The Lost Princess of Oz

The latest Oz post is up at Tor.com - this one about The Lost Princess of Oz. Deceptive rulers and gun toting teddy bears! Yay!

Still exhausted from last week. I do have some end of the year posts kinda rattling around my head, but I'm not entirely sure I'll get to them by the end of the year. So they might become beginning of the year posts, or the sort of posts that just float untold and unfinished in my head, which happens more often than you might think. Meanwhile, the New Year's Eve message from the Little One is that you should all spend more time in the coming year sleeping, seeking out sunny places, eating fine foods like tuna, and cuddling with the ones you love, and making the ones you like sneeze a lot.

That message might even have a bit of wisdom in it. Might.

Since everyone else is doing it:

So, yeah, it's the last day of the year. The day when all Good Bloggers try to sum up the year while contemplating the later food and champagne. In this case, amplified by the apparent need to sum up an entire decade.

Er, the year first.

The year, not surprisingly, started with me yelling at Cigna (my "health insurance" company), and even less surprisingly, ended with me yelling at Cigna ("Cigna! Raising the blood pressure of our clients, one member at a time!"). One of my chief goals for 2010 is "to spend less time arguing with Cigna," a resolution which will be made easier by the fact that I am not going to be covered by them anymore. (Such a statement, of course, implies that they were, indeed, COVERING ME in the first place.)

Between these Cigna moments were many other things that sparked up what I had assumed would be a rather dull year into an unexpectedly dramatic one. I survived getting hit by a large truck. The trike was then stolen, leading to an exciting cop chase during which trained cops estimated that I am in my early 20s, followed by a considerably less exciting day in juvenile court during which trained attorneys estimated my age more correctly and more legal wrangling, resulting in his incarceration until 2014, not so much because of the trike but because of a long string of other charges. My kinder side (yes, I have one; I just don't use it that much) is hoping that he gets the therapy and help he needs.

And many of you, at the beginning of this year, assured me that riding a trike would be dull.

The year had more to it than this, of course. It had shuttle launches; the occasional concert/outing; some rather good movies (Up, Star Trek, and to my genuine surprise, Inglorious Basterds, the only Quentin Tarentino movie I have enjoyed); some utterly dreadful movies (GI Joe, Ninja Assassin); bonding with friends; silliness; zebras; unexpected ostriches and peacocks; Leverage, Lost; not putting stickers on the cane; books, more books; various publications but not enough actual writing, which deserves but probably won't get its own post since focusing on my own failures (and this is a bad one – I did not make any of my not particularly ambitious writing goals) is pretty painful; far too much information about the sex lives of famous athletes; far more music; sudden moments of dazzling insight; accepting the damn wheelchair; feeling the planet shift and move; fatigue; doctors; fuzzy blankets; excellent conversations; painful conversations; and some of those moments that you hold deep in your soul, to ponder over, to treasure in the dark hours of the night, or the worst hours of the day, when you remember to remember them.

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All this said, since August, my life has been held in an odd limbo, where various things that were supposed to happen, were planned to happen, in the fall, could not happen.

And I'm still there, waiting.

That waiting makes it intensely difficult to summarize this year as good or bad; it's a year of holding. And I'm simply not used to holding. I've certainly had worse years (one reason I'm not jumping on the summarize the decade bandwagon is that would require revisiting 2006, a year that seriously needs to be forgotten). I've certainly had better years. But rarely has it been so difficult to say where I was in the beginning, and where I am now, although if the past five years have taught me anything, it is that life – at least, my life – is not going to be travelling a predictable, planned path, perhaps interspersed by these holding moments.

So I'm not going to make any predictions for 2010. Except to say that I suspect chocolate will be involved somewhere. Because isn't it always?

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All of which is to say that my best summary of the year is still probably this, which in the end, was also my favorite publication of the year. I easily could have just posted that again, and left all of this out. But then we couldn't have revisited the cop chase. Hmm.

Publications!

So my decade review was sorta hopping along until I slammed into 2001, and thought, even apart from the terrorists, how do I sum that up in a paragraph?

So, 2009 writing/publication summary first!

Publication wise, 2009 was a good year. I got to try some experimental writing in various formats – twitter stories for Thaumatrope, Nanoism, and Outshine; and a flash fiction/serial tale in Innsmouth Free Press. I finally managed to get into Farrago's Wainscot and Southern Fried Weirdness only to see both publications close. (I want to assure other editors: I honestly don't kill publications deliberately.) The darker side of fairy tales crawled out in Cabinet des Fees, Ideomancer, and Goblin Fruit.

About that poem: that is one of a set of 22 (or 24) poems that I have called fairynelles – fairy tales retold using the terzanelle format. I adore terzanelles – well, let's face it, if it's a structured poetic form, I love it – villanelle, sestina, paradine, triolet, baroline, pantoum, sonnet, whatever. Six have been published so far, and another four or five are forthcoming in 2010.

Which is lovely, but looking them over reminded me that this is a series that really should be read as just that – a series. (Especially because the Thumbelina one in particular does not work well as a standalone poem.) Which means that one minor goal of 2010 needs to be assembling these as some sort of chapbook, instead of just talking about assembling these as some sort of chapbook. Hmm.

Anyway.

I nearly became a contributing writer at Everyday Weirdness. And yes, Mr. benpayne, someone did, indeed, pick up that sandwich story. I am still blaming you.

As always, reader responses surprised me. A reader favorite was Choking on Red Flowers, a story I still can't remember writing (if my Excel tracking sheet is correct, and it might not be, it was written during a time when I was massively otherwise occupied, but you'd think I'd remember something.) I can't say that I have any strong feelings about it one way or another. Some of you objected to Playing With Spades, or said you didn't get it; others identified it as their favorite story. Others loved The Otter, which I had not expected, since the people who loved this one were the same people who told me to stop creeping them out with last year's The Well. My best reviewed story was, to my genuine surprise, "The Fuddles of Oz," largely because I'd assumed no one but me (and possibly camillealexa) was going to read it, and partly because it was a tale that I pretty much just tossed out.

However, by far the most surprising reader reaction came in response to Gravestones. girliejones summed up everyone's reaction here: " I enjoyed her experimentation with form and the piece made me laugh - that's rare for a punchline to work for me in a short piece.">

:: head on desk ::

Completely not the reaction that I was going for.

It was a salutary reminder that sometimes, what I write – or, more specifically, what I think I write – is not what people actually read. The cheering news here is that "Gravestones" was actually written quite some time ago, so I may have improved somewhat since then. Meanwhile, I'm also glad that everyone at least seems to have liked it. Quite probably more than you would have had I achieved my desired effect.

Some stats for the curious: Not counting the Cthulhu stories or the Twitter fiction, it took an average of 60 days for my stories/poems to be accepted – although that number is somewhat skewed by "Gravestones" which Hub Fiction spent some time considering. The stories/poems were submitted about 3.3 times, on average, before acceptance, which I think is pretty good. (This number will, however, probably increase in 2010, because I've shifted my focus to pro markets – not a bad thing, but definitely a way to generate more rejection slips.) Most of the editors who accepted me were male, but that number is again skewed by Everyday Weirdness.

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But if publications went well, the actual writing...decidedly didn't. I missed every single one of my not particularly ambitious writing goals this year, goals I'd already lowered to accommodate for illness and other issues. It was particularly distressing since, as I've noted elsewhere, I can and do write quickly – it's just that I had vast periods of not writing at all. Some months were admittedly better than others – my Excel tracking sheet notes that I can be kind to myself for February and December. But other months (hi, June) were just...really not good.

I could list the reasons, but this would just frustrate me further. Time to see what happens in 2010. I have a lot of work to do to catch up with all of you.

But not tonight - I am being summoned for food and other entertainments. Have a marvelous New Year's Eve, all of you. (And for those that already had it, Happy New Year!)