The end of the year. Normally a time for reflection on the year. Honestly, though, my accomplishments can be boiled down to the following:
- Published in two anthologies this year.
- Completed draft of a full-length novel
- Attended two (smaller scale) workshops
- Kept my job for a full year
- Kept my personal life relatively intact
- Continued to appreciate how damn lucky I am to have found my wife
Things I did not get to do and wanted to included:
- Drop a test podcast/video
- Take more photographs
- Promote myself more on social media
What is in store for 2020? Normally, I’d talk about our down-market, low-budget Cyberpunk future here but I’ve done a lot of that this year. Let’s just say any timeline which forces William Gibson to go back and rewrite a novel-in-progress because the current ‘fucked up’ factor in the real world outstrips his fictional one fairly gritty one.
I can only plan for myself. In addition to the three missed items above, I have the following on my list:
- Read and revise novel
- Find and attend more writing workshops, hopefully local.
- Contacts, submissions, and other outreach attempts.
And the big one:
- Revise that short story.
I wrote a draft last year for an on-line class. It drew from personal experience. Bad personal experience. After sending it about, and getting an editor to take a look at it (Birthday present thoughts for writers: hire an editor to read their short story), I knew I had to revise it.
The protagonist needed to take the lead, go to the forefront. They needed to be front and center. And the story had to be told from first person. Not the comfortable, distant third of the current draft. Which means walking down ugly roads in my head all over again.
I wasn’t ready, until PAX Unplugged. I was at the convention center, 8:15am to sign up for a miniature painting class. Turns out – they’d already gone to waitlist. Which was odd, as registration wasn’t supposed to begin for another 45 minutes. But that left me alone in the con, waiting for my wife to wake up and the expo hall to open.
I had my backpack. My notebook. My pen. And I had a short story to revise from word one.
The word count was unimportant; I wrote. I wrote and stepped back into an ugly, ugly memory. The rest of the story will probably be just as rough. But that’s how you know it’ll impact someone, yes? If it bleeds, it leads.
Or, to put it in true 2020 terms –
Got a bunch of small jobs, mostly routine, but there’s a big op staring me down right now. Wetwork, with legions of CyberPsychos and Black ICE between me and the prize. But there’s no room for winging, sabe? Got my rippers sharpened, smart-link tuned, and enough combat medication in my system for a tour in the last corp war. I’m chipping in…
Biomechanoid Blues 