2020: A Year in Review

[osprey_archer]

Ten Things I Did This Year

1. Survived a global pandemic. High five, everyone! If you are reading this, we all made it!

2. Published The Threefold Tie in April.

3. Published The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball in June. I actually wrote this children’s fantasy in October 2013, and just revised it a bit during lockdown before unleashing it on the world. Not a big moneyspinner (last month I was quite pleased to realize it had made back the cost of its cover), but I’m glad to have it out in the world where it can bring joy to the readers who do find it.

4. Attended a Black Lives Matter protest in June.

5. Published Honeytrap in September.

6. Maid of Honor at a friend’s wedding. I realize this was not a wise thing to do in the year of our lord 2020, and that it was only by the grace of God that the wedding did not become a super-spreader event, etc. etc., so I have mixed feelings: on the one hand, not wise, but on the other hand I was so glad to be there for her and so honored to be chosen.

7. Contributed stories to two charity anthologies, His Magical Pet and Her Magical Pet. (I include links because there was some rigmarole with Amazon that meant at least one of the links died for a while.)

8. Set up a regular monthly Zoom meeting with a group of friends. I’m particularly proud of this because two of the three members are people who were hard to keep in touch with even before the pandemic. I’m really hoping we can keep up this regular Zoom even after the pandemic is over.

9. Finished a draft of David and Robert... unless I end up deciding that draft is only the first half of the book… but, anyway, it’s been kind of hard to write this year (I realize that it sounds weird to say that when I’ve published three books this year, but they were all written before the pandemic), so I’m glad to have finished something, if only provisionally.

10. Did a Q&A session at a Zoom book discussion about one of my books, The Wolf and the Girl. This was my first ever author event, so that was pretty thrilling! And I’ve got another one coming up in January, about Honeytrap - I’ll share more details closer to time.

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

*high fives for surviving 2020*

Congrats on all the stuff!

[osprey_archer]

Hooray! We survived!!!!

[asakiyume]

Well done ^_^

[osprey_archer]

Thank you!

[ancientreader]

I congratulate you on all of this. My beady eye is, as you may imagine, firmly fixed on #9. And how exciting for you to have author events happening!

Happy New Year!

[osprey_archer]

#9 may not appear for some time, depending whether I decide I want to write a second half dragging Our Heroes through the vast dysfunctional polycule that is the interwar English intelligentsia. Maybe? Maybe not? Not sure the book is marketable if it ends with the heroes together but not each other's primary partners?

[ancientreader]

Well, it's a smaller market for sure. ... but you have to write what you're moved to write, no?

"Vast dysfunctional polycule" is perhaps the best brief description I've ever seen of that milieu.

[osprey_archer]

It would def be more marketable if I publish it with the earlier cut-off point, but... I just want to keep going... and also I feel like it leaves a lot of threads hanging, not least of which is that Robert is basically chill with his homosexuality but has a lot of ingrained guilt about the fact that he is drawn to... the term polyamory wasn't invented till the 1990s so I'm not sure what term he would use for it, tbh. Probably something judgmental and self-flagellating. (He coped with his war trauma by sleeping with a lot of guys and his then-boyfriend Did Not Take It Well when he found out.)

[lucymonster]

Huge congratulations on all those successes! It sounds like you've had an absolute powerhouse of a year as far as your writing career goes. And you actually kept a Zoom social schedule going, which I ... really wanted and intended to do, but lazied out of some time around May. I don't hope you have to stay confined to home for another year, but if you do, I hope your Zoom triumph continues.

[osprey_archer]

Should "grumpy Soviet agents" become my publishing niche? MAYBE.

I must admit this is "Zoom social schedule, take 2," take 1 having collapsed under the weight of one of the member's mental health problems a few months back. We'll see if take 2 survives once people can actually do out of the house socializing. I hope it will, though, because one of the members lives too far away to see regularly even when we could all move around willy-nilly, so it really would serve a purpose even in non-pandemic times.

[littlerhymes]

ALL THE THINGS! You accomplished so much! <3

[osprey_archer]

\o/ Really a pretty successful year, given everything.