As another new year commences, I am shocked to note that the last blog post I wrote for this site was submitted almost three years ago to the day. While I don’t wish to dwell on the cause of my lack of activity, I feel obliged to put on record the circumstances responsible for the prolonged neglect of my online presence, because the internet is my primary means of connection to my audience, and I don’t like feeling as though I have been ghosting my readers these past few years.
To say that the Covid pandemic seriously derailed my life, both professionally and personally, would be a major understatement. This global emergency, which began in the early weeks of 2020, irrevocably altered my situation, yet for a long time I remained in denial about the fact my life had been changed permanently, and would never go back to how it was before Covid. Although the pandemic effectively ended by the middle of 2023, it wasn’t until the final three months of 2024 that I finally accepted my new reality, and the need to move on from the past. Until that point, my author life had more or less been on hold since the Covid lockdown was instituted in the UK. The writing of my third novel, which should have been published in 2022, pretty much stalled indefinitely, because the time and freedom I required to devote to it became dishearteningly intermittent. Whenever I was fortunate enough to spend two or three days writing, it wasn’t long before my circumstances forced me to abandon the manuscript for literally months at a time.
After multiple failed attempts to resume writing in my less than favourable living conditions, I had reached the end of 2023 and pretty much given up on finishing the book, having convinced myself it wouldn’t be possible to complete the manuscript until I somehow managed to get my life back to how it was before Covid. This, in turn, led to the gradual neglect of maintaining my online presence, as I didn’t see the point without a new novel to promote. For most of 2024, the inertia created by my defeatist mindset seemed insurmountable, so I lost any motivation to fight it. But then October arrived. It was at this point I realised I hadn’t written anything for nearly a year, and that if I continued to wait for my old life to return I would probably never finish writing my unfinished third book. Finally, I was at a place that forced me to accept my situation. I needed to get back into the habit of writing on a regular basis, regardless of my circumstances, and with NaNoWriMo only weeks away it was the perfect time to resume work on my manuscript immediately, without delay.
Somehow, for the remainder of October I was able to write on a daily basis, and to my surprise, my NaNoWriMo experience during the subsequent 30 days of November was such a success that I was able to maintain my daily writing progress even after the month concluded. By the end of the year my first draft was just two chapters away from being finished, so I went into 2025 feeling very positive and optimistic about my prospects for the year ahead. I began planning for the publication of my third novel, The Line That Cannot Be Crossed, to coincide with fifth anniversary of my previous book’s publication day. Unfortunately, things did not go as I wanted. While working on the second draft of my manuscript it eventually became necessary to abandon all hopes of publishing it during 2025. After unwittingly re-writing literally every word of the first chapter of the story, I had a much stronger opening to the book on my hands, but all the changes made meant I was forced to significantly re-write chapters, two, three, four, five, and six. If that was the extent of the re-writes I had to do it would still have been possible for The Line That Cannot Be Crossed to see the light of day during 2025, but that wasn’t the case. Instead, as I went through the manuscript, I found myself needing to do significant re-writes of literally every chapter, some of them entirely. Yet, despite the delay brought about by the extensive re-writing, I’m glad I persevered with it, because the story I have on my hands now is so much more compelling and better written than the one that would have been published last year if I hadn’t made these changes.
And so it is I find myself starting the new year in a very similar place to where I was at the start of last year, feeling optimistic about my prospects for the year ahead, and making plans for the publication of my long overdue third novel. The difference this time is that my story is now set in stone and cannot be can derailed by re-writes as I spend the next two or three weeks getting my final draft ready to be sent to my editor in February. I’m pleased to declare with certainty The Line That Cannot Be Crossed will finally get into the hands of those readers who have been waiting far longer than they should, at some stage during the second quarter of 2026, which also means that as of today I am now willing and able to devote time to my neglected online presence.
What this new beginning entails in practice is that I will be posting blog updates here on my site on a regular basis, and for those of you interested in what’s going on in my life outside of my struggles as an author, my personal blog will also be getting regular posts. As for my social media accounts, in the short-term I will be consistently active on Mastodon, Bluesky, and to a lesser extent Facebook, Pinterest, and Tumblr; but my long-term goal is to leave all social media platforms altogether once I have enough subscribers on my mailing list. For the time being, social media is a necessary evil for an unknown author with a small readership, though eventually the best way to be kept up to date with what I’m up to is to sign up to my mailing list.
Thank you for taking the time out of your day to read this post,
Ian
Ian Gregoire | Official Website 
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