Resolve

January 3

I love the New Year. I enjoy the opportunity to reflect on a reasonably-long stretch of my life, to assess my accomplishments and failures, and to make course-corrections as necessary. So, here are my resolutions from last year, with assessments in brackets:

• Finish writing a novel this year. [La! The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl! And crits are starting to roll in...]

• Find a job I don't hate and keep it for more than six months. [I've been at A Certain Magazine for 17 months now. Don't hate it.]

• Be nicer to my body. [Eh. The eternal struggle.]

• Become more fiscally responsible. [I have been much, much better at this lately, though we still have too many emergency-expenses to actually save money. Sigh.]

• Cook more, eat out less. [Yes, we've been better at this]

• Keep in better touch with my family. [Hollow cough.]

• Write better stories. [I wrote "Romanticore" and "Bottom Feeding" (though the latter was barely written this year) which are, at least, more what I want to be writing, if not actually better.]

• Sell more stories. [Heavens, yes.]

• Don't get so bogged down in the details of trying to sell more fiction that I forget the joy that the writing process gives me. [Yes. I've mellowed considerably, I think because I've made enough decent sales that I no longer feel such a desperate need to be validated.]

• Read more non-fiction. Fill the more gaping holes in my knowledge of history and philosophy. [The other eternal struggle. I'm certainly doing directed research...]

• Take my poetry more seriously. Try to sell a chapbook, try to market my work more aggressively. [Hrm. Well, didn't sell a chapbook, and didn't really concentrate that much harder on poetry. So this resolution will have to carry over. I did sell a lot of poems, at least.]

• Make Speculon a tremendously well-respected venue for poetry. [Heh. The less said about this the better. But now I edit Star*Line, which is quite well-respected, and I don't think my being at the helm has lessened that...]

• Be a better boyfriend. Be more patient, less defensive, easier to talk to. [I think I accomplished this. Heather and I have had a great year.]

• Become a better book reviewer. I'll never be as smart or articulate at John Clute or Nick Gevers, but I can be better than I am now. [I accomplished this, too. And I think Gary K. Wolfe is the reviewer I respect the most, now.]

• Try to sell reviews somewhere other than A Certain Magazine. [Yup. To Strange Horizons, anyway! And I think I do enough reviewing, now. I like it, but it takes time away from fiction...]

• Organize my books, which are currently in disordered piles all over the place. [Did it. They're alphabetical, even! The organization is beginning to fray around the edges, because it's been a few months since we first did it, but it's much better than it used to be.]

• Visit every used bookstore in a twenty-mile radius. [Absolutely failed. Too many bookshops, not enough money/time.]

• Water my cactus more regularly. (I know. It's a cactus. Even so, I don't water it enough.) [My cactus died. Sigh. Now I have a flytrap to care for, and it's not dead, yet...]

So, that's how I did last time -- not badly, I suppose. This year's resolutions include the ones above that still need effort, and:

• Put out an issue of Flytrap.

• Sell my new novel, or else get rejected a lot trying. Put some real effort into the process this year!

• Do more collaborations with Heather.

• Get an agent. Preferably a good one.

• Write a novel, probably the Frog book.

• Get married, or, at least, make all possible plans for a wedding.

I daresay that's enough...

Now, for a few stats: I don't really keep track of how many stories I sell, but looking over my biblio page, it looks like 14 or 15 -- about one a month, which isn't bad. I'm not sure how many I wrote this year, either, honestly -- maybe 10? And some of those are crappy and will never even be revised. Not as good a year for short stories as 2001, but I mostly worked on my novel in the back half of 2002. I sold a lot of poems, too, and reviews. Made the equivalent of two-month's day-job pay just from writing this year (which might sound impressive, but you don't know how little I get paid...). I actually do know approximately how many books I read this year, because I made a list to help me with the upcoming Tropism awards: 110 (at least). That doesn't include the myriad short stories, articles, poetry chapbooks, etc. I read -- that's novels, and collections & anthologies I read cover-to-cover. It's more than thought; I'm pleased to have read so much, and most of the books were good! And, as you can see over on the right, I wrote over 200,000 words this year, which is satisfactory, though it could, of course, be better.

As for non-writing reflections on the year... well. I lost a couple of friends for some rather stupid reasons -- but the kinds of friends you can lose for such stupid reasons are not, probably, the kinds of friends you want to have anyway. Still sad. My car died, which sucks. That's about it for bad news, though -- all in all, it could have been a lot worse.

For good news, I got engaged to a wonderful woman, and we decided to start a 'zine together. Heather has enriched my life in more ways than I can possibly enumerate here.

2002 was a good year. Here's hoping 2003 is better still.

Words written since February 1, 2002: 204,600

Words written since last entry:
Eh.

Buy Floodwater via PayPal! $5, includes shipping. Or send a check payable to Heather Shaw to the PO Box below.