I am continuing my self-invented tradition of posting a year-end summary of my activity on this blog an other writing activities. It reminds me that--no matter how it sometimes feels--I really have been productive. It also makes a convenient reference for things like what books I've read and movies I've enjoyed--although it's become less useful for that since I've gotten much spottier about posting media reviews and am badly behind on my book reviews. It's also interesting to see the shifts in content. Am I focusing primarily on the Lesbian Historic Motif Project?
Year-End Summary
Blog entry
As has become the custom in SFF circles, this blog is to place on record those items I will have created in 2019 that might be of interest to those nominating and voting on SFF awards. (Or any other genre of awards, for that matter, but there really isn't any equivalent culture within the lesbian literary community.) At the actual end of the calendar year, I'll do my usual "What Hath She Wrote" post that summarizes all my activities, but this one is just for the plausibly SFF items.
Novels
I’ve gotten in the habit of doing a year-end summary of my creative output, if only to convince myself that I really have accomplished something after all. It’s funny: people have a tendency to react as if I’m boasting, or making the lists to try to make other people feel bad. But for me it’s an emotional survival tool. What have I done? What do I have to show for all the time, energy (and money) I’ve poured into the projects of my heart? Am I putting those resources into things that bring return? The intangible returns are the connections and friendships I make.
It is that time of year in writingdom: the time of reminding people what fiction we have put out into the world in the current calendar year. Purely for people's curiosity and amusement, of course. Not at all with any expectation or pressure for people to consider our works for award nominations.
I am relieved to be able to report that I succeeded in having one work of fiction published in 2018:
I hope that thing about "New Year's Day is a sign of what your year will be like" thing isn't true for me, because early on the 31st I started getting that throat-tickle thing that presages a cold, and sure enough I spent the next two days in bed trying to sleep off the germs. I can't control that aspect of how my year started, so here's something I can control. I made an off-hand commitment on Twitter the other day to balance out my self-pitying "what have I done all year" posts with a positivity post about nice writing-related things that have happened this year.
I’m debating whether I want to put out any New Year’s resolutions (or my more usual irresolutions) for 2018, but the end of the year is a good time to look at my post from 2016/12/29 when I laid out my resolutions for this past year and see how they played out. My one solid resolution was: “I'm going to stop doing things just to try to impress people who don’t actually care. And one of those things is blogging five days a week.”
Last week I posted my "what have I published in 2017" list. This week is my "what else have I written" list. It's based pretty much entirely on my blog for logistical reasons. I'm writing this about the same time of year as I posted last year's version, so the survey is roughly comparable, except that in 2016 I looked at only the calendar year up to Dec 8, and this year I'm covering everything since that date.
Here I am on my usual review day without any reviews lined up (though I may do movie reivews of "Battle of the Sexes" and "Coco" at some point). So I thought I'd reprise a feature I did last year. This is not a "best of" list. This isn't even a "best of what I consumed" list. No claim is made that the items on this list have an objective value over any other items I might have placed on the list. But these are 20 items--grouped into 4 general categories of 5 items each--that I blogged about and that have stuck with me for some reason.
It's that time of year again when authors remind the reading world what they've published in that year. In the SFF world, it started as part of the annual awards season--reminding potential nominators of works they may have forgotten they enjoyed. But it's also a self-affirmation. A way of saying, "Yes, I've been productive this year. Look what I've accomplished."
Well, ok. Look what I've accomplished.
"Hyddwen" by Heather Rose Jones, published by Podcastle.org in September 2017
This post is mostly an exercise in convincing myself that I've been productive this year, even though I only had two pieces of fiction come out (and one of those was a self-published free novelette). I hope that it may have a second purpose, which is to entice people who don't follow my blog to consider doing so.
