I spent my holidays among snowy redwoods and Ponderosa pines, and reading Joe Abercrombie’s First Law series well into the night. There was something childishly gratifying about sneaking off to read about men tearing each other apart with their bare hands. Gratifying, too, to see how far he’s come as a writer – the prose in Red Country is far more polished than that of The Blade Itself, and the POVs in the latter are far more clunky than those graceful interludes in The Heroes – as it gives me the faint shred of hope that someone, someday, may still take a chance on me.
Ever hopeful, ever striving. Forward unto 2016.
In the meantime, the tally of this year’s writing, which is far less than I had hoped to have by now:
Finished stories
This Is How You Lose Yourself
Five Little Seeds
Al Niente
All that You Left Behind (I Am)
The Tale of King Edgar
Rare Birds, 1959
We Are Sirens
Drafts, revisions, etc.
The Well at the Center of the World
Echo
In Your End Is My Beginning
Untitled (spider story)
Talassio
The Hounds
Add to that a whole lot of unfinished, well, stuff. Critiques, half-formed ideas, decisions about how to go forward with queries and publishing . . . if nothing else, 2015 will stand out as a year of flailing and struggling; desperately hoping that some of its seeds bear fruit in the months to come.