Year-End Wrap-Up (How Did This Happen?)

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So, as we are all painfully aware, we just days away from the end of 2017. Hence, I’m going to finish up this calendar page with a recap of all kinds of stuff I did in the last 12 months.

Okay, not really. Because although I know I was very busy, I cannot remember 89% of what I actually did. My guess is I must’ve been even busier than I realized, which is why so much of it is a blur.

Well, there are some things I can concretely tell you:

I set my Goodreads challenge at 20 books, and somehow managed to read 68.
At last count, my blog was up to 240 followers, and Twitter had climbed to 195.
I published not one, not two, but three (!) books.

Also, White Fang started high school, and Muffin started preschool, and believe me, this was a big deal.

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Yes, I went from just being a blogger who was frantically trying to finish a novel someday, to being a writer who had not only finished a novel but had it printed.

And it was getting pretty well-received, which really made my year. That led to boosting my confidence high enough to start working on the immediate sequel.

And, I shared some of my short stories and flash fiction on the blog, and that went over pretty well. So I decided to put the major ones together in an anthology.

My Goodreads page rather quickly went from being just a reader to being an author with a bibliography.

This is really such a huge thing; sometimes I still can’t believe it.

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There’s a massive rush in walking into your local library and seeing something you wrote on the shelf.

So, apart from that… Hmm, did anything else happen in 2017?

Oh, yes — I won NaNoWriMo for the second year in a row, and I gave a talk on self-publishing to a small group at said local library.

The latter will most likely lead to future engagements (huzzah!).

Here’s how I felt about the former:

NaNoWriMo was brutal this year. One, I hadn’t completely finished my last edits for Volume 2, and was, in fact, trying to do those on a few days here and there in November, around my NaNo project. (This is highly not advised; I don’t recommend attempting it to anyone.)

Then I discovered (after writing nearly 39,000 words on my NaNo draft) that I didn’t like the way the story was going at all and would probably end up scraping it entirely.

But after coming that far, the idea was just loathsome. So, I decided to be a NaNo “rebel.” Since I wrote brand new 4,000 + words in the final edits of Volume 2 between November 2nd and somewhere around the 18th, I included those in my tally. Then I wrote two potential first chapters for How To Be A Savage at roughly 2500 words each, and (praise the Lord) I was done.

All of this has made me seriously question whether I want to participate in NaNo next year. But, thankfully, that’s 11 months away.

In other, non-writing things — as already mentioned, I did manage to read a lot this year. More than I’d read in a 12-month span since well before Muffin was born. To be fair, I owe a lot of that to him, since now he gets regular bedtime stories (in fact he grows quite concerned if we suggest skipping one night), and while we also re-read a ton with him, I also get to try new picture books that I hadn’t read with White Fang.

And, oh, yeah, if you’re reading 10 new titles a month to a small child, that certainly helps advance that progress bar on Goodreads.

Most of the YA/MG selections I chose were, however, sadly disappointing. There were some real gems as well (happily). Some of my top favorites for 2017 (regardless of publication year) included:

The Beast of Talesend, The Tomb of the Sea Witch, and The Stroke of Eleven by Kyle Robert Shultz
Finding Audrey by Sophie Kinsella
Guardian Cats and the Lost Books of Alexandria by Rahma Krambo
A Matter of Temperance by Ichabod Temperance
Girl Online by Zoe Suggs

Oh, yeah, and somewhere along the way, White Fang went from watching The Thundermans and Henry Danger to watching The Big Bang Theory and The Walking Dead. Guess that has something to do with him going from being 13 to being 14.

So, now, here we are, another year gone, and definitely a lot accomplished! Here’s to a healthy, productive, and happy 2018!