New Year, New Fun, New Me

First off, points to whoever guesses what I'm paraphrasing above.

Hey everyone, it's 2015! I hope everyone had a safe and happy holiday season. I know I got to spend lots of time with friends and loved ones, ate entirely too much food, and generally basked in the joviality that is ever-present during the year's denouement. I even got a little bit of writing done, which was exciting. This time last year, I was waiting on my beta readers to finish their early drafts of The Summerlark Elf, so the thought of how the craziness of December might affect my writing time/energy just didn't occur to me. As it stands now, I'm about 14,000 words into book three, and decided last night to get into a head space where I hopefully won't be dragging my heels across the page for a little while. The momentum is nice, because it feels like something I haven't got a chance to really reach just yet with this book.

We'll see how long it takes before you guys read my next blog post, wherein I lament the fact that I feel like I'm just a hack who may as well be scrawling in crayon across old newspapers. You laugh, but you know it's coming.

Writers are weird, okay?

I had planned on this post being reflective and introspective, what with the whole "full year as a writer" milestone passed (admittedly it's been about fourteen months, but it's been a while since my last blog post, and New Years is always thematically apropos). I admit, it's odd looking back on where I was this time last year. I feel like I've progressed leaps and bounds, not only in my writing, but in everything in the periphery that, one year ago, I had no idea being an author entailed.

I think that, aside from the whole writing and publishing two novels and a picture book in one year thing, I'm most proud of what I'm starting to achieve in terms of networking, of finding opportunities to get my work out there. I've talked about the cons I worked, and of my bookstore appearance this past October, but plans are in motion right now for some projects that a) will be bigger and better than what I got up to last year, and b) are farther in scope than I could have possibly seen myself planning a year ago. I can't go into any details just yet, as everything is very much in its infancy, but rest assured that I will keep you all posted, dear readers, and that I will try my best not to disappoint.

Happy New Year, everyone!

A Book by Any Other Medium

So, here's the thing about being a writer who, incidentally, lacks the time and means to be a writer exclusively: time tends to be a commodity that is precious, and oftentimes scant. As such, any time that I don't dictate to writing is usually reserved for a full-time job, household duties, the maintenance of relationships, and all the other things that a normal, functioning human does on a day-to-day basis. I'm not complaining by any means, but to offer an example, I just took a break mid-sentence to help move a table from my dining room. I guess you could say free time is a bit tight. The biggest issue in this is that I don't have nearly enough time to do the one thing that every writer ought to do (barring, of course, actually writing), read.

Now, when I was younger, I had always thought the idea of audiobooks was dumb, and kind of lazy. As I got older, and therein dropped all my adolescent pretense, I simply eschewed the format out of personal preference. Nowadays, I find myself in a position where, without the audiobook format, I would not have become familiarized with the writings of HP Lovecraft, nor would I have ever come across Wil Wheaton's Just a Geek, which was a huge inspiration for me during my time spent writing The Summerlark Elf. Most recently, I decided to start consuming more fantasy fiction, for the simple fact that, despite the fact that I am a fantasy author myself, I am painfully under-read in the genre. So now, thanks to the fact that I can listen as I cook, or clean, or commute, I managed to get through the first book of Ursula K LeGuin's Earthsea Cycle in less than a week, albeit whilst Pat Rothfuss' Wise Man's Fear has been sitting in a half-read state on my end table for a couple of months now (sorry, Pat...).

I imagine some of the people reading this have already read A Wizard of Earthsea. If you haven't, do so, because it is a classic for a reason. If so, I encourage you to give the audiobook a listen, even if you do have time to read. The narrator, Rob Inglis, is nothing short of perfection, and I am very much looking forward to delving into the rest of the cycle, largely because of his job on book one. If ever there was a want for audio versions of my books, he'd be the first person I'd look up.