Back in 2015, I came up with a concept for a novel called The Regret List. At the time, it was a sapphic rom-com that I meant to write for NaNoWriMo that November. I began it, got about 15k words into it, and quit. It was the first time since I started participating in NaNo in 2009 that I didn’t win, and it was the last time that I participated at all, given that I quit writing altogether the following summer. The remnants of The Regret List went into a percolating folder, with the expectation of never seeing the light of day again.

Fast forward to the summer of 2024. I’d finished writing my latest novel, Rapture on the Seas, and was meant to be taking a writing break. However, I was afraid that if I stopped writing again, I would be stuck for another many-year drought like from 2016 to 2023. I didn’t yet trust that it wasn’t writer’s block, but emotional repression, that caused said drought. The creative energy was low, and so I dug out my old percolating folder and unburied The Regret List.

The thing is, the original concept is nothing more than a hook – a list of regrets to try to right. But a book that simply crosses things off a list is boring! It needed more. I flailed a bit over a month or two, then finally made some connections to bring depth to the story: a long lost friend-turned-enemy, an illustrated webcomic, and an in-the-closet/religious deconstruction journey. I set the book in a part of London (Chiswick) where I’ve spent a bit of time, so that I could ground the setting in restaurants, stores, streets, and parks that I know, to give it more depth.

Last August, the first chapter went up, and while I’ve struggled to keep the story going at times, I posted the final chapter last Friday. Altogether, the book is 107k words long and makes the seventh full-length novel that I’ve written in the last 19 months. It includes a few illustrations of varying quality, and I’m quite happy with how the whole thing came out. My partner (both beta partner and IRL partner), who goes by Rainstorm online, did a phenomenal job helping to guide me through every step of this process, from brainstorming Az’s actual Regret List before the writing even started, to walking me through paragraph-by-paragraph on the hardest chapter of the book (which took an entire month of rewrites to get into shape).

I know it’s unlikely anyone here wants to read any of my fanfic, but in the off-chance that you do, you can read The Regret List on ao3. It’s rated Explicit because it has a few spicy sections, however, they are all skippable with a “skip” button, and if you do that, the story is rated Mature for mature themes mostly to do with mental health. There’s a list of trigger warnings in the tags, in the fic’s notes, and on each chapter that requires them.