2015 in review

Time for the obligatory year in review post!

Writing I spent most of my writing time this year chewing through and revising the novel WIP. Not that there was a lot of time spent on it, certainly nothing like the amount that should be spent on it if I want to see it come to fruition any time soon. Mostly, the edits and rewriting led me to conclude that I need to make major changes to the main character. That insight is the good news. The bad news is that I need to change the MC to come from a perspective I don't know all that well. Difficult. Difficult enough, in fact, that I wrote up the first set of pages and set it aside.

Stories and NaNoWriMo were less than successful. The secret weapon that I thought would make NaNoWriMo work well was, at best, a mixed blessing. My schedule in November was really too horrible to make it work. That's one problem. The other was that, about 8000 words in, I realized that the book I thought I wanted to write wasn't the book I actually wanted to write, and it wasn't the book I was writing. That book went in a direction I wasn't ready for, and one I didn't understand. I hesitated, and the book withered on the vine. Very sad.

Still, both of these are there in front of me. In 2016, I'll take up the WIP again and see if the time away has given me a fresh approach to it. For this and for the aborted NaNoWriMo, I'm going to write with a larger measure of IDGAF, see if that helps.

Exercise Running has been pretty good. I worked my way up to longer and faster runs, with my best distance being a 7-mile stretch. I logged several 6s, many 5s, and more in the 3-4 range than I can recall. I'm thinking of doing a half-marathon in 2016, but not sure how firmly I can make that commitment.

Everything else Day job is busy, successful and fulfilling. Takes time and energy to keep all the plates spinning the way they need to spin, but so far, nothing has fallen crashing to the ground. Family is generally good, but various health issues have taken up a lot of brainspace, time, money, and focus. Stress and worry are the price you pay for caring.


All in all, 2015 was an active, complicated year, replete with many successes, a few failures, and plenty of intense emotion. Plenty to work with and anything but boring.

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1 comment:

  1. It's nice to hear that your year was good overall, as your posts on writing have not been all that positive this year (that isn't criticism, just observation). It's easy for me, as a reader, to forget that you have a life outside of that, bringing satisfaction and joy.

    I hope 2016 also brings you back to those feelings in your authorial life too. (I miss the FF, and other short stories, but not at the sake of your sanity!)

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