Happy New Year, friends!
See? I told you I’d be back.
I’m sorry I haven’t blogged that much in a long time. 2022 was an exceptionally busy year, in both good and difficult ways, and even though long-form blogging is still something I really love, I’m sorry to say it slipped by the wayside for most of the year. One of my goals of 2023 is to be better about that, especially with social media feeling so uncertain these days.
But before I tell you more about my 2023 goals, I want to tell you what I was up to in 2022 that consumed so much of my energy I didn’t update this website for months. The short answer is many, many things.
First, in 2022, I worked on five different books, all in different stages, from outlining to revision. I completely rewrote the middle grade fantasy, only for my revisions to reveal some deeper problems with the main character’s motivation and the stakes of the story which I’m still considering how to fix. I did a ton of research and then began rewriting the novella I wrote for my senior honors project in college to be a historical fantasy set in WWII Italy. I was really happy with what I was doing, but started to feel like it was just too depressing for me at the time, so I set it aside (I think I have a plan to make it less depressing though). I made some subtle revisions to my middle grade space adventure which I think really helped bring it to a new level. I outlined and started drafting a middle grade contemporary paranormal project about a girl with vampire parents who starts a club for kids with one foot in the supernatural world, and so far that’s been a delight. And all year long I’ve been plugging away at a novel set in the same world as my musical phoenix stories. I think I’m almost finished with my first draft, and while I love it more with every word I write and every discovery I make about these characters and this world, I also see how much revision this is going to need, which has made moving forward with the first draft feel really difficult. This has without a doubt been the hardest thing I have ever written, but I am also super proud of it, incredible flaws and all. I hope, when I’m done, it will be brilliant.
There were times this year, particularly when I set projects aside for the moment, when I felt like I was just spinning my wheels or even moving backward. But looking back at all the writing I’ve done and how hard I worked, I can tell that just isn’t true. No, I haven’t finished as many projects as I would have hoped in 2022, and yes, the rejections continue to come in, but I can also see that my writing has improved by leaps and bounds—my ideas, my plot structure, my characters, my world building, even my sentence to sentence writing feel like it’s at a much higher level now than at the beginning of 2022—and that’s because of how hard I worked this year.
Last spring, I also made good on something I’d been wanting to do since I moved to the D.C. area: I joined a tandem cycling group. I’ve been tandem biking with my family since I was a kid, and it was great to take my skills to the next level and bike all over the city and make new friends while I was at it. One thing led to another, and I’m now a member of two tandem cycling groups. From April to October, I was biking 20-30 miles twice a week most weeks.
Except when I wasn’t. Because I got covid from one of my tandem captains in July and was down for about six weeks. I’ve been sick before, but it was nothing like this. I have never experienced such profound fatigue. Most of the time I couldn’t hold myself up in a sitting position, and just taking my dog outside and back in left me out-of-breath and completely exhausted. This disease is no joke. If you’ve managed not to get it so far, do everything you can to keep it that way. If you’ve gotten it once before, do everything you can to make sure you don’t get it again.
Another unfortunate side effect of all the biking I did is that I somehow managed to reinjure my right knee. I twisted my knee in the past, and at first I thought I’d just aggravated the old injury, because it really didn’t hurt that much, but then I noticed my kneecap was going way out to the side whenever I bent my knee. A long saga of doctors visits and physical therapy later, and it turns out I need surgery. I tore the ligament that’s holding my kneecap in place, and it’s fully dislocating whenever I bend my knee, and this isn’t something that will heal on its own. I have been incredibly anxious about all of this, because honestly surgery is pretty much the one thing in the world I am absolutely terrified of, so it’s been a rough couple months to get to this point. My surgery is next week,and I’m looking forward both to getting on the road to recovery so I can get back to the activities I love and also just not having the prospect of surgery dangling over my head.
Back on the good side of 2022, I’m still loving my job licensing satellites at the FCC, and I’m now in charge of my office’s intern program, so it’s been a really busy time at work, but I love everything I’m doing. I’ve also been doing some work presenting at conferences and working with blind teens on how to find a job as a blind person, and that’s all been a wonderful experience.
Looking back on 2022, I can see there’s so much I did that I’m really proud of and really excited about, but at the same time, I’m hoping 2023 is a bit quieter, because I’m tired. I would like to get back to blogging more. I would also like to try more new recipes, since cooking fun new things was something else that fell through the cracks a bit this year, and I miss it.
Otherwise, I’m trying not to set too many concrete goals for myself in 2023. Yes, there are specific projects I’d like to finish, but right now I feel like it’s more important for me to challenge myself simply to keep moving forward and keep doing my best for everything I try. We’ll see what this year holds, but as long as I’m moving forward, whatever I accomplish is something to be proud of.