begin the beguine

[storyrainthejournal]

As Alyx says over here, I prefer the lunar new year. This new year is, essentially, the Christian new year.

And as I said earlier, I find people's totting up of the year's sales and publishings and such...well, I have to curb my tendency to compare myself unfavorably. However, focusing on the good and the happy, and taking a moment to celebrate it, I had three stories appear this last year, two of them to some nice reception and appreciative reviews, and I placed a couple more which haven't appeared yet. I wrote several new stories and revised several others, wrote and saw published one freelance article, made good progress on the current novel, sent out queries to a metric ton of agents and had many requests for partials, all while doing well enough at my day job as an editor to be awarded bonuses and extra days off. 

This year also saw the serendipitous (for me) formation of my current little writing group, the members of whom have doubled as a Buffy watching group, dinner-eating group, cookie-swapping group, and SF0-tasking group. I have been, and am, very thankful for this development.

I have many friends (some of them family) for whom I am profoundly grateful, two swell cats, a lovely loft to live in, an excellent massage therapist, make enough money to give gifts and donations, and have survived another year of scleroderma in moderate good health.

My writing list for 2009 includes

finish DEEP TERRAIN
revise two recently written short stories
work on several in-progress projects, including one collaboration
write a few new stories, whatever suggests itself
 
additionally, I will continue the agent search and work on getting THE LAST LUMINARY VIRTUE a publisher
 

I have only two resolutions:
~I will begin the year with the eight days of happiness meme, because it seems like a good way to begin (no one tagged me and I will tag no one, but feel free--post about something that makes you happy eight days in a row)
~I want to liberate the word "braw" from its Scottish obscurity and bring it into general usage the world over

So, huzzah, and L'Chayyim, to life, y'all. Because it's braw.