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2011 Writing summary
Dec. 31st, 2011 10:28 amPublishing, 2011 was a very good year. I published a grand total of seven short stories – a personal record – one in Clarkesworld, one receiving a Locus Recommendation, one generating a mini firestorm of email, one that everyone seemed to love, one that I turned into a holiday present, one that almost no one seemed to read, and one that hasn't been out long enough for me to make any snarky summaries of.
Earlier this year I mentioned to an Ideomancer interviewer that I really didn't feel like an established poet at all – more like a will-o-wisp, flitting in and out of poetry publications. Eleven months later, things feel quite different, with poems in Goblin Fruit, Ideomancer, Stone Telling, Bull Spec, inkscrawl, Star Ship Sofa, Abyss and Apex, Mythic Delirium and Future Lovecraft, with multiple publications in a couple of those places. I doubt I'll ever have a year in poetry publications this good again, and I'm still a long, long way from "established," no matter how we define that term, but I think I can name myself poet with a little less of a guilt trip/imposter feeling.
On the other hand, my flash fiction publications dropped from 8 in 2010 to 0 in 2011, this largely because of the sad demise of Everyday Weirdness, gulp; just knowing that wasn't around apparently stilled my fingers from short and strange thoughts. I don't expect to be publishing much flash fiction in 2012, either, although with that said I have returned to carving out, little by little, the flash fiction fairy tale series I started three years ago now, and a couple of those tales just may be popping up in the next few months. We shall see.
But if publishing went well, writing did not. Every time I attempted to mention this, people would protest, "But you've just published –" And that was true, but I still feel that I failed at writing this year. I did write, a little, and three stories I wrote this year also crept into publication (for the curious: Sister and Bones, The Trickster, and The Woods, Their Hearts, My Blood.) But I fell far, far short of my not exactly ambitious writing goals, for any number of not very good reasons, writing less than I did in 2009 and even in 2010 (another not very productive year). Some of it, yes, I can blame on the ongoing fatigue and dizziness and the sheer amount of time it takes me to do simple things like getting groceries. But those problems impacted me in 2009 as well, when I still managed more words.
Someone somewhere – I think Tobias Buckell? – said it well: as a writer, you can't control publications, reviews and so on. Those are all nice (or, as the case may have it) not nice, as far as they go, but really not something you can control. What you can control is your actual writing, the words you create, and the number of words you write.
And that, this year, I didn't control.
Anyway. A new year starts tomorrow, and despite the melancholy tone of this post, words still remain to be caught and transformed and turned into something. We shall just see if I can find the tools to grab them.
#
Ordinarily this is where I would now torture you all with a summary or reminder of things you already read earlier this year, but I although I'm in a better mood than the above paragraphs would suggest, my lingering almost cold is still, annoyingly enough, still lingering, leaving me headachy and sniffly and sleepy, which is not exactly the best lens to view the past year in, so orange juice (the mention of which should tell people how I'm feeling) and rest it is then.
Earlier this year I mentioned to an Ideomancer interviewer that I really didn't feel like an established poet at all – more like a will-o-wisp, flitting in and out of poetry publications. Eleven months later, things feel quite different, with poems in Goblin Fruit, Ideomancer, Stone Telling, Bull Spec, inkscrawl, Star Ship Sofa, Abyss and Apex, Mythic Delirium and Future Lovecraft, with multiple publications in a couple of those places. I doubt I'll ever have a year in poetry publications this good again, and I'm still a long, long way from "established," no matter how we define that term, but I think I can name myself poet with a little less of a guilt trip/imposter feeling.
On the other hand, my flash fiction publications dropped from 8 in 2010 to 0 in 2011, this largely because of the sad demise of Everyday Weirdness, gulp; just knowing that wasn't around apparently stilled my fingers from short and strange thoughts. I don't expect to be publishing much flash fiction in 2012, either, although with that said I have returned to carving out, little by little, the flash fiction fairy tale series I started three years ago now, and a couple of those tales just may be popping up in the next few months. We shall see.
But if publishing went well, writing did not. Every time I attempted to mention this, people would protest, "But you've just published –" And that was true, but I still feel that I failed at writing this year. I did write, a little, and three stories I wrote this year also crept into publication (for the curious: Sister and Bones, The Trickster, and The Woods, Their Hearts, My Blood.) But I fell far, far short of my not exactly ambitious writing goals, for any number of not very good reasons, writing less than I did in 2009 and even in 2010 (another not very productive year). Some of it, yes, I can blame on the ongoing fatigue and dizziness and the sheer amount of time it takes me to do simple things like getting groceries. But those problems impacted me in 2009 as well, when I still managed more words.
Someone somewhere – I think Tobias Buckell? – said it well: as a writer, you can't control publications, reviews and so on. Those are all nice (or, as the case may have it) not nice, as far as they go, but really not something you can control. What you can control is your actual writing, the words you create, and the number of words you write.
And that, this year, I didn't control.
Anyway. A new year starts tomorrow, and despite the melancholy tone of this post, words still remain to be caught and transformed and turned into something. We shall just see if I can find the tools to grab them.
#
Ordinarily this is where I would now torture you all with a summary or reminder of things you already read earlier this year, but I although I'm in a better mood than the above paragraphs would suggest, my lingering almost cold is still, annoyingly enough, still lingering, leaving me headachy and sniffly and sleepy, which is not exactly the best lens to view the past year in, so orange juice (the mention of which should tell people how I'm feeling) and rest it is then.