A couple of housekeeping items — there’s a good chance that I’m going to be migrating hosts (or at least servers) sometime in the next month-ish, so if the site is down hopefully it will be back up soon! (Assuming you’re on kitcampbellbooks.com and not the Where Landsquid Fear to Tread blog. If you’re on the blog, please disregard.)
And I finally got myself a Bluesky account, where I have already accumulated two porn bots as followers and no real people.
December’s prompt from WriYe is: Sum up your year for us.
Ah, 2024. Where to begin.
I went into this year with one main goal: finish my revision on Book 1, get my submission materials ready, and send it out to agents.
And then I had follow-on goals, assuming that got done, and some side goals:
- RaTs (once per quarter)
- Short Story Challenge month (spring?)
- SkillShare classes (repost old class, new class late summer)
- Publish Deep and Blue (scifi)
- New novella project (November probably)
And then my usual reading goal of 50 books (currently at 46, not terribly worried, in the middle of 3 at the moment), a hope to get through my backlog of Steam games, and do some art (I think I picked 4 pictures a month, which, uh).
I finished the Book 1 revision in…August? September? Oh, July. But I continued to make changes based on the critique marathon and my in-person critique group past then.
And then I’ve procrastinated the submission material for four months. Very proud of myself. (Sarcasm, obviously.) No, actually, I’m super frustrated at myself, because the revision took a year and a half, and it’s so dumb to be failing on the last step here.
As for the side goals:
- RaTs (once per quarter) – Done! I did keep up with this, and it’s helpful to do scenes from side characters and other POVs, and I think my revision is stronger because of it. (For those who don’t know, RaTs is a writing prompt system.)
- Short Story Challenge month (spring?) – I started exactly one short story in, uh, August maybe. And I have not finished it. I did outline a bunch of stories, though! For, you know, when I have free time and am like, oh, yes, let me just pound out a dozen short stories.
- SkillShare classes (repost old class, new class late summer) – I started a class around June, made some progress in October, and there it sits. Oh, I did repost the old class in Jan/Feb.
- Publish Deep and Blue (scifi) – Done! It’s available through Amazon only at the moment.
- New novella project (November probably) – Uh, no.
I did send out a couple of longer projects to publications though, and now we wait to see if those go anywhere.
My follow-on project after Book 1 got done is called Rings Among the Stars and is a scifi horror novella. I’m in the “gather information so we can figure out what needs to change” stage on that one.
So writing for the year? Mixed. A couple of publications, a rather depressing entry into the Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off contest (I don’t think the reviewers actually looked at my book before they rejected it), the revision finally done but choking at the finish line, and a lot of needless procrastination. Yay.
I’ve enjoyed my reading for the year, though. I’ve been working through my TBRs, so I’ve liked more of the books I’ve read recently than in years past. Looking forward to doing the year end round up on that.
As for the games, well, I wish I had noted how many games I started with in the Uncategorized section on Steam. I’m currently at 65, which is definitely less, but I know I’ve also bought some new games this year which is a step backwards. I’ve at least played through half the games I kickstarted, which is good.
Steam hasn’t put out their Year in Review for 2024, which would definitely help me figure out how I’m doing here. Oh well.
Drawing has also been a mixed bag. I did finally finish the travel journal for the Scotland trip from 2022, but now I’m behind on this year’s trips (3 days left on the June trip, which was a massive 17 days long, and then I need to do the October and November trips as well), and I spent October doing character drawings (which was fun, at least). I’ve worked through a couple of library books on various subjects, and drew a fantasy map in the last week (which was also for fun, but is a useful skill to have, as the Trilogy will needs maps, like any epic fantasy worth its salt).
Speaking of which, Rings Among the Stars would also benefit from a map…
I always get to the end of the year and bemoan the fact that I was not as productive as I could have been, but it doesn’t seem to do anything to help me procrastinate less in the year to come. And I do think there’s an emotional element to the procrastination. Like, when I was younger, I was SO much more productive. But I wasn’t publishing or anything like that, I was just writing for writing’s sake.
I did take on a gift fic exchange this month to kind of counteract that. Write something just for fun, that only my friend (and maybe my other friends? I don’t quite understand who can read what) is going to read. (And even then, in my brain, I’m like, oh, what if it’s really good and then I can sell it to a magazine? which is not helping the point here.)
But yeah, the Trilogy is a big deal, and I do have a lot of emotions tied up with it since I’ve been working on it for 20 years, and I know that’s why the submission materials are going so poorly. When the submission materials are done, out it goes, to face rejection despite how much I love it and have worked on it. And that’s scary.
But we must overcome.
How did your 2024 go, squiders?
