Happy New Year! Welcome 2011!
Had a wonderful Christmas with the in-laws. We managed to miss the worst of the weather driving up to Illinois. Plenty of snow up north, but the skies held off on dumping it down while we were actually on the road. Heard Atlanta had its first white Christmas on record. Just as glad to have missed that traffic chaos.
And celebrated my birthday with the hubby by seeing Tangled—sweet and funny, but I liked How to Train Your Dragon better.
Received a slew of fabulous prezzies, including quite a few accessories for my Droid: a 32GB microSD card+USB reader, a spare battery+charger, and a desktop dock. And the hubby also got me an iconnect wireless data station and a terabyte external drive. Finally I have space (I’ve been scrounging for space on my laptop, constantly getting those “running out of drive space” warnings, for the last…ever) and it’s all wireless. So very shiny. The hubby also got me a new laptop battery, so my poor lil VAIO can now survive without having to be tethered to an outlet. My ultraportable laptop is mobile again!
Yeah, it was a chock-filled-with-tech sort of Christmas. We are geek.
‘Course I didn’t get any writing done over the holidays. I’ve got one short story deadline rushing up headlong and hoping to get Demon Queller revised and in shape before Georgia’s 2011 legislative session starts. Urk.
Feels like I’m perpetually racing to catch up and running in slow motion…oh, wait, it’s ’cause I am. You’d think I’d be used to it by now and would quit marveling and just put my head down and do it. And yet…
It was quite a year for me, writing-wise. The highest point, of course, was winning the Nebula Award for “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast.” That was unbelievably amazing, astounding, awesome, and all those other words which mean “shiny-beyond-shininess.” Wow.
It was a year for warm-and-fuzzy feelings of writerly validation in general. I was also named Bards and Sages Author of the Year and was a finalist for the Hugo, British Science Fiction, and WSFA Small Press awards.
I also, finally, finally managed to finish the novel. Finally.
On the publication front, my work appeared in three new foreign languages–Spanish, Italian, and Czech–which brings my total to seven. And I had stories published in several anthologies, including The Dragon and the Stars and Triangulation: End of the Rainbow as well as podcast in both PodCastle and Escape Pod.
I slacked off on making new year resolutions last year as, in the traditional way of such things, I can’t seem to keep them. But since I did manage to finally fulfill a big milestone with the novel completion, I thought I’d get back on the horse. So okay:
• Finish final revisions of Demon Queller and get it out to market. I’m tempted to resolve to: “sell it” but it’s always a bad idea to make a resolution which is dependent upon someone else. So I shall cross my fingers and hope to find it a good home. But the important thing is getting it out there.
• Write the sequel to Demon Queller: Dragon Queller. Yeah, I know. I finish one novel and suddenly I’m all: “Just gonna write another one, no biggie, la la la.” 😉
• Write more short stories. The number of stories I produced this year really dropped, due largely to the amount of time I spent working on Demon Queller. But surely I can figure out how to write both a novel and short stories contemporaneously? Maybe? Please? Well, it’s a pretty thought.
And there you go. Am I being overly ambitious-unto-delusional? Probably. But that’s what New Year’s resolutions are all about, isn’t it?
Keona likes the little cartoon of you at your laptop.