So. Happy holidays, and I hope the year’s been absolutely wonderful to you and yours!
My year’s been ups and downs, like any good year should be. Just lately it’s been spent running myself a little ragged, rewriting things and catching up after a double-dip spell of the flu which has left me with one of those coughs that take awhile to shake off.
Next year’s going to be interesting, and you should look out for Extinction Biome, my next work with Abaddon Books, sometime around spring-ish. (It has gone under multiple names recently — finding titles is hard work!) This past year? This past year’s probably been the one in which I’ve connected with the idea of writing-as-my-industry most strongly.
It saw the publication of my first short story sale to a pro market (as defined by SFWA), Pavlov’s House — which y’all should read. It saw the publication of my novella Orbital Decay with Abaddon Books, seeing print as part of Journal of the Plague Year, which people seem to be liking a whole lot. I also finished off my first actual complete novel length work, (Dog Country, mostly about Edane who appears briefly at the end of Pavlov’s House) which I’m still shopping around for agents before I make any choices on what to do with it.
I attended more conventions than I thought possible, passing through Confuzzled on a day ticket, and making it through the two week marathon of LonCon 3 and Eurofurence almost back to back. Got to meet lots of people, had some enlightening chats with agents, saw a ton of fursuiters, and started (very tentatively) on a manifesto of why I think furry fiction is legitimately its own genre with its own distinct aesthetics and issues it approaches, rather than just being ‘SF/F with animal people tacked on’.
In many ways I’m doing quite well, even if the holiday season has left me behind on everything work-wise. This year I hit a million words written since I started writing on a properly serious basis in 2009, I’ve managed to sell more things and organize more contracts and paying work than ever before, and, in general, the holiday slow-down’s helping me realize that even if I do feel harried by work right now, I’ve managed to achieve a lot of new things this year.
So, y’know. There’s silver linings everywhere, especially if you take the time to find and appreciate them. Hope you find some silver linings of your own, and take the time to enjoy them during this year’s Christmas-to-New-Years quietude!
