At the year's end.

First off: I apologize for the recent lack of entries.  Stress from work, travel planning, lots of book plotting, and some unfortunate computer issues left me with little desire to blog.  Oi.  I'm hoping and planning to write more regular entries here next year.  But that's then, and for a moment, this is now.  So let's talk about this past year.

This past year, I polished the absolute hell out of Skyborne, everything from rewriting a quarter of the book to doing a "romance and feelings" edit because I wanted to make sure to get that stuff right.  I'm very, very happy to say that I'm still just as enthusiastic about it as I was at the start of the year.  I've edited things until I was sick of them before, and I really feared doing that with this book.  Not happening.  I still have every plan to keep at it until I get Skyborne published.  Speaking of which:

This past year, I started the querying process in earnest for the first time since 2005.  It's just as nerve-wracking.  But at least it's both cheaper and faster now, since it's all done through e-mail.  ^_^  I have a new query letter I'm polishing up to start with the new year's queries, and hopefully this one will work better.

This past year, I got involved with the online writing community.  I'm more than a bit introverted, so throwing myself and my work out there online was a big step for me.  And y'know what?  It's been awesome.  There's such a great community of writers out there, aspiring and newly published and experienced and everything in between.  The mutual encouragement and support is absolutely amazing.  And sometimes it leads to new things...

This past year, I discovered New Adult, and realized I'd been looking for it my entire life.  Most characters I write are in their late teens to early twenties, so as NA slowly gains more recognition and support, hopefully I'll find a way to ride this wave as it rises.  I do hope NA grows into more genres than contemporary and/or paranormal romance, but everything starts small.  The simple fact that agents and publishers are acknowledging it is a major and very encouraging change.

This past year, I had two failed projects.  One of them taught me that I should never start a book within two weeks of having the idea for it, no matter how familiar the idea is.  The other taught me that there's a fine line between 'inspired by' and 'derived from', and that I need to recognize it before I cross it, preferably somewhere in the plotting stages.  But I re-learned that it's okay to just let a book go, and that it's okay to stop before something's finished if I know it's not worth continuing.  Hard lessons, but sometimes it's the hard lessons we forget on purpose.  Hence the need to re-learn.

That was this year.  Tomorrow starts a new year.

Tomorrow, I start writing a new book.  Seems like a good time for it.

Happy 2013, everyone.