Storytime with Rachel F Hundred

Or in other words, beginning my 2026.

We are up and running!

I am really proud of the progress I’ve made in the last two weeks. It has not been easy as I have still been recovering from flu fatigue (still coughing and spluttering occasionally), but I have made a start at getting back into a regular rhythm.

Regular consistent rhythms are the key to my feeling like I am a writer, building a community which loves reading what I post (hopefully!) and, yes, creating a consistent traffic to the website which means WordPress itself recommends the site out to people.

Regular posting is something I really struggled to do when the full-time consultancy contract became really busy in the summer, and in the winter with flu, even the minimal posting I was doing fell by the wayside. It is really great to feel I’ve begun the year as I would like to continue.

So, how would I like to continue? Namely posting on average a couple of times a week; something fanfiction, something non-fanfiction.

Something fanfiction every week may not be completely possible, but I’m going to give it a go. It still is the main reason why people come to my writing site after all. Back when I started I had a weekly posting schedule for my Airwolf series which averaged around 16-20k of words per story, and I continued to post weekly for a long while with my Stargate Aftershocks series too (these averaged between 5-15k with some stories substantially more than that). That was all while working a full time very demanding consultancy job. Of course, I was also twenty years younger!

As I’ve been saying for a while I really want to finish up S8 of my Aftershocks series so this may become the focus of my weekly posting. However, I am focused on getting my Harry Potter fic Another Dimension posted by the end of March, and I’ve already started editing chapters one and two as I will be posting the second chapter as a website subscriber exclusive for Evil Author’s Day on February 15^th.

Indeed it is likely that my writing over the next couple of weeks will be focused on Feb 15^th and posting up stories for International Fandom day. I have three ideas which I would like to see completed, but we will see how I get on. Overall, if I do all three, I’m outlooking writing 10-25k over the next fortnight which is ambitious given that I still will be balancing writing with a very busy work period.

What I will focus on in the non-fanfiction is broad. That might be my writer’s log, a poem, a short story, or a review.

Last year I made the decision not to focus on reviews and only do them when I’m moved to do one. They bring in very little traffic and I feel like with the reviews I’m talking to the void! But I like doing reviews when I want to get my opinion out there and that’s going to continue being my approach this year. I’m looking forward to the planned Marvel slate this year, both the TV and the films. With DC I’m less enthused, but willing to watch and give it a go. There’s also The Mandalorian and Grogu movie, Masters of the Universe (I loved that show as a kid), and maybe one or two others which I’m excited about.

From a fiction perspective, I may write new short stories but this is likely to be ad hoc. Primarily, I’d like to get the final story in the first trilogy of The Iolaire Bay cases done. This prequel trilogy follows my planned novel’s primary character, Eddie, as he attends his first year of University and essentially begins his path as an amateur detective. It would be nice to get this story up as a trailer to the novel itself.

I’m still planning a June release date for the novel. My stretch target here is getting the second book in the series ready for release at the same time or just after later in the summer as this will enable readers who enjoy the first book to quickly get access to the second. However, this may need me to take some time off to just write as I’m not sure I’ll be able to do the novel writing and the weekly fanfiction posting simultaneously.

Poems have been my available new content in January. Having failed to get them published last year, I had three ready and waiting to go. Once those are posted, it is likely to go back to a more ad hoc posting of poems. I write my best poetry when something inspires me. They like the reviews will be in the ‘as and when’ category of my writing.

Which brings me neatly onto the writer’s logs. I enjoy doing these and I’ve good feedback about them so I’m going to continue to do one every two weeks. Two weeks is a good frequency. Weekly feels like I might not have anything particularly new to say and also feels like it takes too much time away from writing stories. Fortnightly allows me to take a step back, do a check-in and see how things are going.

And so, I feel I’ll leave it there for this week and get back to all that writing I want to do on stories! Which is what I’ve been doing this week and I’m pleased to say it means I can post up something which has been sitting in my work-in-progress folder for a while – A Potioned Affair, the sequel to my Harry Potter/The Sentinel fic, A Framed Investigation.

Here’s to focusing on the one I’m targeting next!

End Note: Please like, comment or share if you enjoyed this writer’s log! If you would like to buy me a coffee in support of my original writing, check out my Ko-fi or my subscription/donation page.