At the Closing of the Year
It's the final curtain. 2010 has certainly been an odd and unusual year for me - it's also been a startlingly good year in ways I'd never have dreamed possible. I've achieved a lot in the last twelve months work-wise, and even if I'm still experiencing what could be described as a slow build of work, I've made progress. Landmarks like passing my proofreading course and netting a new client have made me feel even more like I can actually make this work, and the number of fallow gaps when I haven't had that much work on this year have been remarkably few, which means I must be getting something right.
World-wise, things haven't exactly been encouraging - it's increasingly difficult to avoid the feeling that I'm living in a post-modern rewrite of the dystopian world of V for Vendetta, and it would be nice if there was a single politician at work either in the government or the opposition who didn't make my skin crawl, but I like to think that while things are difficult for a lot of people at the moment, that life goes in unpredictable and odd directions, and that turnarounds can happen when you least expect them. But whatever form they come in, just don't expect them to be in any way thanks to politicians...
Anyway, for me 2010 was a good year, and one of the biggest reasons is that I've fallen in love again. It came out of nowhere - I met her at Eastercon this year, and was perfectly prepared for her to be another in my long line of nice unrequited crushes (especially since she was attached at the time). Well, a series of rather surprising plot-twists later, we started going out in July - and we're still having a wonderful time. It's pretty damn likely that we'll be moving in together in a few months, and while there's still plenty of emotional baggage lurking in my head from the past, I'm so glad I found someone cool, fun, creative and understanding, someone with whom I've genuinely clicked. The fact that she's utterly gorgeous and regularly has dyed pink hair is simply a bonus.
My main mission for 2011? First up, I've got to finish the rewrites on my current novel Chill Out - once again, I've tried to pull off something massively ambitious, and it's taking a lot of effort to actually get it up to the standard it needs to be, but it's getting there. I've certainly learned a massive amount from writing it, and it's the best thing I've ever written, it's just also rather gigantic (currently weighing in at about 190,000 words) and is in urgent needof streamlining. I'll also - daringly - be attempting a rewrite on my first novel, The Hypernova Gambit, and there are several projects circling the runway to see which gets picked next (including an exceptionally dark fantasy novel, and a series of novellas that have been bubbling away for quite some time). There's also a couple of other projects on the way, and I really want to make sure that 2011 is a very serious work year.
I might as well be honest, as well - updates here are probably going to be very few and far between. I've blogged on Crawling from the Wreckage for five years, and generated a ton of entries on a variety of subjects, but my love of this style of blogging has rather cooled over the last eighteen months. To anyone out there who's been following the blog long-term, thanks very much for reading - it has been important to me in a lot of ways, especially during some of the very tough times in the last five years. However, I don't want to feel obligated to do this, and I've often only wanted to blog when I actually have something to say. So, for now Crawling from the Wreckage can safely be described as 'on hiatus' - there will be occasional updates, and I will use this for any personal news updates, but otherwise this place will be pretty quiet unless things dramatically change for me. I have a Tumblr blog which I'm using for occasional posts, and there's another project which - as long as all goes well - will see me doing some blog-related stuff in a much more focussed manner, which hopefully I'll be announcing here (and elsewhere) in a couple of weeks. But, whatever happens, I'll still be around on Facebook and Twitter, and I'm not about to vanish into the ether quite yet.
So, I hope 2010 has been a good year for you - and I also hope that 2011 brings you plenty of fun, excitement and a whole series of pleasant surprises.
Thanks for reading, and have a Happy New Year.
World-wise, things haven't exactly been encouraging - it's increasingly difficult to avoid the feeling that I'm living in a post-modern rewrite of the dystopian world of V for Vendetta, and it would be nice if there was a single politician at work either in the government or the opposition who didn't make my skin crawl, but I like to think that while things are difficult for a lot of people at the moment, that life goes in unpredictable and odd directions, and that turnarounds can happen when you least expect them. But whatever form they come in, just don't expect them to be in any way thanks to politicians...
Anyway, for me 2010 was a good year, and one of the biggest reasons is that I've fallen in love again. It came out of nowhere - I met her at Eastercon this year, and was perfectly prepared for her to be another in my long line of nice unrequited crushes (especially since she was attached at the time). Well, a series of rather surprising plot-twists later, we started going out in July - and we're still having a wonderful time. It's pretty damn likely that we'll be moving in together in a few months, and while there's still plenty of emotional baggage lurking in my head from the past, I'm so glad I found someone cool, fun, creative and understanding, someone with whom I've genuinely clicked. The fact that she's utterly gorgeous and regularly has dyed pink hair is simply a bonus.
My main mission for 2011? First up, I've got to finish the rewrites on my current novel Chill Out - once again, I've tried to pull off something massively ambitious, and it's taking a lot of effort to actually get it up to the standard it needs to be, but it's getting there. I've certainly learned a massive amount from writing it, and it's the best thing I've ever written, it's just also rather gigantic (currently weighing in at about 190,000 words) and is in urgent needof streamlining. I'll also - daringly - be attempting a rewrite on my first novel, The Hypernova Gambit, and there are several projects circling the runway to see which gets picked next (including an exceptionally dark fantasy novel, and a series of novellas that have been bubbling away for quite some time). There's also a couple of other projects on the way, and I really want to make sure that 2011 is a very serious work year.
I might as well be honest, as well - updates here are probably going to be very few and far between. I've blogged on Crawling from the Wreckage for five years, and generated a ton of entries on a variety of subjects, but my love of this style of blogging has rather cooled over the last eighteen months. To anyone out there who's been following the blog long-term, thanks very much for reading - it has been important to me in a lot of ways, especially during some of the very tough times in the last five years. However, I don't want to feel obligated to do this, and I've often only wanted to blog when I actually have something to say. So, for now Crawling from the Wreckage can safely be described as 'on hiatus' - there will be occasional updates, and I will use this for any personal news updates, but otherwise this place will be pretty quiet unless things dramatically change for me. I have a Tumblr blog which I'm using for occasional posts, and there's another project which - as long as all goes well - will see me doing some blog-related stuff in a much more focussed manner, which hopefully I'll be announcing here (and elsewhere) in a couple of weeks. But, whatever happens, I'll still be around on Facebook and Twitter, and I'm not about to vanish into the ether quite yet.
So, I hope 2010 has been a good year for you - and I also hope that 2011 brings you plenty of fun, excitement and a whole series of pleasant surprises.
Thanks for reading, and have a Happy New Year.