pendrifter

Night Fairies, Hans Zatzka

November and December were lousy months for me and I’m glad to see the back of them. Normally the end of a year is a fun time, but as 2011 slid to a close, I was trapped in a pas de deux with a torturous flare of  systemic lupus and not at all a happy dancer. So here I sit, recovering on the ledge of January, peering into the mists of a new year and wondering how the writing will go this year. No looking back for me. Well, in a minute…must give a brief, backwards glance to the 2011 Goals–such as they were.

2011 Goals

• Plan Spring workshop: writing and revising TAKEN — Done; some progress made but not much.
• Work on one short story during the year — Not done.
• Write an essay on the writing craft — Not done.
• Read my research books about vampires — Not done.
• Upgrade pendrifter’s content — Not done.
• Read The First Five Pages – got to Chapter 4.
• Do the March Edit: The Foreigner — Not done.
• Attend Literary Orange Writers Conference, UC Irvine — Done. Good conference.
• Attend World Fantasy Convention, San Diego. — Done. Great conference.
• Write Silk Road article for Travel Thru History website — Done and published.

Dreams and Resolutions didn’t even make it onto last year’s list, but I had a couple more successes that were not planned: I did a Creative Visualization presentation to a writer’s group that went very well and was great fun and I self-published to Amazon’s Kindle Grave Shadows, an ebook of my dark fantasy short stories, and it’s still selling! Of course I won NaNo and now have manuscript #6 in the files so can’t beat myself up too badly about all that I didn’t do in 2011.

Enough with the backwards gaze, looking forward…

2012 Goals

• Priority:  Finish writing A Lamentation of Swans
• Plan a new novel: Death By Night (I think it’ll be Death By Night. We’ll see.)
• Attend Literary Orange Conference 2012, UC Irvine
• Write at least one pendrifter post each month. I’m really going to try to keep this commitment. I appreciate that I have readers and I need to give them something to read!

I expect things won’t go smoothly and I’ll go through my usual scatterbrained rotation among the novels, but I’m really, really, really going to focus on completing A Lamentation of Swans. (Do or do not; there is no try.–Yoda)