A couple of years back, while sitting in church at the beginning of January, my pastor introduced our congregation to the concept of choosing a word for the year instead of setting New Year’s resolutions. This idea really appealed to me. I instantly felt less pressure to live up to my own self-imposed goals, so I went with the word-of-the-year concept and haven’t looked back since.
Choosing a word of the year is simple—pick a word that resonates with your intention for the year ahead and use it as a guide for how you live that out. Ascend is my chosen word for 2026, and for the purposes of this blog post, I’ll relegate it to my writing practice and career.
Why Ascend Is My Word
Ascend—at least to me—means rising to the next level. A higher version of my creative life, if you will. Rather than continuing to make lateral moves, my intention is to move in an upward direction. The last few years have been more of the former, and frankly, I’ve had enough of that caca. It’s felt like there’s been no real upward movement in my literary career.
My ascent in 2026 is going to be intentional—not a race, and not overly ambitious in the way it once was. The past felt more like hustling, and the last two decades of my life have revealed that I am simply not the hustling type. Hustling was a big part of my 20s and 30s. I was fighting for my post-19-year-old life after graduating from university with a deceased mother and no visible father in sight. School loans and credit card debt followed me like an apparition in the night. My fight for survival was rooted in trauma.
More than a decade of hustling as a freelancer and then as a communications professional destroyed my nervous system, and this isn’t what I want to embody any longer. This is partly because I’m in my 40s now and just don’t have any more Fs to give.
Ascending to a Holistic Creative Writing Path
The goal now is to establish a long-term writing life—not the fastest route to a book deal. I try to stay abreast of what’s happening in the book publishing industry. Some of the trends I’ve been reading about—shuttering literary magazines, book banning, and the expectation of miraculous hit debuts from authors—are anxiety-inducing. It’s useless trying to fully adapt to this ever-changing landscape, so this year I’m tapping more into living a creative life that doesn’t sway with the wind.
Part of this journey is understanding my writing practice. The thing I’ve recently acknowledged about myself is that I’m not a mechanical writer. When I sense a creative wave in motion, I ride that baby all the way. The results are usually better character development, ironing out a plot with glaring issues, or ten pages of writing for consecutive days. When these waves occur, I’m extremely grateful.
Alternatively, when the tide goes out, I use that time to replenish my creative juices. Forcing out words, rushing pages to meet a self-imposed word count, or chasing fiction-writing trends has never worked for me. I touched on this briefly in my last blog post. I’m now aiming for depth and creative longevity.
YOU HAVE TO FALL IN LOVE WITH REWRITING
Ascending in Revision
One area of my creative practice where I’m hoping to see ascension is revision. The last four years tested my resilience as a writer, and part of that involved a revision process that simply didn’t work. This has become a nagging priority for me, especially after spending close to three years working on a historical novel. While the concept resonated with those I queried, it wasn’t enough to close the deal. I poured a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into that project, including many months of revision.
Blank pages don’t scare me, but I hate revising. Last year, I attended a virtual session of The FOLD on award-winning short stories, where Ugandan-Canadian writer Iryn Tushabe said something that gave me a visceral reaction: “You have to fall in love with rewriting.” That was not the advice I wanted to hear—but she was absolutely right.
Iryn, if you’re reading this, I still haven’t fallen in love with rewriting. But I hope that as I ascend through 2026, that will change, and that my revision process will improve, resulting in a stronger body of work overall. Instead of racing to finish, I need to delve deeper into structure, plot, character, and form. I wasn’t doing enough of that when I was revising the novel that ultimately got rejected multiple times.
Choosing Blogging Over Marketing Trends
I’m no longer focused on my novel post-mortem. Things have shifted since last year. My attention is now on an interlinked short story collection—one I believe deserves to make it to the finish line in the traditional publishing world. My last manuscript might have survived the submission process if it had been as strong as I imagined it was. Instead, it died a slow death over a year and a half. One day, I’ll write a post about grieving dead manuscripts. For now, all I’ll say is this: ascension can’t happen without change. At least not this year.
Part of that change is this blog. I haven’t blogged in ages, but it felt like the right move. Sure, long-form content may have taken a backseat to short reels and video on social media, but that doesn’t bother me. I believe there’s room for all of it.
Substack, for example, has become the holy grail for writers looking to build a platform. I like Substack and subscribe to several writers, journalists, and culture and political critics. I’m not opposed to publishing there—I may even do so later this year or in 2027. Still, I felt strongly about setting something up on my own first.
I once worked in digital marketing and watched online communities and social platforms be born, burn hot like wildfire, and then die out. A couple of years ago, Substack went through a censorship and moderation crisis when users threatened to leave over the platform’s failure to rein in Nazis and white supremacists spreading hate. That whole fiasco made me think about what it means to build a body of work on a platform you don’t control—about archives, subscriber lists, and what would happen if a platform simply shut down without notice. Poof. Gone before you even had a chance to save your work.
Owning my own author website and building a readership here sits well with me for now, rather than forcing myself to chase a platform for marketing success. The idea of connecting with people here gives me a positive gut reaction, and that aligns with my creative spirit—and with ascending.
Returning to the Creative Lab
With this in mind, my aim is to finish my interlinked short story collection. This project has been in progress since the tail end of 2024 and felt like a natural progression after sending out the novel that never got published. I worked on several short stories unrelated to this collection, and unfortunately, none were published or shortlisted. I’m at peace with that.
Venturing toward a different project felt like a natural ascent rather than forcing a manuscript that wasn’t working. This was the biggest lesson I had to learn over the last few years. I stopped resisting and accepted reality.
Now I’m back in my creative lab, drafting the remaining stories. The characters are revealing new sides of themselves every day, and the work is becoming richer because of it. The experience feels more holistic, more aligned.
The plan is to finish this interlinked collection, collaborate with other creatives, and align with the right people in publishing—people who actually get me and my work. I want to protect my creative space and process, and produce a moving collection of short fiction that finds its way to the right readers. Ascension shouldn’t just be part of my journey—it should live in the work itself.
