all my writing projects🌛litfic, horror, historical, fantasy & magical realism🌜| 2025 WRITING UPDATE

A major 2025 pivot in ShaelinWrites’ writing life is that one long-gestating novel—previously far from publishable—has been pushed into submission-ready shape, while several other manuscripts remain paused and waiting for a future break in publishing. After years of ending each year without a sale, she says 2025 felt different because she spent the entire year building momentum toward a debut rather than absorbing fresh rejections.

Two earlier novels, Honey Vinegar and Holding a Ghost, were both previously sent out to publishers (on submission) and then stalled. She describes them as passion projects that were not rejected for lack of editing or craft; instead, there was “nothing to be done” because the manuscripts are already at the end of what she can revise. The books are now on pause, with the hope that a future deal for a different project will “open the door” for these older manuscripts. Despite the frustration and embarrassment she says she’s carried for years—these books representing roughly six years of her life—she refuses to abandon them.

Short fiction output also shifted. She didn’t write a short story for the first time in nine years, attributing it to “novel mode” while she worked toward a submission push. Still, she did publish: a cyberpunk body-horror story titled “You were contractually obligated to withstand violence” in The Expuritin, and a flash piece called “Safo Sees Us at the Castle of Midolene” in Plenitude, a Canadian queer lit journal.

The centerpiece of the update is The Animal Sense, a debut-targeted novel with a logline centered on an arsonist searching for missing parents on a remote island during the early CO 19 pandemic, while pursuing an affair with her brother’s wife. She says the book’s path changed in late 2024 and early 2025: after deciding her earlier options weren’t ready, her agent pushed for a second read and then she undertook what she calls the largest overhaul of her career. Over roughly five weeks, she added more than 20,000 words, multiple new plot lines, four or five new chapters, and several new characters—then followed with a month of final developmental and line polishing. Her agent recently indicated it is essentially ready for submission, needing only small finishing touches like added foreshadowing and a slight boost to a reveal.

Beyond that, she lays out what’s next. Her MFA thesis project, now called Project Profit, is a literary folk horror novel about queerness, trauma, and religious fanaticism; she plans to polish the first ~150 pages for her master’s defense from January through April, then revise the second half after the degree. She also has Project Muse, a novella-length vignette novel (about 12,000 words so far) aiming for roughly 40,000 words, and a fantasy project she’s referred to as Tibo (now leaning toward rewriting it as a standalone rather than continuing a planned series). Finally, she lists four longer-term ideas—Project Goose (historical satire in medieval Europe), Project Apple (magical realist/surrealist sisters story set in 1920s Montreal), Project Wolf (post-apocalyptic noir), and a novelization of her short story Hold Me Under Till I See the Light, tentatively called Project Summer—while emphasizing that deadlines, not yearly goals, will drive what gets written.

The publishing and writing timeline is tightly linked to her MFA schedule and teaching. She says she’ll be largely off YouTube sit-down videos for the next five to six months, posting mainly writing vlogs and lighter-format updates until she finishes her degree and defends her thesis.