Ah, the end of the year.
At this time it is traditional for us to gather together and paw through the smoking embers of the last twelve months, picking through the ashes for nuggets of gold and occasionally holding up charred bits of regret to ruefully show them off. Then we all get drunk and promise ourselves the next year will be totally different, completely awesome and hopefully less flammable.
Are you tired of that sort of thing? I think I am. I was getting ready to write a 1000-word post about the things I learned in 2013, but when I sat down at the computer I realised that I didn’t really feel like writing that – and that, more importantly, I was pretty sure that no-one else would be all that interested in reading it. We’ve done that before, we’ve all danced that dance, and it’s probably time to change the music and switch to the hokey-pokey instead.
So let’s cut to the chance and do an executive summary. (I do a lot of those, now that I’m an executive.)
Pros of 2013
- I went to China, France, Germany and Finland
- I got an awesome new job
- GenreCon was totally excellent
- We adopted a pretty great dog
- The people in my life are pretty much all awesome
Cons of 2013
- One of my best friends died
- I didn’t finish writing Raven’s Blood
- I didn’t finish writing much else either
- The Abbott government
Things I Want Plan to do in 2014
- Finish, revise and polish Raven’s Blood and find a publisher for it
- Write and self-publish Obituarist II: 2 Pinterest 2 Posthumous
- Write more short fiction and maybe even find someone to pay me for it
- Become more involved with the Melbourne writing scene, or at least some other writers
- Go to the US, eat barbecue and have a few drinks with Chuck Wendig again
- Hang out with my wife and my dog
Things I Will Probably Also do in 2014
- Drink too much
- Spend too much time playing games and not enough time writing
- Come home after work and feel too drained to write or do anything creative
- Make excuses that I know are bullshit
- Blog excessively
That probably covers everything. Man, if only I was writing this novel in bullet point form. I could have done the whole trilogy by now.
In closing, many thanks and much respect to everyone who’s stuck with this blog, and with me, in this year where I didn’t get a whole lot done. I probably would have done even less if I hadn’t been worried about disappointing you.
Hope you folks have a good end-of-year celebration, if that’s your bag, and I’ll see you in 2014 – The Year of Living Dangerously (Because You Keep Getting into Bar Fights with Robots).
