Retrospective

Here's a brief list of things wot happened or wot I did during 2013:

( The council meeting was a great success. We made a lot of lists. We here in Vault City love making lists. )

All in all, it's been a scary, disorienting, demoralizing, and challenging year, which has seemed intent on putting me into walls but has still served up a few measures of grace. Looking back, I can see that a lot of cool things happened – it's just that the stuff that was bad was really bad, and often for months at a time. It could have been a lot worse. But I still count having survived it mostly sane and optimistic to be the major accomplishment of 2013, and I eagerly, eagerly await 2014. Which will be better. I will make it be.

Partially because of how low I've felt through much of the year, I feel like I'm getting a better handle on how to build (and rebuild) strong foundations and get myself moving, even if I'm still not an expert at applying all of that. But I'm learning, slowly but surely, to find my footing in bad places, and if I can just keep building on that, it'll lead me to better places in the end. It's a goal to live into.

Story formation and plausible choice meta

Holy crap, I think I've got a short story done in draft. (Well, "short"; it's roughly 6600 words long. One of these days I'll figure out* how to write at commonly-acceptable lengths like 3000-4500 words.) I think I started this one sometime in mid-November. Not a bad start to the year, even if I probably won't have it out the door today!

* This is probably a lie.

Over the past few days of trying to tie everything together, I've been thinking about a couple of things.

( Neepery on characters being afforded plausible choices. )

( Neepery on plots that dig deep and plots that go far. )

And on we go. I've been writing for as long as I can remember, publishing for... yikes, 2005 was nine years ago already, wasn't it? –and editing professionally for over a year, and I've been to one of the most prestigious writing workshops in the speculative fiction field, and I still often feel like I have no idea how fiction works or how to write something that functions. Then again, I hear that this never really goes away, so I'd best get comfortable with continually working to figure things out and put neat labels on the tools in my toolbox.

[ETA] Welp, I read over it, and I'm still not entirely happy with the arc – but I'm not sure what I can do to fix it without writing a different story. So I sent it out! Because if nothing else, starting the year on a submission has some nice symbolic heft, and it is sometimes the case that other people like my fiction more than I do after a long writing/tweaking process. &o.o&

There are just about 50 minutes left in January 1. I'm doing pretty well!