Fantasy writer Olivie Blake jokingly tells me that she doesn’t know how to write a book. With eight adult fantasy novels and two YA romantic comedies under her belt — including the bestselling Atlas series — it’s a little hard to believe that. But Blake, a self-proclaimed “discovery writer,” insists.
“Every time, it gets done, and I tell myself I know how to do it,” she laughs. “But when I’m in the middle of the process, I’m like, I don’t know what I’m doing, and we’re just working through it. I’ve come to this embrace of the unknown.”
Blake is a prolific writer for an author who claims not to know how to write. She originally self-published her adult novels under a pen name, the same one she used for her fanfiction. When The Atlas Six became a viral sensation via TikTok and other social media, she got a chance to republish that novel in 2022 with Tor. The publishing house also republished her older adult fantasy, and picked up the rest of the Atlas series. At the same time, Blake published her YA debut, My Mechanical Romance, under the name Alexene Farol Follmuth.
In 2024, she published the last book of the Atlas trilogy, along with Twelfth Knight, another YA rom-com. With two new stand-alone adult fantasy books coming out in 2025 and a whole lot more planned for down the line, Blake has learned a thing or two about balancing projects, focusing on goals, and figuring out what to work on next. Since the beginning of a new year is always a time for reflection about setting new goals and considering self-improvement, Polygon reached out to Blake to ask how she stays so productive, and discuss the perks of being “a New Year’s resolution person.”
This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
Polygon: Do you set professional or creative goals for yourself as the new year approaches, or do you have different strategies?
Olivie Blake: I’m a New Year’s resolution person. I like to start the year assuming I will be my least lazy self, and then inevitably be disappointed. But I feel like in the margin for error, there is still some improvement.
[For my creative goals], I’m trying to see myself as less of an expert and more of […] I keep trying to put myself back in the feeling of being a hobbyist. I had the most fun when I was a fanfiction writer and there were no expectations. I wasn’t worried about building an audience. I just [thought], Can I do this? Or How good would it feel if I got this exactly as I’ve imagined it? And it never happens that way. But I think the feeling of approaching something like it’s the first time is falling in love all over again.
As far as professional goals, artistic careers are really hard to have a sense of measurement for. It’s hard to see that you’ve come a distance or moved up in any way. I’m at a point where I’ve been pretty prolific and some of it is a mix of new [and old self-published titles]. We’re at the point where I don’t have any more backlist titles and everything is new.
But I also would like to kind of slow things down so that I’m not so fatigued by the promotional and marketing and all the industry aspects. And so to give myself more, basically more art time, less administrative time, I’m hoping to pace down a little bit. I would like to write every day, which I have not done over the last couple of years as my career has taken off. That means that all the administrative tasks also need to be done. All the things that are very important to selling a book, but are less satisfying to me as an artist.
I’m going to try to return to — maybe we write a little less every day, but we still do it every day. Instead of taking these windows where it becomes this big marketing period, the focus will always be writing, even if that means smaller amounts every day.
How do you pick between projects, or focus on what you want to do next?
I think of it as when you’re bowling and you have the bumper guards on, that’s what my editor is for me. I’m like, Here are the ideas I’m having. Let me bounce this off you. Which one sounds like the right thing? And to be fair, I have a very privileged career, in that I have a long-standing relationship with my editor. She’s here for my career. It’s one of the ways that I always knew I wanted to be traditionally published, because I kind of need to be managed.
I’m the kind of creative that has a lot of ideas and wants to cross media and wants to do something new and different every time. So it’s helpful to have someone say, What if we did this? What if we focused on this? Or This is the strongest thing you’ve pitched. So to some extent, I leave that up to someone else, which is a huge relief for me, because I wouldn’t say I have a very good sense for what the market is. Nobody does — everyone who says they understand the market is just selling you something.
The two books I have coming out in 2025 are Gifted & Talented, which is kind of incisive about the tech industry, and then Girl Dinner, which is an interrogation of what feminism is, what contemporary feminism has become. They’re both vaguely political books. I wanted the book after that to be a little bit more of… It’s an LA Gothic, it’s more of a horror romance. I’m conscious of things that I write in similar periods having similar tones, thinking about the same things and working through them. In that sense, it was good to be like, Let’s take a little break. Let’s look at a different aspect of existence or whatever, and then we can yell about the tech industry some more after that.
How do you handle distractions, or the urge to jump to another project?
Sometimes if I’m feeling the need to work on something else, I will do [both] concurrently. I think in terms of artistic efficiency, there are some ideas that if you try to ignore them, they’ll just slow you down. This idea is what you want to be working on, what you need to be working on — that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the only thing you’re working on, and that everything else goes away.
Right now I’m working on two projects at the same time that are in different phases, so if I feel like one is not quite right for the day, I’ll do the other. But I am also pretty conscious at this point of what the best idea is. The one I should be working on is the one I’m thinking about the most, the one that I find the most interesting.
There are times when I think to keep that feeling of play or to keep that hobbyist energy of I’m doing this because I love it, I will sometimes do something shorter. It’s never a loss. That story will become something someday.
Part of it is knowing what kind of creative you are and gaming those things, I think. So I identify the priority project. Obviously having actual deadlines is helpful for this — things that actually have to get done. But also knowing that sometimes if your brain just isn’t in it, or the mood is just not right, then a quick break can be helpful. It’s like, Let’s just do this other thing. And maybe that feeling of satisfaction will keep you going on the other projects.
How do you restart yourself when you get blocked or overwhelmed?
Usually when I’m feeling blocked, when I can’t move forward in the project I’m working on, it’s because there’s a problem in the project I’m working on. Something I just wrote isn’t right. What it really is is kind of a feeling of I need to cut what I just wrote, but I feel like that will be such a loss that I don’t want to do it.
But every time without fail, if it’s a “can’t move forward” feeling, it’s because something went wrong behind me, and I need to own that and change it and fix it. Because trying to continue forward will actually be a more inefficient use of time. But if I’m feeling uninspired, which is a different feeling than blocked or overwhelmed, that’s when I would go to a smaller project, something that’s a little bit more bite-sized.
I’m bipolar, so a lot of the ways that I game my creative problems are similar to the way that I deal with my mental health. When you’re really depressed, the feeling of satisfaction is even more important, but it’s harder to achieve. So my to-do list when I’m depressed is “take a shower” or “clean this one thing.” I give myself tasks that I know I can accomplish. And so in the creative realm, it’s like, Why don’t you just come up with an idea today? Just think of something today.
That feeling of being able to cross something off helps you move forward. The feeling of I have accomplished something, that is progress or doing something that’s smaller, you can still feel like I flexed that creative muscle today.
How do you know when it’s time to let a project go?
That’s a good question. I’m trying to think of what projects I have let go. There’s not too many that I’ve left unfinished. Usually if I leave something unfinished, it’s because I came up with a better version of the idea, or I want to use the characters in a different way. I have an “unfinished” file, but I always have the sense that I’ll come back to it.
I think what’s hard is the feeling like I’m letting this go forever, I’m just dropping it and it’s gone. I prefer the sense that it’s just waiting somewhere, and I can come back to it anytime. But usually it’s because I’m being more driven by the feeling that something else is a better idea, that something else is like, Oh, I really know how to do this, or I can really work on this thing that’s specifically interesting to me.
Most of the things I don’t finish are short-story ideas where the tone is wrong. I tried to write this one story. It was meant to be sort of absurd. It was about a demon that was manifesting like Zillow, when they’re trying to buy your house. But for some reason, the tone just kept coming out so melancholy. The narrator was so sad. And I was like, This is not right. So I’ll come back to it when I figure out how to do it. I think my brain is just working on that in the background somewhere, and however long it takes, it’ll come back when the time is right.
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