2010/2011

What a crazy year. Lots of unexpected family stuff. My kitty nearly died. But we saved him. It was a very frightening month or two.

We were worried we might lose my grandfather, and after a few scary months things are looking up. I got married! Didn’t see that one coming, even though Oliver and I had been together 9 years. My little brother got married. My little sister got pregnant and is due any day now. Our house was broken into. Our neighbor’s was broken into and Oliver and I called 911 and chased the burglars. We adopted a dog.

Like I said, a crazy year.

So, my resolutions/to do list for 2010:

• revise Queen of Freaks Done! Approximately 7 times.
• write Queen of Freaks synopsis
• revise Queen of Freaks synopsis
• draft Courting Death
• revise Courting Death
• submit Courting Death Only to Writer’s of the Future, but I think it counts. It needs some editing before I submit again.
• send Queen of Freaks to betas
• revise Queen of Freaks for feedback Trunked Queen of Freaks instead of moving forward with it. It was the right move. Maybe I’ll come back to the idea some day, but I would need to rewrite the entire thing from scratch, and I just don’t have it in me currently.
• query Queen of Freaks
• draft adult urban fantasy  Began working on Feral instead. Have not completed Feral, but I have made good progress…after scrapping everything three times and starting over until I found the right story and the right starting place.
• draft 12 short stories  Just 1 completed. A half a dozen more started. I have hopes of coming back to a few of them this year.
• read 100 books  Nope. Only 34 this year. I had trouble finding things that I really fell in love with this year. My tastes were changing and it was hard to pin down what I needed in books afterwards.
• blog 200 times Ha! Try 51, plus drafts for 12 more that were about topics that it was difficult to articulate my thoughts on in a way that I was satisfied, and thus need to be revised and polished before they could be posted. Plus 2 more about Doctor Who, and 1 for the Vampire Diaries that I never posted because they felt a little too fan-girlish.

I’m not going to list all of the books I read in 2010. I’m not sure I even remember what they all are, I only wrote 34 of them down. But! I do have a few I want to gush over.

I still adore Ilona Andrews, Richelle Mead, Devon Monk, Kim Harrison, Gail Carriger, Caitlin Kittredge, CE Murphy, and Patricia Briggs. There are others I really love too, but each of those writers has a series which is a guaranteed pick-me-up, even when I feel like I’m in a reading slump, and they surely didn’t let me down this year.

New to my author/book love list this year:

Kristin Cashore: Graceling was amazing. I’ve been holding off on reading Fire until I know when Bitterblue will be out because I know I won’t be able to hold back once I start reading and will gobble it up, leaving me desperate for the next.

Robin McKinley: Don’t know how I went so long without reading her books, but started with Beauty this year and am working my way through everything else. This is pure love. I longed for these sorts of books when I was young. I really wish a librarian had put them in my hands back then.

Diana Wynne Jones: Ditto. For the number of times I’ve watched Howl’s you’d think her books would have been devoured long ago, but no. Oh, Howl, how I love thee. I’m in the middle of Fire and Hemlock.

Melina Marchetta: Saving Francesca had been sitting on my shelves for the longest time before I finally read it. Should have picked it up when I first bought it.

Suzanne Collins: Didn’t read The Hunger Games until this week. Burned through the entire trilogy in 2 days while I was sick. The Hunger Games was definitely my fave of the three.

And, to finish up, my resolutions for 2011:

• write at least 250 words per day and keep bumping up the word count as the weeks pass until I find the comfortable daily output to aim for that stretches what I can do without the quality suffering because I’m pushing for a higher word count
• read 100 books
• at least 10 of them nonfiction
• at least 10 of them classics
• at least 15 of them not YA or fantasy
• finish drafting Feral
• draft sekrit project YA
• write at least 6 short stories
• blog  3 times/week
• walk at least 5 hours/week
• make a budget
• sort through all of Oliver and I’s stuff and throw out/donate anything we no longer need
• organize what’s left
• buy some plastic drawers and organize all my different craft supplies in them
• make a point of getting together with my family at least once a month
• make a point of getting together with Oliver’s family at least once a month
• sort/sell/giveaway our comic collection. just do SOMETHING with them.

And now I’m off to finish cleaning our bedroom and organizing the clothes and all the belongings in it. I’m already well on my way towards the getting rid of what we don’t need and organizing what’s left. I hope to be done by the end of the week. And it will certainly make moving easier in a couple months.