace Curtis 

My Hot Friend – Sophie White 

Vicious – VE Schwab

Penance – Eliza Clark

Masters of Death – Olivie Blake

The Nothing Man – Catherine Ryan Howard

Feed – Mira Grant

Orlando – Virgina Woolf 

YA: 

What Walks These Halls – Amy Clarkin 

Iron Widow – Xiran Jay Zhao 

Mindwalker – Kate Dylan 

One For All – Lillie Lainoff 

Sixteen Souls – Rosie Talbot 

Overemotional – David Fenne 

The Honeys – Ryan LaSala 

Wise Creatures – Deirdre Sullivan 

Heartstopper vol. 5 – Alice Oseman 

Nonfiction: 

Takeaway – Angela Hui

18 Tiny Deaths – Bruce Goldfarb  (a re-read) 

But What I Really Want To Do Is Direct – Ken Kwapis 

Murder: the Biography – Kate Morgan

Night Terrors – Alice Vernon