This is a year that sucked for a lot of people. In many ways, for me, too, the world is a darker, scarier place–
Oh crap, that’s how I began last year’s post. Um. Well. Still true?
This was also a year for some personal achievements, so I can’t condemn all of 2017 to the trash heap. Here’s where I’ve been and what I did.
Last Year’s Resolutions
For 2017 I wanted to complete edits on Lioness and query agents. This was a partial success. I felt a lot of resistance to editing, and I’m embarrassed to admit I avoided it for much of the year. But in the last days of 2017, I “finished” structural edits and send the story to my beta readers. I use the scare-quotes because editing feels like something that’s never finished; Lioness wasn’t so much released to my beta readers as allowed to escape. But: progress.
Write four new short stories. Partial success. I wrote three flash-length stories as part of the Codex flash contest, and started work on two (theoretically short) pieces. Two of those (“The Mirrors of Her Eyes” and “Granny Hubbard vs. the Giant Slime”) have been edited and sent out to a few markets.
Participate in one of the Codex flash fiction challenges. Success! I participated in Flash, Savior of the Universe (FSOTU) 2017, the winter flash contest on Codex, and wrote a story for all three rounds. And my scores weren’t totally shitty!
Read 50 new-to-me short stories. Success! Even though I read the last one on December 31st 🙂 Sam J. Miller’s “Bodies Stacked Like Firewood,” “The Dauphin’s Metaphysics,” by Eric Schwitzgebel, and “Scattered Along the River of Heaven,” by Aliette de Bodard, were among some of my favorites.
Conclusion: In my Year of the Short Story, I discovered… I don’t enjoy short stories as much as I enjoy novels. It has something to do with immersion — I value spending time in a beautifully crafted SFF world, but by the time I get into a short story, it dumps me out into the real world again. Given all this, maybe I shouldn’t spend my limited writing/reading time focusing on them? A fine thing to discover halfway through the year, but there you go.
Other Cool Stuff Wot I Did in 2017
- Read 25 books
- Wrote 12 substantive blog posts (i.e. not the accomplishments posts)
- Visited England and attended Kaleidoscopic Consequences
- Attended the Stratford Festival with my mom
- Got my druid Wodehouse to 110 in WoW
- Completed Nighthold (normal and heroic), Tomb of Sargeras (normal and heroic), and Antorus (normal) with my guild in WoW
- Did a road trip through Western Massachusetts with EB
- Did a road trip (with a stay at a theme hotel) in New Hampshire with EB
- Finally framed the 10-year anniversary gift I made for Matt
- Completed season one of Zombies Run!
- Ran my first 5k race
- Completed two developer self-directed days: one on CSS Shapes and clipping/masking, and a second on CSS Grid layout
- Visited ten places on Atlas Obscura I hadn’t been before
- Replaced the lamp globes in my upstairs bathroom
- Started playing a new boffer larp campaign, Shadowvale
- Finished PCing my first boffer larp campaign, Fifth Gate (Silverfire)
- Staffed three Tales from the Cotting House events
- NPCed five Madrigal 3 events
- Played in four theater-style larps
What I Want to Do in 2017
As I wrote about in “Moving into my own life”, my theme for 2018 is going to be habitat. As I wrote there:
So, starting in 2018, I am moving — into my own life. I am going to do the things you do when you move: go through my crap and getting rid of what no longer suits, make our house into a comfortable place to live, and keep it that way through regular maintenance. I am going to make it the sort of place I love to spend time, instead of the kind of place I dread to come home to.
I’m still working out a concrete plan on how I will tackle these goals, going through each room of my house. And of course, I have the “Habitat” section of my 101 goals in 1001 days list to refer to.
What else? By itself, that could keep me busy for a year! But I feel remiss if I don’t hit on some other aspects of my life.
Writing: There are more edits ahead first, but by the end of 2018, I’d like to have queried a non-zero number of agents. I would also like to do Pitch Wars or another pitch contest.I will continue to submit my short pieces to markets, until hell won’t have ’em, etc.
Reading: My Goodreads Challenge for 2018 is 30 books. I really admire those folks who read 100+ books per year, but I, dear reader, am not one of them.
Health: I intend to continue to run and mostly stick with a healthy, low-GI diet. I’ll try to take my vitamin D and use my sunlamp more regularly.
Family: I will spend time with my mom, who has a terminal lung disease. I’m already planning to go to the Stratford Festival with her in 2018, her health permitting.
And that’s about it. But most importantly:
The last photo of 2017. I did, in fact, pet more kitties this year.
