Resolutions And Reflections

I love the magic of one year winding down and flowing into the next. I think we all feel it, to some extent, and we all hope that the next year will be better than the last. It’s so much easier to be conscious and aware of all the new beginnings.

My year has been pretty awesome: I got my first story published, this blog began, I met some amazing people and made some amazing connections, I even got a new (better) day job and spent two weeks in Ecuador. I finished (multiple!) short stories, I have an awesome start to a new novel (even if it won’t be finished as soon as I had hoped), and some truly fantastic and talented people critiqued another novel of mine.

All in all, I lucked out with a pretty amazing 2013. So how does 2014 get any better?

First things first, What Follows, the awesome apocalyptic fantasy anthology on Kickstarter that all three of us Inkettes are writing for, could make its funding. That would totally rock the start of the year. *Hinthinthint!*

Like most of the rest of humanity, New Year’s resolutions and I tend not to get along. But I do have goals, and goals give me something a little more concrete to strive for.

Travel goals for 2014: visit Istanbul, Turkey and my uncle who lives there with my grandmother, attend Readercon this summer and World Fantasy Con in DC this fall. (Just thinking about it makes me feel poor. But it will be so, so worth it.)

Writing goals: to be honest, I’m terrified of setting these. Mostly because the ones that immediately come to mind are highly dependent on others — things like getting an agent, selling novels and short stories. Those all require the collaboration of gatekeepers.

Three short stories and two novels sounds like a decent, if horribly ambitious, goal for the year. But I will be counting the current project as one of those novels, so that’s not as horribly daunting as it seems.

In write/work life, I aim to find a better balance, carve out more writing time, and ease back on the video-binging.

Also, I want to be better at interacting on social media. I am the type of person who will fall off the face of the planet, sometimes going years without contacting people I love. With email and social media, that happens less, but it does mean I am maybe more reticent about online interactions than some others. Living in a town with absolutely no cellular data connection doesn’t help matters, either.

When I first started thinking back, 2013 didn’t feel like a busy or productive year, but it has been. And the plans for 2014 look even more spectacular.

So how about it? What are you looking forward to in this new year?