Yuletide reveal.

 This year, I wrote Lemancholy, a supernatural thriller-ish thing set at the Villa Diodati.  Byron, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and Percy Bysse Shelley are my perspective characters, but I had to try very hard to keep Polidori from stealing the show, and every scene needs more Claire Clairmount (who I admire more the more I research her).  There's lots of debatably Unresolved Sexual Tension, stupid amounts of well-researched historical accuracy, and I think I tried to be fairly ambitious in my craft with this one, though I'm not sure I succeeded.

Anyway, I was very pleased to write it, and almost as pleased to present it with an annotated bibliography (something I wanted to do two years ago with The Knight of the Star, but couldn't, because I hadn't been organized enough and probably used upwards of forty sources).

And now, belatedly, New Year's!

 My resolutions last year:

1)  Blogging/Writing.  Continue blogging 5 days a week, but make an effort to get more interesting.  Write 550 words of original fiction every day.
2) Publishing/Gaming.  Start typing and self-publishing gaming supplements. 
3)  Track what books I read.  Both in order to review them, to complete the 50 Books POC challenge, and to appreciate my latest Christmas gift -- a 6 month subscription to Bookswim .
4)  Fitness.  As a first step toward getting in shape, I'm giving up soda again, cold turkey.  I'm going to try to reduce the amount of sugar in my coffee.  And once the weather allows it, I want to spend at least an hour a day walking.  
5)  Political aspirations.  All right, so I'm not going to be signing every petition that comes my way.  I can still pick at least one cause or current event each month that matters to me, blog about it, lobby for it, call my congresscritters, and see if there's any sort of personal difference other than rebroadcasting I can make.

Point by point, let's review:

1) I was steady in my blogging until September or October, and then more or less gave up completely.  I just didn't have it in me.  I've also mostly been microblogging on plurk.  Say, is there a plurk aggregate the way there's a Twitter aggregate?  Eh.  probably wouldn't use it, but I'm curious.

Bluntly, this is a failure, but it's one I don't really care about.  For whatever reason, daily blogging went from desirable to a chore to a touiil to flat-out abhorrent.  I would like to get back to occasional blogging, but daily?  Can't be arsed right now.

Writing.  I wrote 115,231 words this year.  That's far short of my goal, and it's short of last year... but it's still better than triple my wordcount in 2010 or any year before.  I can live with it.  When I post about my resolutions for this year I'll talk more about this, but in short, I'm not really disappointed in my 80,000 word shortfall.
2) Total fail.  I was too busy with other things.  This year, I'll just have to redouble my efforts.  I've sold my second LARP, locally, so I am making money for gaming-related pursuits, but this was still definitely something I fell down on.

3)  Like blogging, I did great for most of the year but I didn't stick with it.  This year, I'll try again.

4)  Fitness.  Well.  I've reduced the sugar in my coffee!  I walked... sometimes.  I'm back to drinking soda and unlikely to stop at the moment.  And I'm heavier and more out of shape than ever.  I'm not sure the New Years' Resolution model of goal-setting is helping me very much on this front, honestly, so I dunno what I'll be doing this year.  But I haven't given up the dream of getting under 200 pounds and a 36-inch waistline!

5)  I didn't really track this, but I was active, involved, and thoughtful over-all, and I got to work in canvassing again, which was as satisfying to my soul as it was punishing to my feet.

Still pondering how to handle it in the upcoming year.



Later today or tomorrow, I've got a new list of goals -- ten or twelve of them -- and some more reflective musings on the busy-ness of my life and the way my plans have changed and evolved.  I think I'm healthier (er, mentally) and happier now than I was last year, and I want to capitalize on that in ways that, since the cessation of my blogging daily, I haven't really told you about.