New Year, New Challenges

On the year behind and the one ahead

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Mentioned in the podcast:

• Ink & Magic Writing Retreat Applications open until Jan 16, 2026

• UPCOMING EVENT: Me and Nicole Glover – January 15, 2026 – 7pm ET online + in-store at East City Bookshop in DC – Register

• Read The Starseekers by Nicole Glover

• Margie Lawson

• Ray Bradbury Challenge

• The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton

• Falling in Love with Hominids by Nalo Hopkinson

• A Black Women’s History of the United States

• Story Engine deck

• Plur1bus & Better Call Saul

• Playing Big by Tara Mohr

• Freedom app

• Erykah Badu New Year’s Invocation

The following is an edited transcript of my podcast episode. Audio transcription done via MacWhisper.

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I am fantasy and paranormal romance author Leslye Penelope, and welcome to My Imaginary Friends, a look behind the scenes of an author mapping the worlds in my head and making them a reality.

Hello friends. Today is Friday, January 9th, 2026, and this is episode 255 of My Imaginary Friends Live, I’m Leslye.

You can probably hear I’m a little congested. I started off the year fairly ill with the flu, but I had a long list of things I wanted to talk about today, and I am feeling better. I felt a little better yesterday. Today I’m feeling a lot better, so I figured I can probably get through a livestream recording without devolving into a coughing fit.

I was talking to my brother, who was also ill because my whole family got sick over the holidays, about how it sucked to start the year sick. And I kind of feel a little differently. I do like to start the year strong, and “start as you mean to go on.” You have all these big plans and ideas about how the year will be. But starting off sick makes you slow down. I had to rest. I was forced to rest. I was forced to be slower, more contemplative, more mindful, which I think are all ultimately net positives for how I want my year to be. Also, not taking my health for granted.

Anytime your status quo is changed, you realize how much you take for granted. When I had surgery, I took for granted everything: being able to walk, move my arm, all of these things. So I am feeling better. I’m still on the mend, but I’m very grateful to be healthier.

In terms of announcements: the Ink & Magic Writing Retreat applications are still open until January 16, 2026. If you are listening or watching in real time and you are a writer and would like to join us outside of Baltimore this May for a transformative writing retreat — we’ve had two of these and they’ve been amazing so far — check out inkandmagicretreat.com and submit an application.

We’ll be letting people know very quickly. We changed how we did it this year because we’re trying to be faster on things. We’re also doing another retreat/mastermind in the fall for more advanced writers. All of that is available on inkandmagicretreat.com.

This week’s best thing: I turned in the copyedits for The Inevitable Undoing of Zahara Douglas, the book that releases August 11th of this year. That felt good. I reread it again.... I don’t know how many times I’ve read it, but it’s always good to have had time away from it. I reread it with as fresh eyes as I could and had to think about word choice.

I was actually going to make a post (still might do that) because the copyeditor, and I ended up requesting and got the same copyeditor from Daughter of the Merciful Deep because that was the most intense copyedit I’d ever experienced. And I loved it. It was hard, and I loved it. So she came back.

There are certain words and crutches writers use. Every time I’m alerted of a crutch, I try to incorporate that information and not rely on it so much. In my earlier books, people sighed a lot. People were always looking. They were gazing. I’m conscious that I use a lot of gazing and looking and sighing.

This time, I had all new words. I wrote down the page numbers every time I used the words “chest,” “throat,” and “stomach,” because my characters were having all kinds of chest, throat, and stomach reactions. I try to write visceral reactions so you can show how someone is feeling. It’s a technique I learned from Margie Lawson, who’s a great writing teacher, and a big proponent of visceral reactions.

Apparently I’m very focused on certain body parts. I haven’t counted, but it was something like 60 times in the manuscript where someone’s chest did something: heart beating out of chest, chest tightening, chest feeling hollow. Sometimes twice on a page, sometimes three times.

So I wrote down all the page numbers and went through, cut half of them, or changed them to other types of reactions. Same thing with “throat.” It was about 60. “Stomach” was a little better, but the copyeditor told me she expected Zahara to be diagnosed with some kind of stomach illness because of all the stomach reactions.

So I’m not sighing and gazing as much anymore, but I will have to beware of my chest-throat-stomach situations and fist-clenching, because hands are always being clenched into fists. Anyway, I got through all that in addition to the other copyediting things. The ARCs should be coming in the next month or two and that will be exciting to hold in my hands.

I also did the acknowledgments and the epigraph. For the last two books, I’ve had an epigraph in mind. The epigraph is the little quote at the beginning of the book. Sometimes I have chapter epigraphs, there are none in this book, but I didn’t have anything in mind this time. The production designer put a space in the manuscript for a dedication and an epigraph. I usually dedicate my books, but I was like, do I have an epigraph?

I went through my notes and research notes. Since the book takes place in 1999, I was tempted to use a quote from the Prince song. But A) I don’t know if we can clear real song lyrics, and B) it doesn’t actually fit. It would just be funny.

I ended up with something at the top of my notes file: a quote from an interview with Kamau Brathwaite, a Caribbean poet. It’s not even poetry; I looked for a poem but didn’t have one that inspired the book. But this quote actually inspired some of the fantastical aspects of the book. I’ll save that reveal for when you get the book. It’s a little odd.

The past two books had poems for epigraphs, and for The Monsters We Defy, the title itself came from the poem that’s the epigraph. For Daughter of the Merciful Deep, there was a poem, Olive Senior’s poetry, that really inspired aspects of the fantastical world.

For this one, it was just this little quote I found in a paper. I do a lot of looking through research papers. This goes back to researching The Monsters We Defy during COVID using JSTOR. Sometimes I’ll find PDFs of dissertations and there’ll be nuggets that inform the writing. That’s where I first saw that quote. And Brathwaite was someone I researched for Daughter, so research from Monsters went into Daughter, and Daughter went into this book, even though Zahara isn’t historical in the same way, though technically 1999 is historical now.

I’m not dealing with the same magic system. Daughter isn’t a sequel to Monsters but it’s like a spiritual sibling. The magic systems are different but related. For Zahara, I went in a different direction but there are still roots. The connection is me though the books are different.

I was actually talking to my brother yesterday about how Zahara is a different thing for me. There’s always that worry about whether readers will still like it. It’s still me, it still comes from the same place, but I’m always pushing and stretching myself.

Originally, I wanted it to be more of a thriller, a techno-fantasy thriller, and I don’t know that it is that. It won’t be marketed as a thriller, and I’m not sure it even is one. Maybe it’s a Leslye thriller in the same way Monsters is a Leslye heist: still a heist, but not quite a heist-heist. That was my inspiration. It’s a different book than any of the others, and I’m thinking about my audience still liking it. It’s a different vibe and energy, but it’s still me, so hopefully if you like what I write, you will like it. We’ll find out soon.

In terms of my writing update: I haven’t done real writing in the past few weeks. The copyedits took up my writing time. I reread everything carefully, I can’t skim, I have to think about questions and word choice, especially replacing words. Sometimes I replaced a chest with a throat and then realized I still had too many throats, so I had to go back. It’s mentally intensive, so I didn’t write new words.

However, I did take on a spontaneous reading/writing challenge. The Ray Bradbury challenge: every night for 1000 nights, read one poem, one short story, and one essay, and write a short story a week for a year. It seems very cool but also impossible. But I saw on Instagram that my writer friend Kaia Alderson was doing it, I commented how I could never do it, then thought “Maybe I can just try.” Even doing it for a week would be a win. So Monday I started, and I’ve done it the past four days and plan to do it today.

I’ve actually read a full short story every day. I modified it to be a page of a short story and a page of an essay for flexibility. Poetry is easy, I’ve been reading five or six poems a day. I picked three books off my shelf:

• The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton
• Falling in Love with Hominids by Nalo Hopkinson (short stories)
• A book of essays, A Black Women’s History of the United States

I’ve ended up reading full short stories every night. They’re fantastic. As for writing a short story every week, I decided to do flash fiction and drabbles. A drabble is a 100-word short story. I wrote one this week and it is terrible. Maybe I’ll show it to you sometime, maybe not. I’m going to try to write at least a drabble every week for as long as I can, because I always talk about inertia. I like to keep writing and not have breaks. Breaks can be good, but they can also break momentum, and I’ve been on a writing break.

I sat down and tried drafting a short story using my Story Engine deck. I pulled cards and got: “A powerful witch with an invention wants to erase a memory of an ancient letter, but they will lose their life’s work.” I had a whole vision of a witch traveling to erase these memories of an ancient letter that spawned a religion causing destruction. I sat down to write it and it was terrible.

I’m always hard on myself with first drafts. Often I look back and it’s not that bad, but it felt bad and didn’t go anywhere. I think it’s a cool prompt, so I’ll try again. But I felt rusty. I have to clean off the dust and rust from the writing muscles because they’ve been atrophying.

I finished the script of Blitches in November, so I didn’t write new words in December. But I’ve been doing this long enough that I know I can scrape the rust off. Still, there’s always that irrational fear that I’ve lost the ability to write. Also, I was ill and my brain is cloudy.

For my brief 2025 year-in-review: I’m still doing my planning for 2026, partially because of illness, partially because I want extra time. A year ago yesterday, I had cubital tunnel surgery on my arm. They moved my nerve. It’s taken a full year to heal. I still have some numbness in my pinky, but almost 100% back. My grip strength is decent, I’m not having the issues I was having. I’m trying to be careful. That has been a wonderful blessing. I’m very grateful.

Last year was my year of “no”: saying no to events and things so I could rest after a very busy 2024. I think it went really well. I still said yes to things, and I realized this year I’m not in a year of no. I’ve said yes to many things, so I need balance. I have a book to promote this year, so I feel like I should be active.

I watched a video from Becca Syme (Better Faster Academy) that I want to incorporate into how I think about yes/no decisions. She asks five questions to rank 1–10 across your activities:

• How much do you enjoy it?
• What are you best at?
• What gives you the most energy?
• What has the most success in your genre?
• What fits best in your financial model?

That’s a great mindset. It’s already sort of in my decision matrix, but I want to tease these out. I don’t know about “what has the most success in your genre.” I’m a poor judge of that. She suggested joining Facebook groups and Discords. Great suggestion; but I’m not going to do it. I cannot keep up with those. So I might focus on the other four and get anecdotal evidence about my genre. Zahara is being marketed as contemporary fantasy, which is different from my previous Orbit books, and I have no idea what’s working in contemporary fantasy. That’s something I’ll keep thinking about.

Some things I planned last year that I did finally do at the end of the year: I cleaned my Mailerlite email list, which means cutting the list by half. Cleaning means finding people who haven’t opened in six or seven months, sending a re-engagement sequence, and deleting them if they don’t click or open. It sucks to see your list cut in half, but it’s nice to prune. Your open rates go up, and you know the people there want to be there.

A lot of my goals didn’t happen, but I did do the special edition of the Bliss Wars. Also at the end of last year, I redesigned the covers for Angelborn and Angelfall and I’m going to put them out as a flip book. Maybe March? Don’t hold me to dates. But it’s the 11th anniversary for both this year. Angelborn first came out in April 2015, so by April, expect the flip book to exist in the world. I never really put those books out in print. I printed a few copies of Angelborn for conferences, but they were never widely available. I’m excited about doing this flip book.

So yes, I think 2025 was a pretty decent year.

The year ahead: my goals for 2026. I’m focused on showing up more and promoting my backlist more, in addition to promoting Zahara Douglas. I want to finish writing Blitches this spring, my Black witches book, and get it to my agent by May. We’re going to say May 1st. That is the goal.

I’m just having problems with tone in that manuscript. I haven’t reread the script I wrote yet. I did the first draft as a script, and I know there was a lot missing, so I’m reimagining it. I just have to sit down and work on it, probably next week. I’m going back and forth about tone and what the book wants to be, and whether that matches my interests or the vision. Less marketplace because who knows what the market will be when it comes out, it’s more about me shaping it. Those are questions I have to figure out.

My focus areas for the year are branding and platform, audience and visibility, and mindset and sustainability. I picked a word of the year: audacity. That is how I want to show up, challenge myself to get out of my comfort zone, show up more, maintain authenticity, not try to do what everyone else is doing, but do what feels good and pushes me.

I have other goals and plans that I’ll take this weekend to work on for my 2026 planning, and I’m excited about that.

Someone in the livestream asked: how do you balance the market and staying true to your own authenticity? That is the question. I’m looking at my brand again. I’m tweaking my logo. I want to redo my website in terms of: What am I writing? How am I showing up? As a traditionally published author, but even if you’re self-published, you think about the market. I want readers to find the book, enjoy it, for it to be relevant. But I also have to write the books I have to write.

Where I’m landing right now is: I’m not writing to market. I’m not writing the most marketable genres. I don’t plan to write more romantasy, for example, because that’s not sparking joy for me in the way romantasy has gone. I’m trying to find readers who may be tired of reading the same book over and over, or who aren’t seeing what they want in the popular books. People who want my unique value proposition, what I do differently. Leaning into that.

If I am interested in something, the people who like my books will probably be interested too. That means not always listening to best practices and advice because it doesn’t always apply to me.

For Becca’s list, things I enjoy and am good at and that give me energy, I do believe that even though I’m unique, there are other people out there. If you like any of my books, there’s a Venn diagram of overlap. Focusing on that overlap and not on things that don’t align with me but might be more popular.

I’m still writing commercial fiction. I still follow genre expectations. If I write a romance, it will have an HEA. If I write fantasy, it might be more bittersweet. But my promise to the reader is ultimately a positive experience. I don’t want to write tragedies necessarily.

So that’s how I think about market and authenticity. I’m constantly thinking about it. Even as I’m writing Blitches, I’m trying not to have the market in my head too much. It’s there. It’s about finding the overlap of what is true to myself that I think the market will respond to in some way. It’s a lot of soul searching, ignoring things, and trying to be better about that because I’m high Input and high Learner. I take in all this information. It helps me help writers and monitor things. But in my own writing and business, I have to take that knowledge and put it in the closet because it doesn’t always help me.

What I’m reading and watching: I watched the show Plur1bus. It’s a new Vince Gilligan show. It’s very slow, and it’s good, but I don’t think I’m the biggest fan of it. I liked the ideas it was confronting but I don’t think it needed to be nine episodes. Six would’ve done it. If you’re on the fence, give it a shot, but know it’s slow. It did inspire me to go back and watch Better Call Saul, which I never watched. I saw Breaking Bad back when it aired. I’m watching season one of Better Call Saul now and trying to fill the well. This is a good fill-the-well period, in addition to my modified Ray Bradbury challenge.

I’m also reading The Starseekers by Nicole Glover because I have an event with her next week at East City Bookshop (online and in person — if you’re not in DC, you can still join). I love Nicole’s books so much. The Starseekers is another fantasy mystery, set in the 60s, and I’m enjoying it.

I’m also reading a book recommended by one of our Ink & Magic Retreat attendees, Mariah Kingsley. It’s called Playing Big by Tara Mohr. It’s extremely good; designed for women entrepreneurs and business people. It’s about showing up bigger and how women tend to minimize our accomplishments. There’s a lot of socialization stuff and more behind that. I’m really enjoying it and recommend it. I’m halfway through. I have the audiobook and I bought the print book to highlight in.

Finally, since I’ve been talking for too long, to wrap this up: this morning I was on Instagram before Freedom shut me out because I’m blocked for half the day. So I tried to get in and respond to comments and things. I saw Erykah Badu’s post from a few weeks ago. She had this invocation for the new year that I thought was extremely good, and I wanted to share it with you all.

She said: I wish you a happy new year and wishing you abundance, prosperity, resilience, health, clarity, perspective, wisdom, guidance, courage, freedom, sanity, single-mindedness, flow, fluidity. Be a strong dreamer and a strong believer. I hope and wish these things for you.

And I hope and wish them for you as well. I hope you’re having a wonderful new year.

As a reminder, you can sign up for the Footnotes newsletter, which includes all of the links and show notes for each episode, as well as inspiration, strategies, and ideas to help you grow as a creative person. You can also choose to become an Imaginary Best Friend for a few dollars a month and get access to extra posts, discounts on courses. We’re doing the craft book club again, which I will announce soon. I hope that you can join me there.

I hope you’re having a good new year and that it is full of wonderful things. Thank you so much to everyone who was here live and everyone who was listening after the fact, and I will talk to you next time.

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