My 2022 had so much in it, and most of it was good, but a lot of it was draining and challenging. All told, it was a year of changes and new challenges and new opportunities. A year of firsts.

I turned 45 at the beginning of the year, which feels very much like the halfway point of the years one can hope to have, so it felt liminal right off the bat. I felt like Janus this year, looking ahead and behind.

My mother in law’s birthday is also in January, and she turned 75. Her care continued to be a large part of my life for the first third of this year, as we struggled to find some kind of equilibrium for the horrific symptoms of Lewy Body Dementia, which she’d been diagnosed with earlier in the pandemic (exacerbated by many other health problems.) I remember January 2022 very well, because she started the new year with a new set of delusions — sad and complex but less scary than her usual. She was also suffering from intermittent pain in various parts of her back, neck and shoulders that nobody could figure out, and she was still having bouts of behaviour that the long-term care home was struggling to cope with. There were several trips to the emergency room for various reasons. The Royal Ottawa Hospital took her in for several weeks to try to see whether there were any better ways to treat her symptoms, including a new approach to medications. This was a real blessing, despite the ongoing difficulties of health care during the pandemic, and I’m so grateful to the Royal for their work.

She seemed to be doing better for a moment or two during the spring, but the pain was not improving, and then she took a sudden downturn, becoming almost nonverbal, totally confused, and not eating at all. We weren’t sure whether this was simply Lewy Body Dementia being its unpredictable self and lurching into the end stage, but it turned out it was a very rapid onset of cancer throughout her body. (I’d urged the doctors to check for cancer back at the turn of the year, because of her pain, and because she’d had breast cancer eight years before, but the doctors didn’t find anything on the tests they did then.)

We spent her last couple of weeks in the hospital with her, taking turns with family members at her side, and she died in May. My 12-year-old was very close to her and he did a beautiful reading at the funeral.

Grief can sometimes be a slow evolution, and that’s definitely the case when someone’s death brings an end to long suffering. Much of 2022 has been about supporting my spouse and about coming to terms with my own caregiver burnout and grief. I process things through writing, and my story The Morning House, about a caregiver, was published by Podcastle this summer.

Which brings me to the other ways in which 2022 was a year of change for me: my writing. Trying to establish a career as a novelist feels a lot like clinging to a cliff by one’s fingernails, so even when things are going well (maybe even especially when they are), I have a tendency to worry about whether I’m one bad set of sales numbers away from disaster. But there are two important counters to that feeling.

One of them is the connection to readers, which has been so incredibly humbling and rewarding this year, as tens of thousands of them took a chance on The Embroidered Book and its 650 pages. Later in the year, I published Assassin’s Creed: The Magus Conspiracy, and the fans of the franchise have been just wonderful in welcoming me and my stories to the universe. I don’t take that for granted for a second.

The other counter to career stress is the work itself, which is the one thing under a writer’s own control (assuming conditions that allow the work to happen, which of course is not always the case.) This was a busy year for work. I did edits on The Magus Conspiracy, and I outlined, contracted and wrote Assassin’s Creed: The Resurrection Plot, which is now in the editing stage. I also did edits on The Valkyrie, with my new editor at HarperVoyager UK, Jane Johnson. This was another change, as I had worked with Jack Renninson on The Embroidered Book. I’m sad not to be working with Jack anymore (he moved on to other adventures in life and publishing and doesn’t work for HarperVoyager UK anymore) but Jane and I get on wonderfully and she made The Valkyrie shine.

Another great joy of this year was getting to work with fabulous book cover designers Bastien Jez and Andrew Davis and the production teams at both Harper Voyager and Aconyte. I am extremely fortunate in my covers!

My agent Jennie Goloboy and I signed two book contracts this year. One was a three-book deal with HarperVoyager UK for The Valkyrie, plus The Chatelaine (a revised edition of my first novel, Armed In Her Fashion), plus a novel called The Sharp Sisters that I’m still writing. We also signed the contract for Assassin’s Creed: The Resurrection Plot with Aconyte Books (my editor there is the wonderful Gwendolyn Nix, with Marc Gascoigne working with me as well when Gwen was on leave.)

The Assassin’s Creed books are my first tie-ins. The Embroidered Book also brought me several career firsts: my first big book (and maybe my last — no plans to go into the 600-page zone again any time soon!). My first real hardback publication, my first print ARCs, my first special editions, and, in a surreal turn of events, my first bestseller lists (one week on the Sunday Times bestseller list in the UK, and several weeks on the Canadian fiction bestseller lists here.)

I also started working with a film rights manager this year, and even had my first chat with a producer, which is a strange and wonderful thing. (There’s no news on that front, and may never be — I know enough writers that I have calibrated my expectations low — but it’s still an exciting opportunity and a new chapter in my career that I never dared to even dream about.)

Writing a very short story for Audible was also a new, and great, experience. I have a lot of practice writing very short fiction on deadline for contests run by the Codex Writers Group, of which I’m a member, so that came in handy for this Audible project! “A Perfect Cup of Tea” is secondary world fantasy, which is a nice change from my usual. I also had short stories published in Pulp Literature (“And in the Arcade, Ego”) and the anthology Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue (“Lilies and Claws”) this year. I wrote a few short stories this year, too, but I’m kind of burned out on the submission process so I haven’t been very diligent about keeping them out there. (Non-writers are sometimes surprised that even published, award-winning writers continue to get rejections, but indeed we do, so getting any short story published typically requires sending it out to get rejected a few times before it finds its home.) I’ll get back on the submission horse in 2023, so there may be some short fiction from me in 2023 or 2024 — but nothing in the hopper at the moment that’s already been sold.

I also worked on an audio fiction project this year, but it hasn’t been announced yet, so I’ll have to tell you about that in 2023.

I worked really hard on book promotion in 2022 (with a lot of help from wonderful publicity and marketing people for both books I published.) I expect to do even more in 2023, as I have The Valkyrie hardback and the paperback of The Embroidered Book coming in March (July in N. America), The Chatelaine coming in May (August in N. America), and Assassin’s Creed: The Resurrection Plot coming in July. Thanks so much to everyone who had me on for a guest post or podcast interview this year. I appreciate the connections and conversations!

Once I finish the edits on The Resurrection Plot, I’m turning my writing brain to finishing the draft of The Sharp Sisters, which keeps getting back burnered. It’s due in August but I want to finish it well before then. It is a book that requires some careful, quiet thought, so I keep wanting to steal a stretch of time to just think about it and nothing else, but I’m unlikely to get that. I love it and I think it’ll be a good novel when I’m done, but it needs some untangling at the moment.

My brain, not terribly helpfully, is already daydreaming two or three novels into the future…

As for other work, I’m teaching an arts and culture journalism course at Carleton University in 2023, as I do every year. I’ve cut back on some of my other teaching and editing work, but I will still do the occasional workshop. I’ve also been working several days per month for WIEGO (Women in the Informal Economy Globalizing and Organizing), which is a wonderful organization and it’s rewarding, important work with great people, but it’s very brain-intensive and will probably take more of my time in the next few months.

I hope everyone has a joy-filled 2023 and I just want to say thank you to everyone who’s spent some time with my stories and books this year. It means so much to me.

Oh, and how could I forget? In 2022, I adopted a sweet black cat named Minerva, who is the best familiar I could have. Anyone who has done a Zoom call with me this year knows her well!