Let’s look back at 2013, shall we?

I don’t really do new year’s resolutions, since I find it’s an exercise in frustration, and it can often trigger depressions when I find I have a whole list of things not accomplished. I do like to look back at a year and try to sort out if it was a good year or not. And looking back on this one, it wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t all that I was hoping for, either.

Let’s start with the good stuff. I wrote a lot, even getting out a five-book series in just four months. I also wrote some other novels and novellas that have been sitting on the back burner a while, and as the year closes, I’m near the middle of a fourth Sex Doll novella, which I THINK will close out the series.

I read 33 books this year, a goal I’ve been tracking on Goodreads since 2010, when I’d read 32 books. At a certain point this year, I was complaining about not reading as many books as I did when I was a kid, but then someone pointed out what should have been obvious, that the size of the books I read now are a lot longer. I used to read stuff that was maybe 150-200 pages, and now most of my reads are in the 490-600 page range. So yeah, it makes sense that I can’t read as many. I am happy that I found time to read between torture sessions with the muse, and this year, I enjoyed a lot more of the books I read, which I attribute to having slightly better luck in picking books this year. Last year it seemed like I’d just gotten so picky that nothing could please me. But this year, I’ve read a number of books that I could not put down once I started them.

I did the garden again, and I got a decent batch of food out of most of what I planted, not including the tomatoes. Still no luck getting them to produce without having some kinds of problems, and no clue what I’m dong wrong there. But everything else grew…well, no there were the carrots, too. They were technically from last year’s garden, but they survived the winter, and I was thinking, “Man, these are gonna be huh-yuge!” But no, they were wimpy, scraggly thin roots, and most were so tough they were inedible. But yeah, everything else grew fine, and the exercise outside did me some good.

And then there’s the health report, which was also relatively good. I’ve had fewer relapses, and fewer episodes of depression. I still had both, and sometime around the end of summer, I started going through a massive spike in fatigue attacks. The muse might have had something to do with that, but even on days when I did nothing at all, I could just drop, and my whole body got sore like I’d been working out at the gym. These fatigues were so bad that I’d even get brain fuzzed, leading to the voices in my head playing word salad. At that point, all I could do was lay down and wait for my brain and body to get back online.

The voices…I talk about this in abstract terms so often online that people must think I’m joking. But yes, I hear voices, and not all of them are nice. They bring images sometimes to back up their ideas, and I know they’re there, and I don’t listen to them. Still this year, they’ve been right pissy things, always complaining about shit I don’t care about, or about old shit I don’t want to think about anymore. That in turn sends some other voices off into really violent suggestions, along with the images to hint at what their plans would look like near the end. Dealing with those voices makes me cranky, and about the only way I could deal with it is to stay offline and let them whine in isolation. Crazy is no fun, people.

And then there were the nightmares. Three solid fucking months of nightmares, which also forced me to stay offline and avoid stress. They did finally go away, and most of my dreams these days have been pretty nifty. There have been a few triggering dreams, the kind that make me wake up feeling agitated. The last happened on Christmas day, but I fortunately got over it quickly. The real trouble with dreams is, you’re never the writer or the director, just the audience to a film made up by the lizard part of your brain. So sometimes they dredge up really old stuff, the kind I don’t want to think about anymore, and they dress it up with newer surroundings. But it’s still the same old shit, and it hurts to feel pulled back into hell just because my subconscious is ready for a trip down memory lane.

The sum of all these issues is, I spent a lot more time offline, and without doing promotions, my sales slipped a lot. I’d reached record heights in spring, and I thought at the time that I would have a release ready every month up to January. If sales had kept up, I probably still would have been able to stick to that plan. But they dropped to single digits in the fall, and winter hasn’t been much better, even after I started promotions back up.

I try to look at it as a two-fold problem. One is, I stopped promoting, and two is, I’ve seemingly run up my supply of readers in my current social networking. I’m a niche writer, and lots of people overlook me, either because of who I am, or because they think they know what kinds of books I write and dismiss me. So to get anyone reading my stuff is something of a miracle, something I’ve said and written over and over this year. It’s still true, too. There’s millions of books out there, old and new, and hundreds of thousands of new books coming out every year. With all those choices, somehow someone still chooses me? Miracle. Small-scale, sure, but still a legitimate miracle. So yeah, it does suck to sit down at the end of this month and only count up five sales. But then I think how lucky I am that I even have that number. And then it’s not so bad.

I got reviews and ratings from some readers, and most of them were positive. Reviews, though, are like some kind of harmful upper. The high that comes with them doesn’t last very long, and in the absence of more, the withdrawal symptoms included sweaty palms, grinding teeth, and random paranoia episodes. I always feel like I want more, and logically, I know it’s the same thing as the sales. What I get is a miracle, especially considering how much of it is positive reviews. Even the books I knocked off as goofy diversions have had good reviews. And a few followers keep me updated on their progress through my catalog. The tweets are often just an update and a quick comment, but on days when I’m struggling with review withdrawals, they do tend to pick me back up.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a complete year for me without offending someone, and this year, I knocked a grand slam number of Twitter folks into hysterics. I’m STILL discovering people who’ve blocked me through random RTs. They appear in my timeline and it’s only then that I find I can’t pass them on because I’m blocked, and I’ve never even talked to those people. That’s how far out on the offense radar I went. Oh well, I only had…three epic meltdowns this year. Have to mark that down as a positive on account of it being an improvement from previous years.

Laying out some of my problems like that, it really does feel like a bad year. But I read many good books, and I played some fun games. I’ve had conversations on Twitter with random people and covered an insane amount of topics. I wrote a huge number of books, and hey, for a complete nobody, I still manage to get sales on my writing. It could also be called a good year because I’ve had worse problems in previous years, and this year, thus far, I have yet to get one of these nasty colds everyone is so fond of passing around. Even my allergies seemed to settle down more this year.

2013 was a mixed bag, but it was a bag with more good than bad in it, and I’m letting it go without many regrets. Having said that, man, I sure hope 2014 brings better sales, a few more reviews, and at least one award nomination that I don’t have to pay for to nominate myself. I don’t even have to make the short list, yo. Just a nomination, is all I’m hoping for. And no, these are not resolutions. Because if I didn’t get them, that would just lead to binge drinking and drunk tweeting while ringing in 2015.

Kidding aside, I hope 2013 was merciful to you and yours, and that 2014 will be a great year for all of you. And thank you as always for reading my stuff.