Hey ho, squiders. How are you? I’m attempting to re-upload one of my SkillShare classes, but the videos are uploading blurry and I can’t figure out why. The originals aren’t blurry, and half the ones that got uploaded are fine. Very frustrating, I don’t have time for this crap.
Working on Chapter 18 of the revision. (There’s thirty chapters, for reference, though I think I may need to add a new one in.) That’s going fine except I’m in an occasional phase I go through where all my sentences sound stupid even though they’re actually fine. Good times. Halfway through one of the other people’s critiques for the mini-marathon.
Have lost track of who I still need to get Christmas presents for, but I hope to wrap some later which should help me remember.
Anyway, let’s do our final WriYe blog prompt for the year.
Sum up your year for us.
It’s December, so it’s That Time. And it makes for easy blog topics at this point every year.
2023 has been, well, very stressful. There was the flood in May and the tornado in June, our furnace died in…Sept? We had to figure out which middle school to send the bigger, mobile one to for next year (good news–he got into the one we wanted. Bad news–no bus.) which is more difficult than usual since he’s 2e. Someone ran into my car in a parking lot two weeks ago. There’s major personnel changes happening at work, which may affect my own role. Both small, mobile ones have had two emergencies this year (one that actually required an ambulance).
I’m just…I’m tired.
Writing wise, well, I hunted down my goals for the year. I did think I was going to get completely through my Book 1 revision, and perhaps another revision, or two! Plus putting together submission materials and actually submitting them. (Here on the blog I thought three whole revisions and submission materials, plus something new for Nano. At WriYe I only committed to two, with the third optional, and then outlining a whole series, revising the first book of that, and THEN writing something new for Nano. On my spreadsheet I had four revisions in the wings.)
(Apparently I forgot how long it takes me to revise. Like, seriously, what was I thinking? Ah, the optimism of late December/early January.)
I also was going to release my novella Deep and Blue (originally released in serial installments), which I did not do but could do pretty easily. I’ll move that to early next year and hopefully remember to do it this time.
I also wrote Across Worlds with You in April, which was not on my list of goals and which has been releasing serially since June, and I sold two short stories.
As for the revisions, well, Book 1 is going well. We’re over halfway done, I’ve been getting feedback on it which is generally positive and has definitely helped me make it better (though maybe slowed the progress down a bit), and I can see the end in sight. I can’t be too sad about it not being done yet. It will be done eventually. And hopefully this is the last major revision I ever have to do on it, though that, too, is sad in its own way.
(There’s always a bit of sadness at the end of a project, a feeling of “what now?” And since I’ve been working on Book 1 on and off for twenty years, I imagine it will hit harder than usual.)
So, hoorah, 2023.
And I shall withhold judgment on 2024 until we get there. Just in case.
Because the last time I was really excited about the possibility of a new year, it was 2019, going into 2020, and we all know how that went.
All right, squiders, see you later!
