When the imposter syndrome is telling you that you don't do enough, you do an audit of the year.
Way back when, I once worked a Social Media Manager at a human services agency. The work itself was fun and made me feel like I was doing something good, as I was writing blogs and short posts on the lives of people with disabilities in our community that my agency supported in everyday life: in getting jobs, in finding nice places to live, in exploring their communities and meeting new people, in participating in volunteer action and community events. That part was cool and taught me a lot about equity, humanity, and the necessity of representation.
But outside those moments with the people we served and the community at large, it was a soul sucking corporate job like any other. Couple that with a weird boss man in a "department" of just two people—him and myself—and you can see how that got real uncomfortable, and went downhill, eventually. Yet I stayed for a long time, because it provided security, a stable paycheck, even benefits (really good benefits)—and because I was told that that was the only realistic way to sustain myself. By working the old 9-to-5 and playing the corporate game. I still remember weird boss man saying:
"The kids on TikTok aren't going to be buying your books." (The unspoken part was: So you better stay here and keep working for me, because you'll fail doing what you want to do.)
If there's one thing I am, though, it is a spiteful bitch. Tell me I'll fail at something, and that just means I'll have to succeed even more than I originally planned to. Just to stick it to folks like this.
All that aside, though, what matters is that here I am now, nearly two years after I finally took the plunge and did my own thing—and this year has been my busiest yet. The amount of work produced this year is actually a little mind blowing, and to think this is only the start of all of this? To think that the Christian Witch movement continues to grow, the conversation continues to spread, and people continue to come together under that banner? That's something amazing. And while I can't quantify everything I've seen, done, and gained from such a wonderful community, what I can do is take stock of the works published since January 2024.
Let's take a look.
The Work Taken On Throughout 2024 (And What I Learned)
At the start of this year, I knew I had two goal: publish Discovering Christian Witchcraft, which was just about done at that point, and write, edit, and publish The Wraith Queen, the sequel to The Glass Witch. (Couldn't exactly put that one off forever, you know?) However, there was a secret third thing thrown into the mix: the Christian Witch's Tarot Journal, which I'm already super excited to use, even though we still have two weeks left of 2024. There was also the audiobook for The Glass Witch, which is honestly a process I never want to repeat. Making audiobooks—from recording to editing—is ass. Never hated something so much in my life. But at least it exists now, right?
Even without the journal, which I got a bug up my ass out of absolutely nowhere to make in June of 2024, that was a massive amount of stuff to do. Looking back, it's starting to make sense, why I felt so busy all the time: essentially four publications, in twelve months. (And that's not counting the 70 bits of content posted on YouTube, all the Patreon content, all the TikTok and Instagram content, and the part-time gig of teaching writing at one of my state's many colleges... you see what I'm getting at.) What I didn't know when I had that cute corporate job that didn't let me work past 40 hours was that the work I was about to hop into was actually way harder, with way worse hours—but the benefit is that it's work I actually deeply enjoy doing, to the point that I find myself reaching for my next resources and books to study for my next bit of content even when I'm technically supposed to be "relaxing" (whatever this means). When you love the work you do, it's really hard to put it down.
So how did it get all done? Simple: by having a solid timeline and weekly schedule set-up to juggle multiple projects with, deadlines I was going to hold myself to, and having both grace and backup plans for myself when things just weren't going as planned. Discovering Christian Witchcraft was a book that took Mimi and I both a good year and a quarter to research, write, edit, and publish, and for me, that work happened all while I was also writing Where the Gods Left Off to come out in September of 2023. For Mimi, it happened while juggling the responsibilities of managing her household and homeschooling her children. Lots going on for everyone, all at once—and we certainly weren't out there aspiring to be Burnout Queens.
(Come publication day, there was still a bit of burnout, though. Publishing is always burnout central. It is what it is.)
And as soon as Discovering Christian Witchcraft hit the internet on March 1st, I gathered all the balls I could muster and got to tackling The Wraith Queen, which I'd been dreading since I put it away in 2021. I spent hours writing this thing back then, but I just wasn't the writer I am today, and I couldn't figure it out. I was still mired in the imposter syndrome at that time, being so freshly out of my MFA; I was still clinging to outside validation, a professor or an editor to check my every 25 pages and tell me I was doing well.
As much as Where the Gods Left Off and Discovering Christian Witchcraft were patently not fiction in any way—hell, the latter felt like writing a gigantic college paper, if I'm being honest with you—they did teach me something about just getting the story down without all the drama and the catastrophizing and the self sabotaging. They showed me how a deadline forces you to buckle down and get what needs to be written on the page, not what you want to be written—and how sometimes (a lot of times), what you think you want in your writing actually kind of sucks. The heart is deceitful, and all that. You just gotta learn how to get out of your own way, stop forcing the story in a certain way, and let the work speak for itself—let the story develop naturally, even as you hit all the main beats you need to hit.
So in nine months, I wrote The Wraith Queen. Wrote it, edited it, and published it. The final files for the ebook and paperback were all set and tucked away as of December 16th, 2024, just a little over that nine month mark, and the first copies are on their way for pre-order fulfillment. In all, it took five drafts, and a breakneck writing pace, given half my time got sucked up to making the tarot journal happen during the summer. I also learned that I hadn't been reaching my true, insane writing potential, though, because where I'd been writing 1,500 words for four days a week before, by the end of this mess, I was writing 3,000 words a day for five days a week—over doubling my writing speed. And at one point, I wroet 45,000 words in three weeks. NaNoWriMo (or what that corporate, problematic shell of an organization used to be) ain't got shit on this, lemme tell ya. Between the Excel spreadsheets to stay on track and the many pages of notes on each draft, I was dead serious about getting this thing done, writing in three hour blocks each day in between all this other work.
And with the breakneck pace I took here, I discovered: I literally didn't even have the time to doubt the quality of my writing by the end. This became more than some artsy fartsy little project; I treated it like a job, and I performed like my life depended on it. I buckled down and made it happen. And somehow... it ended up better than the first book (in my opinion). Because I got all that bellyaching and hand wringing and "what if" nonsense out of the way, because I saw exactly where I needed to go and the stones I needed to hop across to get there, I ended up writing a book that is purely, truly, 100% my work, no elders holding my hands and coaching me along... and I wrote something that reflects exactly the kind of qualiy every book I publish deserves, no matter what.
I still can't believe that. Can't believe that I'd be the writer I am right now. Can't believe I've got so many more years to get better. Better than this? Jesus. What a thrilling idea.
So What's on the Docket for 2025?
Now, if you thought I was going to take it any easier in 2025, you'd be... kind of right. I certainly don't plan to have four massive projects like this year—just two big ones and a little one. Now that the skeleton of the tarot journal is done, after all, it won't be so grueling to create it for 2025 and ever year after that; I'll update it, make additions, listen to user feedback, all of that, but it won't be the same as literally building every page from scratch like I did this year.
That said, those two works in question are: the sequel for Where the Gods Left Off and the sequel to Discovering Christian Witchcraft. I know I said I'd throw a cookbook in here in previous announcements, but honestly, the more I think about that, the more I really want to have a cookbook that is full of big, full color pictures and other fun things—and that'll take a long while to organize, a very long while. (Maybe a recipe booklet or recipe pages are in order, but I'd rather not make things just for the sake of making them, y'know?)
And with the way the world is going right now... the world needs another Discovering Christian Witchcraft book. It needs one on the inner journey, and then after, one on the outer journey: one on community, activism, and translating all that spirituality and faith into the works that make spirituality so alive in the first place. Mimi and I are on it, and we've already got a massive list of works to read and sift through to get you that information in an easily digestible form. (Because believe you me... some of these books are the kind that take me hours just to get through ten pages. The dense, academic ones that have you reading the same paragraph four times in a desperate attempt to understand what the hell is being said.) We don't want you to have to suffer that, because this kind of information needs to be practical and accessible, not stuck in the twisting thoughts of scholars that only other scholars can decipher.
Still, look out for release dates for these two books, as well as titles, cover reveals, and more. If you haven't already sighed up for my newsletter, too, definitely do so—because that's how you'll stay up to date on everything going on.
Sara Raztresen is a Slovene-American writer, screenwriter, and Christian witch. Her fantasy works draw heavily on the wisdom she gathers from her own personal and spiritual experience, and her spiritual practice borrows much of the whimsy and wonder that modern society has relegated to fairy-and-folktale. Her goal is to help people regain their spiritual footing and discover God through a new (yet old) lens of mysticism.