Here's a brief list of things wot happened or wot I did during 2013:
- After the startup I was working at ran out of funds in December 2012, I stuck with them for more months than I probably should have as they promised me that funding would be restored and investors promised them that they'd invest. These things did not happen. I left to attempt to find other employment.
- In January, I submitted a story to Eclipse Online, and it was accepted! It ran in March, and promptly killed the magazine. (...not really. EO folded because Nightshade went down; my story was just the last they published. Which, I think, got it a bit more attention than it would otherwise have garnered, but which was very sad.) This would prove to be the only story I would sell all year. Though, to be fair, I sold it three times – once to Eclipse Online, once to PodCastle, and once to The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year.
- I lost almost the entire month of April to an infected salivary gland. There were a few days when I had difficulty speaking, and several weeks on end where I couldn't open my mouth wide enough to eat solid food (...even if chewing had been tolerable) or fit an adult-sized toothbrush into my mouth (even the child-size one I bought was barely usable). I spent a while with a half-baseball lump on my jaw, and slept – when the pain wasn't too bad – with a hot water bottle against the swelling so I could halfway control it. I finally had to do a couple urgent-care visits (one of which came to my house! That's a thing you can get in the Bay Area!) and go through a run of antibiotics, which culminated in one really fun 24+ hour period where I had [TMI/gross] thick, hot, bloody pus draining into my mouth in spurts. I used a lot of hot-water-and-tea-tree-oil washes. ...the antibiotics did clear everything up, and I'm immensely thankful that I had access to that medical care, but (being unemployed and uninsured) it did help to piledrive me further into debt.
- I went up to Seattle to see my brother do a reading, which was awesome. Got to see a handful of friends as well, which was extra-awesome.
- I started teaching myself Java!
- I started on a redesign of my website, ditching the old SilverStripe CMS and building something new from the ground up in Yii. It has a lot of cool-to-me features, which are probably completely non-notable to visitors. Oh, well.
- Discouragement and... I don't want to say "depression"; I've never been diagnosed with anything of the sort, but it was certainly depression in the colloquial if not the clinical sense? Yeah. These things kicked my ass for a long time. Financial stress, health stress, employment stress, inability to fix any of these things; all of this was a constant fixture in my life, especially during the middle sections of the year.
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auto_destruct moved back to Iowa, leaving me with an extra room. Coincidentally, calculusletters was looking for a change in living situation at the same time auto_destruct was, so I actually wound up with an empty room for roughly... one day. Prior to that, I had been half-planning to move in with the inestimably awesome Rachel Swirsky, who was generous enough to offer her spare room while I got back on my feet.- I took a three-day mini-vacation (and mental-health break) to a hostel on the Coast, where I sat and read book after book on a bench overlooking the Pacific. It was one of the most intensely content periods of time I can remember, and solidified my desperation to Make This Work, somehow. Even if I am still not entirely sure how.
- I called Child Protective Services on a neighbor. Actually, I had to call twice; the first time I called it was a weekend, and they can't actually do anything on weekends unless the child is in physical danger, at which point you're supposed to call the police. (When I called the second time, the police ended up coming out anyway, so I'm not sure what the distinction was.) I then spent the next several weeks trying never to pass within a line-of-sight of the neighbor, because awkward.
- I started teaching myself Ruby! ...and then spent the better part of a month fighting with my hosted site and my local webserver, trying to get a Rails server working. (Not kidding. Most of a month. In fits and spurts, granted, but that was way too convoluted.) Getting it working on my local webserver involved upgrading to the newest version of MacOSX, which Apple kindly made free, and not-so-kindly made break almost all of my workflows and make some really simple things extremely difficult. It also wiped out all of my MySQL databases, and given how much 2013 had been swinging for me, I hadn't backed them up in a while. So, thanks for that, Apple.
- I decided to take a break from the active job search and make my money on content writing, focusing on developing my skills and getting some fiction writing done in the free time. And... well, focusing on mental health. Job searches are immensely demoralizing, and given the way my year had been going, it was easy to slip into feeling like there was no human agency which accorded me any worth or could ever be persuaded to. You know, typical negative self-talk hyperbole. Being able to step back and take control of circumstances, and being able to do things/take action and see direct results of that action, was immensely helpful.
- calculusletters and I embarked on an epic quest to turn our house into as much of a homestead as one can, given a single unit in a duplex with not much of a yard to speak of. So far, we have a respectable amount of food storage. (Costco is love.) And a really excellent dehydrator! (Amazon Prime is love.)
- I took an online course on getting things done, which really helped for about a month! In that I had a system laid in where I was powering through a lot of work, and it felt sustainable. ...and then holidays and houseguests came and blew up all my typical time-based routines, which is a little discouraging, but which really only means that I need to redesign the routines to be robust vs. morning interruptions. I'm working on re-establishing those routines again.
- But on the plus side, my brother visited for about a week over thanksgiving, during which we made him watch the first part of Black Butler. And we had two of my Clarion West friends over for a big dinner the day before Thanksgiving, and we drank wonderful tea and talked about fascinating things, and we played Cards Against Humanity (which I won, surprisingly, though Erik had some really fantastic scoring streaks) and 1000 Blank White Cards (which nobody ever really wins).
- In what proved to be a really difficult decision, I donated my car to One Laptop Per Child. I... it was the first car that was mine, and my father helped me buy it, but. It was very broken, and I didn't have the money to get it fixed. And a combination of it being very broken, not having it for a while, and my driver's license being caught in some kind of weird California bureaucracy limbo meant that I had driven a grand total of once in the last two years, and I haven't really needed it, out here. Shopping and interviews I can get to via BART, and other things I can TaskRabbit for a lower cost than continuing to pay the car's registration every year and its insurance every month. ...and at least it's going to a good cause. The final paperwork has yet to be finalized, but the deed has been transferred, and it's pretty much a done thing.
- I started learning how to mod Minecraft. I'm making pretty good progress – the modding tools out there make a lot of things fairly accessible, and then refuse to document a lot of other things – which is encouraging and enthusing. ...of course, Mojang is planning to release their own set of modding tools, which will no doubt make everything I'm learning now obsolete in not too long, but still! Modding Minecraft! Practicing Java! Cool things!
- Got a houseguest! Met someone involved with the SF tech and queer communities who was looking for a place to stay before her internship started up in January and gave her the funds to find an actual place. But she's a very cool person, and now I have someone to talk code with! And we have been introducing her to the wonderful world of baking and home food preservation.
- Screaming, crying, and a loud thump meant Ryan calling CPS on the neighbor again. ~_~ We all really hope this neighbor will shape up; the kid is something like five years old. (At least, I'm pretty sure I heard the neighbor screaming "You are five!" in the midst of berating her for something.)
- I completed my first full calendar year of being at editor at Strange Horizons! Which is still humbling, occasionally intimidating, and continually wonderful and wondrous. Despite the holidays and being closed to submissions through December I'm still Rather Behind on my workload, by goddamn it I will get my feet back under me.
- And then, on December 31st, we woke up to discover that Sascha the cat had somehow managed to wriggle out of his harness (which he'd been wearing for weeks and we thought fairly safe against wrigglings-out-of), and hide the lighter that we use for incense in the bathroom so well that none of us could find it. Also, Amazon had delivered us some sort of fuel exhaust sensor instead of the 1.7oz extra-strength Tiger Balm which we'd ordered. It was an inexplicable beginning to the end of a frustrating year.
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.
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Date: 2014-01-01 09:46 am (UTC)From:... and I am totally on board with the "accountability buddy" thing, or at least with some variation on that idea, even if I'm not sure what that might look like. I suppose I'm doing something vaguely similar with Frith, in the sense that we email/chat a lot and throw encouragement each other's way, but in general I'm not used to doing creativity collaboratively, if that makes any sense -- I don't have much practice at it! But I am always up for trying new things, especially if they may lead to greater creative output and more focus on unlocking new goals.
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Date: 2014-01-01 10:11 am (UTC)From:And that would be very cool! I think the basic template is just making contact at defined intervals, probably once a week or so, and discussing what we want to work on in the following week, if we've met last week's goals (or) how last week's work went, and doing postmortems if the work went badly to see if we can make it work well. And then probably some element of brainstorming, tinkering, tossing ideas back and forth, or even betaing back and forth, depending on what we need to facilitate the week's work. That sort of setup sound good? (It's also potentially a thing that could be expanded into a larger group, so long as we were assiduous in making sure everyone got time to be focused on.) How does something like that sound?
What sort of chat clients do you use? I'm pretty consistently on AIM, and I have Skype and of course Google Hangouts as well. I can PM you my usernames on any of those, or look into something different. :)
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Date: 2014-01-02 09:21 am (UTC)From:... anyway, yeah, I would love to try something like that! Since I'm not really used to writing as a social activity (as opposed to hermiting and stubbornly NOT TALKING ABOUT MY PROJECTS until they're done) I will admit up front that I'm not sure how well this will work for me; but you never know 'til you try, and one of the things I've been struggling with on original fic as opposed to fanfic is that fanfic has so much more immediate feedback and reader enthusiasm, which makes it easier to keep the creative motivation alive. And maybe this will be a good way to help with that!
I'll PM you my info too. :)
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Date: 2014-01-02 09:28 am (UTC)From:I think it'll be really interesting for me to see if I can adhere to a regular debrief schedule, too; this will be an experiment in more ways than one!
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Date: 2014-01-01 04:39 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2014-01-02 01:18 am (UTC)From:And thank you. :) And same – if there's anything I can do from down in California, drop me a line. (And I swear the Gay YA is going to get frontburnered again at some point, here.)
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Date: 2014-01-02 10:09 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2014-01-01 04:53 pm (UTC)From:I am always impressed at the way you view problems/challenges/etc. as a learning tool, a sort of base to tell you what things need improvement. I mean, I wish that you wouldn't have to deal with so many of those problems, but I'm always inspired by the way you talk about them and set about doing something to improve.
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Date: 2014-01-02 01:45 am (UTC)From:And, heh – full disclosure, I have to admit, that's in large part because I try to keep from posting things publicly until I can frame them productively. I am often not this sanguine when they're actually happening.
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Date: 2014-01-05 01:06 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2014-01-05 01:09 am (UTC)From: