2014: Another Year Gone

This past year I accomplished a number of things. Among them:

I found a fantastic literary agent.
I wrote approximately 280k words on various novels/novellas; including heavy revisions to The Steampunk Novel, finishing/revising The Spider Thief and The Assassin King, and finishing/revising The Super-Secret Project. (The rest of the words written were on Old Guard - a space opera, and Thingbreaker - a magicpunk novel. But neither of them have reached a "finished" state yet.)
I attended my first ever convention and met a bunch of really awesome folks.


Acquiring an agent and writing/finishing a new novel were both big milestones for me.
The first is a big step toward finding a publisher for my novels (in all their genre-rich glory) and means I can spend more time writing. (Compared to 2013 which was a pretty slow year for me, I was super-productive. Mostly because I was not wading through the query trenches and could actually spend my time putting words on the page rather than researching potential agents.)
The second was proof that I could move on to the next thing after having spent a lot of time in the previous years working through all the flailing mess that is writing a first novel. (To be fair, I wrote some other stuff during that time too, including the first steaming pile that is now the in-progress draft of Thingbreaker.)


A few things I didn't do this year:
Write/sell more short stories.
Finish a third novel this fall. (That was what I meant to do with Old Guard, but a sudden move + family drama + H1N1 = only part of that book got written.)
Sell one of the novels.


The latter is something I've been wrestling with the past few weeks. The holidays are a difficult time for me anyway and it was a perfect opportunity for doubt to sneak in and tell me I'm not good enough to do this writing thing on a permanent basis. If I were, the agent would have had no trouble finding a home for my novels. If I were, wouldn't I be making more money at it?


And, here's the thing, I would really like to already have book contracts and a nice advance on any of the things I wrote this year. But I have to remember that the life of an author is a marathon, not a sprint. Not only does the business move slowly, but it's a long-distance proposition. One book doesn't make a career, even if it should happen to sell immediately.


Right now I am building a body of work. Unpublished? Yes. But that can (and will) change at any time.
In the meantime, I am writing - which is something I love - and telling stories that scare me in the best possible way. It's not time to give up, it's time to push forward.


So here's to the New Year and the opportunity every day brings.