Year in Review

It's my end of year, beginning of the new year (winter starts for me Nov. 1) so it's time for the annual did-I-meet-my-goals post.  Bleh. 

LOL. It's a pain in the ass and I hate it every year because I just KNOW I've done awful (and am usually pleasantly surprised, there's that only-remembers-bad-stuff brain for you) but it also helps so much in prepping for next year's goals, so ... here it is.

I wanted to simplify my goals this year because I was getting waaaay to wrapped around doing and tracking a bazillion things and it felt like I was tracking more than I was doing. Which continued somewhat, but I also identified a different problem this year, which I'll get to in my 2019, eventually. 

My past year's goals 

(with my top-of-my-head reaction to how I did)

- Read more, track better  (which worked BEAUTIFULLY some months and Horrifically others)

- Write better -- improve skills (meh)

- Take classes to increase motivation  (dunno how I did on this)

- 20/hrs writing a week or better (such a damn low bar. Sigh) 

- Send Purpose to agents by Samhain (Falls off chair laughing)

- Be more collected and sane, i.e. -- 

  -- more single goal weeks, (eyes ceiling)

  -- more forest, more river: kayaking shape (winces)

  --Stay on top of budget, house and personal time (seriously winces)

-Stop Nazis. (blows a gasket)

What I actually accomplished (Nov 2017-Oct. 2018)

75,000 new words (or 1500/week for 50 weeks) A drop from last year, but I didn't hit my NaNoWrimo numbers at all.

336 revision hours. (Wow is does that feel low; but I hit 358 last year and I got a major revision done) 

452 other writing-related hours (drafting, marketing, printing, critting other folks' work, meetings, classes. Reading not included, I can't seem to get myself to track that accurately or consistently). 

That included 27 skill-building sessions (much too low to honestly feel I made much progress on my "write better" goal, but slightly better than last year) and 140 crits for other people (including one novel and one full-length play--similar but slightly higher than last year). Part of the problem is "write better" is a subjective goal. I know I'm a better writer than I was five years ago, but last year? That's harder to quantify.

At any rate, that's a combined 788 hours -- only about 20 weeks of full-time work. *sigh*  It is about 60 hours more than last calendar year, and close to two hours more a week in a 50-week year. So... slight improvement. But it's still 4.25 hours a week shy of my 20 hrs/week goal. I need to boost the annual number by more than 200 hours just to hit what I'm calling a low bar.

Read 24 books and more than 93 short stories  (blink. blink. Same number of books, but I hadn't tracked short stories last year. And I KNOW  I read more short stories this year. So that's good.)

Submitted work at least 16 times. (that's... more than double last year's number. Blink blink. cool!)

Sooo the numbers are a trifle skewed because I'm comparing a Nov.-Oct year with a calendar year (last year I didn't get this done until January) but I think it holds up okay. I'll do a "non-writing things I accomplished this year" post later; most of my monthly records are buried on my desk halfway across the state.

Okay. So where I missed my goals entirely:

Getting Purpose to agents (it's... close... but I've stalled, which tells me I've got a major issue I'm avoiding)

Physical health -- I started up with Pokeman Go to get walks in, and that has helped. But my weight has stabilized at a bad (high) place and I've ceased doing any of my PT exercises, so my shoulder is increasingly unuseable -- I had trouble cutting a hamburger on a plate today.

Mental health -- Like many creative and empathetic folk, I am high anxiety central over the state of the country right now, and I've not been meditating, exercising or taking sufficient mental health breaks. 

I have been doing SOME things--singing lessons, singing with the choir, taking breaks and mental health days and doing what I can on the political front. But my writing, my focus, my ability to contribute, my body and my creative capacity have all suffered.

 Moving forward into Samhain, into 2019

So... I'm trying a new Goal-setting process, this one with only four to six annual goals, which I'll rotate through the months. Each Goal has its own page with why, how, and "what would success look like." So far for Nov. 2018-Oct. 2019 I have:

Break the electronics habit

Regain and feed resilience and equanimity

Be a better writer

Be a better citizen (country and planet)

Breaking the electronics habit came from realizing part of the reason I'm not getting more work hours in is ... well... Facebook, Twitter, Plants vs Zombies and all the other electronic distractions. It's not all bad, obviously -- I use a computer to write, I'm using a work tracker, focus app and timer/alarms on my phone to help keep me on track. But I need to give up some screen time in order to have more USEFUL screen time. 

I'm still filling out the "Why," "How," and "Success Looks Like" but it's interesting that Success in one of these goals feeds and bleeds over into the others. 

I can't control the outcome of the election, and no matter what happens, we're likely to have two more years of 45, so. Maintaining my health and sanity so I can contribute in a positive way -- and then making that contribution -- is going to be key. So. Onward.

It's 100 degrees outside, and sunny, and about 5 percent humidity. The air conditioner is working, the fumes from the painting I've been doing are *mostly* contained to that room. Can't do anymore on that until tomorrow, so I'm a bit at loose ends, which is about the only time I update this thing.

Been doing reasonably well on my goals. Been reading a lot (24 books!), but it doesn't feel... purposeful. I don't feel I'm learning as much as I should from it (although I am enjoying reading more!). I gulp-read: I read the bulk of Goss' four-hundred-page "Alchemist's Daughter" in one insomnia-plagued night. I feel a tad guilty for having left no reviews; I feel I should let a book sit and write a review after some processing time, and then I rarely make that time.  I suppose that's why e-readers ask you to review the book right away; I'm not the only one whose, "I'll do it later" becomes "I didn't get around to it."

Hm. Let's see. I had four skills I wanted to work on: dialogue, description, vivid sense-based experience, and more efficient, faster revision. Of the books I've read this year, which ones carried those skills off the best?

Can't really tell how efficiently a finished book was revised, although one can tell if revision wasn't really *finished.* Hm. None of the books come to mind, although I would say the "third-and-a-half-wall conversations" in Goss's "Daughter" that ended up working so well would have been easy to excise, and I'm very glad an overzealous editor didn't do so.

Vivid sensory writing that worked for me: China Mieville's "Station," Cat Rambo's "Hearts,"  Cassandra Khaw's "Food," Gaie Sebold's "Babylon," worked best.  Sarah Gailey's "River," Nina Kiriki Hoffman's books.

Description: I have to go back to Mieville, who blew me out of the water, and Khaw and Gailey. Also Yoon Ha Lee's "Raven" and "Revenant," for telling concise details, as opposed to Mieville's pages of it. Nnedi Okorafor's "Akata" and "Phoenix," for middle ground. 

Dialogue: too many to list: Yoon Ha Lee, Rambo, Vernon, Valente, Goss. Mieville, Gailey. I don't recall anything I read this year having dialogue that wasn't good, in fact.

So I should probably be using these novels to help me do my own writing better; take apart a scene, a conversation, a description  and see how it worked, how it was crafted. Worth an attempt.

Skills to focus on

Writing skills I need to work on:

Well, all of them.  LOL. But if I had to pick the top, say, four:

• Dialogue.
• Description. 
• Non-avatar persepective; giving the reader a character's vivid, sense-filled experience.
• Effective, efficient revision.

That's a big chunk, right there. So that's my plan for the next four months: take turns with those four skills, every week.

Reading as a writer, an attempt.

A few (non-comprehensive) thoughts about what I've read this year, so far: Novels/novellas edition.

I haven't finished many books that didn't work for me this year. Just two; Every Heart and Black Tides. 

Every Heart had some older-man-love by teen girls as part of their paradise and that creeped me out despite being realistic. It may have suffered because I read it right after Perdido, so the setting, which was probably perfectly adequate, felt flat and bland and undeveloped by contrast. The evocation of being an outsider, rumor mill and instant distrust worked, as did the evocation of hunger for a paradise glimpsed and lost, the fragility of trust and of children's futures.

Black Tides I had the most trouble with, partly because it succeeded in making me care a great deal about its characters and denied me massive chunks of their lives. Too much was implied and unspoken, and the time leaps were too large for me. I would have preferred this filled out as a novel, apparently.  I'm told if I'll read the sequel that might fill in some of the gaps, so I'll have to do that. Mom as villain is a trope I'm tired of and she was kind of a cardboard asshole at that. This is a culture I'm not as familiar with, (even though it's fantasy, it's a fantasy Asian culture) and as a writer I should think about assuming my readers have cultural familiarity with every aspect of my character's lives, and as a reader, I should not  expect Ts to be crossed and Is dotted that I would NOT expect (or need, or want) from a more Euro-centric story.  

I did not have that problem with Raven Strategem or Food for the Gods, but the story narrative in those two novels did not require massive time passage (and any areas that did lent themselves to tightly written flashback). 

Lee's Raven worked for me because the bizarre, math-based war-eclipsed universe peopled with such powerful, outsized characters and relentless stakes; I cared about Charis and her "is he insane or not" general; and the larger mysterious manuevering. I'm so wrapped up in all that I don't even notice the words half the time, so I don't know how Lee worked that magic.

Khaw's chef in Food is the epitome of "protag between the devil and the sea," or in this case Hell and his ghoulish bosses. He's totally screwed and knows it, and deeply, deeply in love and shows it. She makes me care about the future of a guy who cooks humans for a living, and that's tall damn bar. It's much more a mind-candy read with its Urban Fantasy, commercial fiction feel and almost cheerful gore. Moments of normalcy are a relief. Flaws: war between the gods didn't always make sense, but I was reading it really quickly.

Hoffman's books (Chapel Hollow series) delighted me. I know Nina, but had read very little of her work, and I'm going to need to fix that. I'd probably avoided them because they're classified as horror, but they're what I would call cozy horror, with a pagan underpinning; horror I can handle. Young-adult feel, very believable characters, escalating, magic-peril situations. They're also set in the PNW, so they feel very much like home to me. Flaws: Villains felt a tad cardboard in Silent Strength of Stones.

Riverwalking worked for me due to the evocative nature of places I've been and want to visit; the way Moore blended the considerations of river rafting, hiking and camping with her family and professional academic responsibilities, her vulnerability and her very clear words. Much sensory detail about something I long to experience viscerally.  

Beasts of Tabat delighted me in pretty much every way (it's the most recent read, and I tend to gush over the last thing I finish). I cared about the two main characters, winced over the poor choices they made... and understood them. I think that's what made this stand out, is that those two characters made bad choice after bad choice, making their situations increasingly perilous, and those choices fit their personalities and made perfect sense. (This is true of Khaw's protagonist as well, although situations force his hand repeatedly). I wanted to beat Rambo's characters about the head and shoulders for their stupidity, which meant they were well drawn. Now, the story isn't over and I'm still mad, because I had expected resolution at the end, although the sequel is supposedly downloading onto my kindle any day now.

Perdido Street Station is a character itself, the city as character in this immersive, bizarre world with its sticky mysteries. The in-depth, character-filtered descriptions are vivid and awesome. A rich palate of place and people. And just fucking weird, with a grinding, terrifying plot. Mieville breathes description, and does not hold back the words. Reading his work changed how I approach describing my aliens.

Digger is just delightful in every way and everyone should read it, along with everything Ursula Vernon writes. 

Whoops. Unfiltered praise! I might be getting tired; time to shift to something else.

Catching a Full Breath

I both love and hate that quiet clear space between one project and the next. There's a sense of aimless scrabble and "but but but but I should be BUSY" and a "shut up and say 'ahhhhhh,'" from my hindbrain, who really wants to enjoy this already.

*inhales*

Last weekend our choir had our Spring concert, and one of my primary foci was breath. Taking deep enough breaths, only breathing at the right times. It sounds clunky and amateurish if you breath mid-phrase. You can't hold a note if you don't have enough air in the first place, if you use it all up too soon.

Creative energy feels like breath. This clear space between big writing ideas feels like the inhale, and I want to fill it with fascinating ideas, clarity of purpose, new ways of thinking about writing, clarity in my surroundings and just... rest. Less sleep and more getting out into the woods, which we did two weekends ago, hiking to a magnificent waterfall. Reading Riverwalking had reminded me how much I need Forest in my life. Hoping to do more of that this season.

 I'm not *quite* done with the tinkering on the novel (Purpose/Moriakt's Apiquai). I've got trimming to do, and had some thoughts today on how to deal with the tonal sidetracking that's happening mid-book. But momentum is carrying me forward, despite part of me thinking I should wait for feedback after shipping it off May 1 (on deadline!) to [exceedingly wonderful feedback opportunity]. 

I've caught up around the house a bit (we're no longer in danger of death by dustbunny), and caught up on my tracking. I'd been kinda ovaries-to-the-wall (with the occasional depressive slump and two out-of-town-trips) for two months. Which feels marvelously productive in one area, but there's all this other stuff that hasn't gotten done. 

It has been awhile since I have given myself any thinking-on-paper cogitating time, which this brain needs to SORT THINGS THROUGH. Ghods and jackals, I admire people who can do that on the fly, in their heads, and retain any of it. I frequently don't retain it even when I DO write it down, which is ... well, partly explains the whole Pheonix nature of my existence, I suppose.

Anyway. Things I'd like to sort through: 

-- writing skills and the work I am and am not doing regularly to improve

-- some of the reading I've been doing, and how those writers succeeded at what they were doing, and how some of their choices didn't work for me but clearly did for others and why

-- a general "whew, here I am, here's where I want to be, am I on the right track and if not what do I need to change."

-- ways I can breathe fresh energy into my life on a more regular basis than once every three months.

*exhales, inhales* 

That's a start.

Singing and writing together

Taking a moment to write about a nonfiction book because I want to apply some of the lessons from my singing to my writing.

First. I've been doing daily vocal warmups and a bit of time practicing songs for... has it been three years now? At least two; and I've had a minimum of two breakthroughs with my voice: volume (the lid is off) and ease -- effortless extension of my range in both directions by several notes. I'll never be a solo concert singer, but ... well, I can relax and actually open my jaw now; I've got at least an extra half-inch gap between my teeth when I sing, though it *feels* like two inches (LOL), and what sounds to ME like a room's worth of volume. M. can hear me singing clearly through two closed doors while the shower is running. People can hear me when I speak in crowded places because I can support my voice now.

All that from weekly half-hour lessons and 15 minutes a day.

What kind of breakthrough could I have in my writing from applying the same approach? I've long tried the 15-minute practices Eric Witchey recommends, but getting myself to commit to that disciplined practice *daily,* with regular check-ins has been ... problematic. And such improvements in writing are harder to quantify, although "I'm not making the same mistakes in my short stories" would be a great first step.

Singing is easy because I can do my daily 15 minutes while in the shower, and my weekly lesson is scheduled. Perhaps if I link my writing sessions to my second cup of coffee (or to *earn* my second cup of coffee)... I shall try this beginning Monday. And I could take a half-hour on Wednesdays to think and read about craft.

At any rate. I just finished reading The Performer's Companion (subtitle: A Guide to Conquering Performance Anxiety). I'm reading it for my voice instructor, who got four books on performance in at the same time.

 Like Performance Power for Singers, which I read two years ago, I felt very much that I was brushing against concepts I'd read about many times before, or touched on in different ways: meditation, relaxation, visualization for success: discipline (although in this version, I'd say that last word came up the least; she emphasizes play rather than discipline, but to the same end). She also incorporates the Alexander Technique, which I'll shorthand as body awareness and good balance as contrasted to "good posture."

Author Sharon Stohrer spends some time reassuring the reader that performance anxiety is normal, and a certain amount of tension is essential to a good performance. Then she spends chapters on mental preparation, intentional rehearsal, performance prep, physical prep, nurturing your inner artist, tips for backstage and getting in the performance mindset, the value of investing in oneself (including the value of music to society) and a bit about the Alexander Technique.

She has checklists of suggestions in almost every chapter and strongly encourages the reader to try some or all, and to track what does or does not work in a journal, so one learns what works for oneself, because everyone's needs are different. She does make it clear that all of this is work, or at least an investment of time, and that it is a worthwhile investment one should take seriously -- and that it is of serious value to re-instill a certain amount of play into one's discipline.

And she makes the point that if you try all she suggests and nothing works, therapy is a valid and excellent next step. She or other singers have tried the things she suggests, and she uses many of them, and she still needed therapy, worked out her issues and was able to return to the stage. That in itself is a supportive and honest message I appreciate. All that practical, experiential background gives this book, which spends a certain amount of time on the emotional/performance balancing act and her own professional experience, a heft it might not otherwise have. Stohrer is helping her readers overcome anxiety and stage fright, so her focus on such emotional support is entirely appropriate.

 Other than a sample log, it lacks worksheets, although it is rich in suggested practices and exercises. It has a reasonable resource section. It does not push the Alexander Technique (the author is a practitioner), and does not get into that until the last chapter.

I have difficulty not comparing TPC to PPforS; the latter I remember as feeling slightly disjointed, and written as if the authors thought students would be encountering these skills (meditation, visualization) for the first time in their lives, but also broad and rich in ideas. It also felt... dated, somehow. Stohrer's book, with its references to 9-11 and  might feel the same away in another decade.