I know, it’s not the end of 2014 yet, but I will be Christmasing merrily away for much of the rest of the year, and then collapsing in a heap. So it seemed like a reasonable time to talk about this year in writing.
My bibliography tells me that I have twelve things with 2014 publication dates, which seems like a goodly number. (Right now it actually has thirteen things with 2014 publication dates, but one of them is a tyop it is on my list to fix.) I appeared in new places! I reappeared in old places! I made my first invitational anthology sale! Hurrah stories! They are:
The Young Necromancer’s Guide to Re-Capitation (co-written with Alec Austin), On Spec, Winter
Ask Citizen Etiquette, Asimov’s, February
The Suitcase Aria, Strange Horizons, February
The Stuff We Don’t Do, Nature, April
The Salt Path, Apex, June
Maxwell’s Demon Went Down to Georgia, Nature Physics, June
Calm (co-written with Alec Austin), Analog, September
Emma Goldman: A Biography for Space Aliens, Daily SF, October
The New Girl, Apex, November
Boundary Waters, Nature, November
A House of Gold and Steel, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, December
The Hanged Woman’s Portion, Not Our Kind, December
Also I wrote a lot more stuff. I didn’t finish any novels this year, but I worked on some that will pay off next year, I think. And so far–this is one that could easily change depending on my mood and everyone else’s mood at the lake house with the in-laws in the last week of December–I’ve finished twenty short stories. Which is quite a few short stories, actually, even for me. I looked, and that’s how many I wrote last year, too, but I don’t plan on doing it every year. Also I have more short stories waiting to come out (six) than I did last year at this time, so that’s good.
(One of the things about that is that I calibrated how many short stories I should have in circulation at any time back when I was not quite as good at short stories. So I was selling a smaller percentage of them. Still, I am adjusting what “a reasonable number of stories out in circulation” means for me. Some things are a process.)
Last year I talked about having the spigot, just being able to write and write and write. This year I did not have the spigot turned on. And I wrote anyway, and it was good, and other people liked the stuff I wrote, and I liked the stuff I wrote, and I even had fun with the stuff I wrote. So that is its own kind of victory: to be there, to be hanging in and doing it and making the art work, when it’s not in free flowing amazing mode.
Also I led the Fourth Street beginning writers’ seminar, which I will do again next year, and ideally next year I will do it when I am not recovering from such a bad virus. (As I said at the time: on Wednesday of that week, I was still so sick that we had to put a stool in the shower for me to sit on, because standing up long enough to shower was still too much for me–not because of the vertigo, because I was just that sick and weak. On Friday morning I went to lead the writers’ seminar. I think it went well! I just think it can go better next year when I am not quite that wretched.) And I have learned a great many things this year about process and about people in one’s writing life and about a great many other things, so I will have different things to say next year. So that will be good too.
So onwards.