Drunken Owls and Other Delights

So. What was 2014 all about, anyway?

Personally I'd say it was a banner year, with room for future improvement. I hit a hell of a lot of goals I wanted to hit this year. I've missed a few, some failing spectacularly, but for the most part I'm truly happy with how the year turned out. I have new goals for the next year, many that are quite different from the past few years. It's not so much a continued 'ramping up the output' like the last few years, but more along the lines of taking different paths. I'll explain this more in my New Year's Day entry a few days from now...this entry is all about what I've done this past year.

Writing. Despite not having a complete product to release to the world (yet!), I'm actually quite happy with the output I had this year. I also put a number of stagnant and stalled projects to bed and labeled them Trunked. The main focus for most of the year was on finishing the revision of the trilogy, and I nailed that one halfway through the year. It still needs a bit of work, but it's a hell of a lot further along than it was previously. I managed to keep a near-daily personal journal the entire year, only skipping the weekends and the occasional weekday--itself a surprise, given that past journals rarely lasted for that long. I was much more active with my daily words, utilizing the 750 Words website. I had dry spells with no words, but I also had a very long and fruitful month and a half of daily words as well. I also came up with a number of interesting ideas and passages via the 750 Words site, and they've given me inspiration for future projects. The poetry was touch and go, but it was never forgotten. As for the Trunked items, this was a very personal decision--I felt that many of these ideas had been sitting around gathering dust, and I could not find adequate reason to continue them. The half-ideas (demos if you will) were never expanded, one of the well-intentioned projects came to a halt, and others were simply so old that if I still hadn't touched them after all this time, they probably weren't worth revisiting. This also gave me a bit of a tabula rasa for newer and fresher ideas to come in. All in all, I'd say I managed to hit the most important goal of getting better at my craft, and that was my main focus all along. I'll be starting fresh and ready to go come the new year.

Music. I did not get any recording done this year as I'd hoped, but I did get a lot of practice in, and that's the most important part. I've got a few snippets of songs in my head that I'd like to expand on in the new year. Earlier this month I found, much to my annoyance and frustration, that the audio software I use stopped working due to shady business practices on behalf of NCH Software. I really liked their software, but I will no longer work with a company who forces older versions to stop working so users must repurchase the new versions. I've since gone with Audacity and hope it works to my advantage.

Artwork. Being a part of the Inktober meme this year was quite possibly the most fun thing I've done this year. I'd stopped doodling some time ago for various reasons (mainly because my writing work is almost completely on PC), and even though I have the Wacom tablet, I don't nearly use it as often as I should. Doing Inktober was a great push, however...it forced me to draw something almost every day of that month, and in the process reawakened my love for drawing. I also started following a handful of artists on Tumblr to inspire me to draw more as well. I still have a long way to go on this, but the impetus is now there.

Photography. This one's a relatively new goal...I've been more excited about photography for a few years now, but 2014 was the year I stepped up my game with a new and slightly more professional camera. I've taken quite a few pictures this year, and even though I may not have posted them all online, I'm visibly getting better at it. In a roundabout way I'm revisiting my college years and relearning how to capture something visual--this time with still photography rather than moving film. I'd love to see where this leads.

Personal. Yeah, I admit it. I'm getting a little bit older and a little bit slower. I've been keeping an eye on my physical and mental health, going to the YMCA with Emm (although our Q4 attendance has been embarrassingly poor due to work and other issues), eating better, snacking less, and so on. I made a lot of personal moves to avoid or bypass emotional stress, which in the process has brought down my blood pressure and lifted my peace of mind. I'll continue this in the new year.


All in all, I think I did pretty damn good this year. I met my personal goals, with the aim of improving them and continuing in that direction. I'm definitely looking forward to a busy yet extremely fruitful 2015.

I'm not going to post a picture of the whiteboard this time out, because for the most part it remains the same:

Mon-Fri: Revision of Bridgetown Trilogy
Wed: Photo post
Sat: Art, Music
Sun: Walk in Silence, Music

The whiteboard will most likely change as necessary, depending on what major project I'll be working on and anything new that comes up.

What's important here is the goals:

Revision of the Bridgetown Trilogy, and Related Projects.
I'm a few chapters short of finishing the first revision run-through of The Persistence of Memories, and will be picking up The Process of Belief soon after. As time permits (and if, by chance, I get a bite from Angry Robot or an agent or someone), I will also be tidying up A Division of Souls. This trilogy remains my main project for the time being.

I will also be updating the Welcome to Bridgetown blog with new related posts as well. I have a bunch of fun ideas for that one.

I have also previously commented on wanting to write further stories in this universe. I have a few vague ideas and a few stronger ones, and plan on working on a few of those as well as time permits.

That said...the related goal here is to get the Mendaihu Universe stories out into the wild this year.

Can't Find My Way Home.
I've decided that this one may end up being my next project unrelated to the above. I recently read through the outline I'd worked on a few years previous, and a lot of it still stands up well. The few chapters I worked on in the past a little less so, but it's nothing a little revision can't help. It's also a story that's not nearly as intensive in worldbuilding as the above, so there's not as much prewriting work to do.

Another idea I'd had for this novel was to post it online in installments. It's supposed to be read that way anyway--its episodic nature was inspired by the various anime series I've watched over the years, with a finite set of chapters (twenty-four), many of them with self-contained minor storylines with the overall plot showing up tangentially. I'm seeing this novel more as an experiment more than as a publishable novel (although I'd be happy with that as the end result), so I'm totally fine with self-publishing this online. As soon as I've come up with a bit of a backlog and a set schedule, I will of course let everyone know of its debut.

The YA Novels (Angela Death and The Children of Dun Corran).
These two may be a little further out on the schedule, maybe third or fourth quarter, but I'd like to at least work on outlines. I recently read through the outtakes and notes on these as well, and found them strong, if lacking in extension at this time. If anything, I believe I'd started these too early--I wasn't ready to write them just yet. I'd like to think I'm at the point where I may be able to try them out now.

Journaling, Poetry, Music, Photography and Art.
After much deliberation, I've reevaluated these five things in my life--many of them pastimes that I've taken part in for decades now, but never expanded on professionally. I've come to the conclusion that these will most likely remain personal endeavors, things for me to work on in spare moments, avenues to let off steam or play around without trying to make them professional. Over the last few years I found that the onus of trying to create everything to publication was actually inhibiting me rather than giving me a personal creative outlet, and that was exactly why I'd had such a dry spell. For 2014, I plan on using these five as a personal and emotional outlet rather than a professional one, as that is precisely what they were back in the day, and should probably remain. Most if not all of what comes out of this will most likely remain offline.

That said, if I do in fact create something I feel is worth sharing, I will of course post it. And I will of course show up from time to time on LJ and elsewhere when time and mood allows!

Walk in Silence, the book and the blog.
As said previously, this one fell by the wayside due to other more important deadlines. I am hoping to pick this up again on the weekends. This project has changed quite a number of times over the last few years, going from a book to a blog and back again, and I'm still not entirely sure what I'm going to do with it, but for now I'm going to focus primarily on the blog. The reason for this is that much of what I'm going to be posting will most likely end up in the book anyway, if it comes to fruition. I do not have a set deadline for this book at this time, given my other self-imposed deadlines, so this one will most likely meander here and there until next year.

Other.
So yes...I have given myself a shit-ton of homework for the year, all due by December 31. And most of this will be worked on in tandem with everything else in my life. I'll be squeezing these things in between the cracks of my day; a slow day at work, at the gym, on vacation, what have you. Like I said in my previous post, I was able to handle my schedule last year, so I think I should be able to ramp it up a bit this year. I'm not sure if I've given any room for anything else to work on, but I know that I'll be working on all this on a day-to-day basis, and if time frees up for me to do something new, I will by all means embrace it.


Here's to an insanely busy 2014. Despite the workload, I'm looking forward to it.