Year in Review
So not a lot happened this year per se but I thought I'd give it a shot:
Jan - Mar: After an embarrassing start writing a first chapter, Tempest pulled together an incredible writing group, with whom I busted out two chapters of my dissertation. I finished the second chapter literally the day it was due (last day of the quarter), while I was at ICFA.
March: OK quite a few things happened this month!
1) I was accepted to Clarion! I wasn't really allowed to tell anybody about it but I told a few people, plus Marianne Kirby and I were in a Hangout together when I got the news so she got to witness, eyebrows raised, my high-pitched noise-making.
2) The SEA Is Ours was published by GerakBudaya, a leftist bookstore in Malaysia, for Southeast Asian distribution! This means it's cheaper for people in the region, and it's hitting the audience it was meant for!
3) Joyce came to ICFA! It was so good to hang out with her outside of Singapore. I arrived Tuesday night (which is to say, Wednesday morning stupid o'clock, and slept in the lobby) and was there to meet Joyce and check her in and it was YAYNESS. It was the first time both of us got to do a reading at ICFA, hopefully not Joyce's last time!!
4) The weekend after ICFA, I was at AnomalyCon, which paid for airfare and hotel and worked me to the goddamn bone with SEVEN panels over the weekend. Like, damn!
April: I was working on my third chapter, and I was interviewed by Uma Ampikaipakan for his BFM radio segment Invisible Cities on steampunk: http://www.bfm.my/invisible-cities-07-southeast-asian-steampunk.html
I also wrote a paper on editing The SEA Is Ours and presented it at UC Berkeley's Center for Southeast Asian Studies Conference "Making Southeast Asian Culture: From Region to World"! I got to roadtrip up to Berkeley with Dr. Mariam Lam and Dr. Henk Maier, which was *really entertaining*.
May: Timmi Duchamp asked me to edit the WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 11!!!!! I have themed it "Trials By Whiteness". (If anybody wants to slip something in last minute, something small like poetry, let me know.)
And I booked it to the East Coast for Diana and Ashley's steampunk wedding! What a wonderful day.
The SEA Is Ours also came out in Czech!
June: I don't remember what else happened but I know I handed in my third chapter. Clarion also began this month! I arranged for a subletter to take my apartment, and Lisa Bolekaja came and got me out to La Jolla, and we stayed in a hotel overnight and she took me around campus.
July: Clarion Clarion Clarion. I wrote a story per week. I also did my first collaboration with S. Qiouyi Lu, who was at Clarion West... while collaborations between classmates have happened, this was also the first inter-Clarion collaboration, so we made a bit of history there! I cooked a lot for my classmates. We got to go to San Diego Comic Con, and I spent most of the day with Indrapramit Das, who is way hotter in real life than he needs to be. Cecilia Tan was in town for the Romance Writers Association Conference and she also came to visit, which was cool! My roommates were Jen Julian and Kathleen Kayembe: we're all queer women, and Jen and I spent several topless days down at Black Beach (which is a "clothing optional" beach... so I learned how to swim in the sea finally! and with no clothes). I didn't get the Octavia Butler Scholarship, but Kathleen did, and I might have shed tears when Lisa gave her her owl. Ellen gave me a chapstick as a "Den Mother award" which lol I guess.
Also, VINTAGE TOMORROWS was released on Netflix, which is a thing that has my mug in it.
August: I went home to Malaysia. I let my mom buy me clothes. I also bought my first ever smartphone, a Xiaomi Redmi Note 3, because Dad started playing Pokemon Go and I just.... didn't want him to be cooler than me in that way. I went to Singapore (and caught some cool stuff there) and hung with Joyce and Christopher Hwang and SEAsteampunk writer Timothy Dimacali. (There is an Ivysaur in my collection called Joyce&Chris.) I went to the Peranakan Museum with
delfinuum! It was a good time.
September: I don't remember what happened this month, honestly. I... turned 32. Uhm, I had a houseguest over who managed to push past many of my boundaries. Eric, Maurisa, and Javier bought me a cake! Maurisa and I went to see Nisi read!
October: Sunil Patel, my Clarion classmate, was outed as an abuser, so I spent a LOT of time doing emotional work with my cohort. I fostered a stray puppy for about a week. I'm still in love with the puppy. I also start sending out job applications. This shit managed to suck a lot of mental energy that I should have saved for my dissertation.
November: I sink into the worst depression I've had in years. Also, the election happened, which, what the actual fuck. The nice thing is I got to go to San Diego with Nalo, to watch a special screening of ARRIVAL. There was a special reception before the screening where I got to hang with some other Clarion folks. I snuck some posters home. I.... should send those out.
December: I went to China! For a conference in utopian and science fiction studies. That was really neat. I got to meet the first SF Studies academic in China, Wu Yan, and Chinese SF author Xia Jia (who is not just talented creatively, but terrifyingly intelligent, AND really hot to boot). I got to go out to the Lama Temple, too. But otherwise I spent most of it sinking into depression and feeling terrible that my dissertation is no further along.
I also got my first rejection for an academic job. Which, well, shit happens.
2017 Goals:
- Establish a morning exercise routine that doesn't depend on a gym
- Ask a doctor for a prescription for depression. Folks have been telling me to go to therapy but I honestly don't feel that's right for me.
- Send out more work.
- Revise more stories.
- Write more, period.
- Write a new goddamn novel, omg. I just realized I have a quartet, a trilogy, and three standalone novels that really want to be written, ARGH, not to mention the novella that wants to be re-written, AND the short story collection that I've got ideas for but no time nor inspiration.
- Try for some visiting assistant professorships. If not, try for some actual jobs. If not, go home, and write.
I hope you all have a blessed 2017 ahead!
This entry was originally posted at http://jhameia.dreamwidth.org/241219.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Jan - Mar: After an embarrassing start writing a first chapter, Tempest pulled together an incredible writing group, with whom I busted out two chapters of my dissertation. I finished the second chapter literally the day it was due (last day of the quarter), while I was at ICFA.
March: OK quite a few things happened this month!
1) I was accepted to Clarion! I wasn't really allowed to tell anybody about it but I told a few people, plus Marianne Kirby and I were in a Hangout together when I got the news so she got to witness, eyebrows raised, my high-pitched noise-making.
2) The SEA Is Ours was published by GerakBudaya, a leftist bookstore in Malaysia, for Southeast Asian distribution! This means it's cheaper for people in the region, and it's hitting the audience it was meant for!
3) Joyce came to ICFA! It was so good to hang out with her outside of Singapore. I arrived Tuesday night (which is to say, Wednesday morning stupid o'clock, and slept in the lobby) and was there to meet Joyce and check her in and it was YAYNESS. It was the first time both of us got to do a reading at ICFA, hopefully not Joyce's last time!!
4) The weekend after ICFA, I was at AnomalyCon, which paid for airfare and hotel and worked me to the goddamn bone with SEVEN panels over the weekend. Like, damn!
April: I was working on my third chapter, and I was interviewed by Uma Ampikaipakan for his BFM radio segment Invisible Cities on steampunk: http://www.bfm.my/invisible-cities-07-southeast-asian-steampunk.html
I also wrote a paper on editing The SEA Is Ours and presented it at UC Berkeley's Center for Southeast Asian Studies Conference "Making Southeast Asian Culture: From Region to World"! I got to roadtrip up to Berkeley with Dr. Mariam Lam and Dr. Henk Maier, which was *really entertaining*.
May: Timmi Duchamp asked me to edit the WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 11!!!!! I have themed it "Trials By Whiteness". (If anybody wants to slip something in last minute, something small like poetry, let me know.)
And I booked it to the East Coast for Diana and Ashley's steampunk wedding! What a wonderful day.
The SEA Is Ours also came out in Czech!
June: I don't remember what else happened but I know I handed in my third chapter. Clarion also began this month! I arranged for a subletter to take my apartment, and Lisa Bolekaja came and got me out to La Jolla, and we stayed in a hotel overnight and she took me around campus.
July: Clarion Clarion Clarion. I wrote a story per week. I also did my first collaboration with S. Qiouyi Lu, who was at Clarion West... while collaborations between classmates have happened, this was also the first inter-Clarion collaboration, so we made a bit of history there! I cooked a lot for my classmates. We got to go to San Diego Comic Con, and I spent most of the day with Indrapramit Das, who is way hotter in real life than he needs to be. Cecilia Tan was in town for the Romance Writers Association Conference and she also came to visit, which was cool! My roommates were Jen Julian and Kathleen Kayembe: we're all queer women, and Jen and I spent several topless days down at Black Beach (which is a "clothing optional" beach... so I learned how to swim in the sea finally! and with no clothes). I didn't get the Octavia Butler Scholarship, but Kathleen did, and I might have shed tears when Lisa gave her her owl. Ellen gave me a chapstick as a "Den Mother award" which lol I guess.
Also, VINTAGE TOMORROWS was released on Netflix, which is a thing that has my mug in it.
August: I went home to Malaysia. I let my mom buy me clothes. I also bought my first ever smartphone, a Xiaomi Redmi Note 3, because Dad started playing Pokemon Go and I just.... didn't want him to be cooler than me in that way. I went to Singapore (and caught some cool stuff there) and hung with Joyce and Christopher Hwang and SEAsteampunk writer Timothy Dimacali. (There is an Ivysaur in my collection called Joyce&Chris.) I went to the Peranakan Museum with
delfinuum! It was a good time.
September: I don't remember what happened this month, honestly. I... turned 32. Uhm, I had a houseguest over who managed to push past many of my boundaries. Eric, Maurisa, and Javier bought me a cake! Maurisa and I went to see Nisi read!
October: Sunil Patel, my Clarion classmate, was outed as an abuser, so I spent a LOT of time doing emotional work with my cohort. I fostered a stray puppy for about a week. I'm still in love with the puppy. I also start sending out job applications. This shit managed to suck a lot of mental energy that I should have saved for my dissertation.
November: I sink into the worst depression I've had in years. Also, the election happened, which, what the actual fuck. The nice thing is I got to go to San Diego with Nalo, to watch a special screening of ARRIVAL. There was a special reception before the screening where I got to hang with some other Clarion folks. I snuck some posters home. I.... should send those out.
December: I went to China! For a conference in utopian and science fiction studies. That was really neat. I got to meet the first SF Studies academic in China, Wu Yan, and Chinese SF author Xia Jia (who is not just talented creatively, but terrifyingly intelligent, AND really hot to boot). I got to go out to the Lama Temple, too. But otherwise I spent most of it sinking into depression and feeling terrible that my dissertation is no further along.
I also got my first rejection for an academic job. Which, well, shit happens.
2017 Goals:
- Establish a morning exercise routine that doesn't depend on a gym
- Ask a doctor for a prescription for depression. Folks have been telling me to go to therapy but I honestly don't feel that's right for me.
- Send out more work.
- Revise more stories.
- Write more, period.
- Write a new goddamn novel, omg. I just realized I have a quartet, a trilogy, and three standalone novels that really want to be written, ARGH, not to mention the novella that wants to be re-written, AND the short story collection that I've got ideas for but no time nor inspiration.
- Try for some visiting assistant professorships. If not, try for some actual jobs. If not, go home, and write.
I hope you all have a blessed 2017 ahead!
This entry was originally posted at http://jhameia.dreamwidth.org/241219.html. Please comment there using OpenID.