Goodbye 2023!

2023 was a really terrible year. On the list of terrible things we have major knee surgery, another novel failing to get a book deal, a really upsetting reading slump, Neutron making it clear he’s about ready to retire, my mom being diagnosed with brain cancer, and more. It’s been a rough time, and I can’t wait for 2024 to start and hopefully move in a more positive direction.

But there were some good things that happened in 2023, and I’d like to focus on those right now.

I have a wonderful, supportive group of friends and writing buddies who I honestly could not have gotten through this year without. And this year I really strengthened and developed my friendships with some of my coworkers. I feel like I have an army around me holding me up, and I couldn’t be more happy to have all of them in my life.

I also successfully branded myself as the person in the office with all the space clothes, and I’ve got even more coming for 2024! A silly thing but a good thing. Everyone should have galaxy dresses.

My job has been fabulous about letting me telework from home, so I’ve been able to spend so much more time with my mom than I would have otherwise. We have had so many small adventures in the last few months and built so many precious memories.

I wrote a new book this year. It was a deeply personal book about the first time a friendship ends, but it’s also about prejudice and inclusivity, and I’ve thrown in some vampires, selkies, weerebears, and dragons for fun. The draft needs a lot of work, and I’m currently revising to add more actual plot to balance out all the feelings, but I’ve grown a lot as a writer because of this project, and I think I’ll be really proud of this book in the end. If I ever finish it.

I also started writing another book this fall, which I’m calling my destress project and which has done wonders for my mental health and my love of writing. I’ll have a lot more to say about this in 2024.

And I had two short stories published in 2023, which I completely forgot about in my first draft of this post! “Duet for a Soloist” was published in Electric Spec, and “Where No One Sleeps” was published in Andromeda Spaceways. I’m really proud of both of these stories and so glad I got to share them with you this year!

Despite the reading slump, I also read a total of forty-five books this year. Twenty of them were new books, and twenty-five were rereads. Here are my favorites:

  • The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud
  • Bloodmarked by Tracy Deonn
  • Before and After the Book Deal by Courtney Maum
  • Save the Cat! Writes a Young Adult Novel: The Ultimate Guide to Writing a YA Bestseller by Jessica Brody
  • Don’t Want to be Your Monster by Deke Moulton
  • The Thing About Jellyfish by Ali Benjamin
  • Chewing the Fat: An Oral History of Italian Foodways From Fascism to Dolce Vita by Karima Moyer-Nocchi
  • The Chalice of the Gods by Rick Riordan

I have added these books to my book recs page, and I will have more detailed thoughts about them soon, I hope!

As for what’s coming next in 2024? I don’t know, and I’m not going to set any goals for myself right now. I have plans for my blog and books and short stories I want to write, but I’m just going to keep doing my best with everything.

So happy New Year! Here’s to a 2024 full of light and love and words!

Where in the World Was Jameyanne in 2022

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.

2020 wrap up

2020 is finally coming to a close. It has been a rough year for everyone on this planet, and I definitely feel ambivalent about writing what in any other year would be a celebratory post about all I accomplished this year and my plans for 2021. Obviously, I don’t feel celebratory. I was only just starting to settle into D.C. with a great job and lovely coworkers and a wonderful new friend group when the pandemic knocked everything flying. And I’ve been lucky. I still have my job, and I am healthy and reasonably sane. But that doesn’t mean it was easy.

I’m also struggling with this post because as I write this, I’m sitting on the floor holding my Mopsy girl, who is very sick and will likely pass in the next couple days, and I’m struggling to think of anything but that. Mopsy deserves an entire post and so so much more, and she will get it, I promise. But this is just a horrendous end to a horrendous year.

I set a number of goals for myself in 2020. I don’t remember what they were, and I don’t think it would be productive to look back at my 2020 New Year’s post to see if I met them. But I continue to find that I deal with stress by being creative, and amid everything, I have accomplished quite a bit.

First, on the writing front, I had two publications this year. My story “A Valentine’s Fear” was published in February by Every Day Fiction and my poem “A World in Seven Flames” was published in the anthology Twilight Worlds: Best of New Myths Volume II. I also have another short story lined up to be published in 2021, so yay!

My writing group is flourishing, virtually of course. It’s become not just a writing group but a great group of friends. Without these guys I don’t know how I would have coped with everything going on this year. In October, we all took Covid tests and quarantined for two weeks before gathering in New Jersey for a Halloween writing retreat, which was a ton of fun, and in the new year we’re going to expand our activities beyond critiquing each other’s stories to also start holding mini workshops where we teach each other what we’re good at.

This year, I managed at least one new draft of three major projects, and more than one draft for two of those projects. I also wrote two new short stories and another poem, which was great because I’ve been so focused on novels for a while. I really enjoyed working in these these different forms, which present unique challenges all their own. Once again, I cope with stress by writing.

I actually wrote almost every day this year. I say almost because I didn’t write yesterday or today, but while writing every day has become a habit that works really well for me, I also have to admit that sometimes, like now, I need to focus on other things, and that’s okay too.

I also read 106 books in 2020. I’m almost done with two more books and I’m hoping to finish them before the end of the year, but it’s very likely life will intervene so we’ll see. Eleven of the books I read were in Braille. I really enjoyed so many of the books I read, and I can’t wait to share my favorite 2020 books with you after the new year.

My exercise plans were derailed by the pandemic, but I have continued the barre virtually, even though it’s not the same. I also didn’t blog as much as I intended, but this is a perennial concern for me. I did learn to make ice cream, and I’ve had a lot of fun practicing my cooking skills.

It’s been quite a year. I hope everyone is able to find some joy and peace as we bid 2020 goodbye and set off into 2021. I’m not planning to set any goals for myself in 2021. I’m just going to keep on doing my best and see where I land. So happy New Year! Here’s to 2021 being not 2020.

2020 Goals

I set some pretty ambitious goals for myself in 2019. I didn’t meet all of them, but I did pretty well on the whole. I was having trouble deciding how I wanted to challenge myself in 2020, which is why this post is so late in coming. This post is also really late in coming because I got the flu last week, which brought my entire life to a screeching halt for more than a week. The flu is a gross illness guys.

In the end, I’ve decided that my biggest goal for 2020 is to keep up the momentum I’ve built for myself in 2019. Right now, thanks to the flu, I feel like I have to start building that momentum from scratch again, but once I get everything up and running I’m sure that won’t be the case.

Last November, I challenged myself to write every day. Not only did I succeed at that, but I continued in December and January. As of today, I’ve written ninety-one days in a row. Yes, I managed to write a little bit every day when I had the flu because I refused to have to start back at day 1. It’s become a habit for me now, and I really want to keep that up in 2020. In addition, I set a goal for myself to get up early and write before I go to work on weekdays. It’s been hard to adjust my sleep schedule, but so far I’ve written every morning before work since the start of the new year, and I’m already seeing some incredible benefits, so it’s definitely a new year’s resolution to keep that going.

In particular, for writing, I’d like to try again to complete new drafts for three big projects, especially since I don’t have the bar exam to interfere with my productivity this summer. I’d also like to get back into writing and submitting more short stories, which I’ve already started this month. I’ve had a few short story projects that have been languishing on my computer thanks to the bar and novel revisions, and I’d like to get back to those as well.

I’m still going to barre classes three or four times a week, and I want to keep that up in 2020 too. I’d also like to add in evenings when I go to the gym in my apartment. I’m starting with one day a week, and I’m hoping to up that to two days a week at some point. I’m also setting a 2020 goal for myself to cook one new recipe a week. Last week I tried a coconut roasted butternut fennel bisque, which unfortunately fell into the too-much-work-to-be-really-worth-it bucket.

I also set my 2020 Goodreads reading challenge to 100 books again. I’m hoping to read more, but 100 is a nice round number, and if I surpass it I can always increase my goal. In addition to reading 100 books, I want to challenge myself to read at least one book a month in Braille, because I got out of the habit of reading books in Braille when I was in law school and I miss it and want to get back to reading like that.

And of course I have my usual goal of blogging regularly. I’d like to get back on track with a manageable blogging schedule this year.

Writing it all out definitely makes it seem like a lot, and I’m already behind on a few of these goals thanks to the flu. So I better get started.

The End of a Year, the End of a Decade

Well friends, 2019 is coming to a close, and with it a decade is ending.

For the record I fall on the side that 2020 starts a new decade rather than being the last year of this decade. It’s true that the first year of the calendar was year 1, not year 0, so the first ten year period would end after year 10 and the next would start with year 11, but culturally we’ve been grouping decades from 0 to 9 for a while now, and the idea that 1920 is not considered part of the ‘20s, or that 1940 is not considered part of the ‘40s, is ridiculous to me. So I’m calling it the end of the decade tonight, and if you disagree you can do so quietly because I also feel like this is a silly thing to argue about.

So today I want to reflect on not only this year but also this decade. I set a lot of goals for myself this year, and while I didn’t achieve all of them, so many incredible things happened that I’m totally okay with that.

For Christmas in 2009, I asked my parents for a subscription to Writers Market. I believed that the book I’d been working on all through high school was ready to be published. I cringe a little now writing this, because in 2010 I still did not understand plot,  but all publication journeys have to start somewhere, right? It took nine years, a lot of help, a lot of revisions, and a lot of rejections, but last January I signed with my awesome agent Laurel Symonds. While I’ve been working on the same book for the past ten years, more than that really if you go all the way back to the very first idea, it is an entirely different book than that terrible draft I started querying agents about back in 2010. Excuse me while I cringe some more. And this past year working on revisions with Laurel has transformed it yet again. I’ve learned so much about myself as a writer in the last ten years, and in this year in particular. I’m still revising, but I’m really happy with how things are shaping up, and I can’t wait for the day when I can finally share this project with all of you.

Also in 2010, I was entering my last semester of high school, breathlessly waiting on college application decisions, and planning to go to the Seeing Eye over the summer to train with my first guide dog. I had no idea how much I would love not only working with my Mopsy girl but also how much I would love having her with me all the time. Together we went to Kenyon for four years, lived in Italy for a year, and started law school at Harvard. Now Mopsy is living with my parents, and I get home as often as I can to see her. She’ll be twelve in June, so she enjoys more snoozles in front of the fire than she used to, but she’s still up for a trot through the snow. If she feels like it. And once Mopsy retired, I got matched with my little Neutron Star. He is very different from Mops, but just as delightful in his own way, and seven years working with Mopsy has made me a better handler when it comes to Neutron. We’ve adventured all over Boston, and now we’re working on D.C.

A lot has happened to me since 2010, and I feel like a lot of it has culminated in my accomplishments in 2019. This decade, I graduated high school; went to college; got a Fulbright and lived in Italy for a year; volunteered at the New Hampshire Disability Rights Center; went to Harvard Law; decided I didn’t want to do disability rights law and wanted to be a space lawyer instead; and interned at the U.S. Department of Education, MIT, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Analytical Space, and participated in the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program. And this year, I graduated from Harvard Law, got a job at the FCC as a space lawyer, and moved to D.C. In 2010, I started querying my book. I got rejected, got some helpful advice from the agent of a friend of a friend, revised, queried again, got rejected again, revised, revised, and revised some more. In the meantime, I attended the Alpha Young Writers Workshop, wrote a bunch of short stories, and started submitting them to magazines. I was twice a finalist in the Dell Award, and I’ve had six stories published so far, including one story published in 2019. I also have a poem coming out in an anthology this spring, which I’m really excited about. I also wrote 2.9 other books this decade: my memory-wiping musical academy novel, which I’m halfway through a third draft of; my WWII Italy novella which I wrote for my senior honors thesis back in 2014 and haven’t touched since; and my middle grade space adventure novel, which I’m so, so close to the end of a first draft of but have paused on because of other projects. I kept up this writing through college, Italy, and law school, and while I admit it’s hard to do the amount of writing that I want to be doing with a full-time job, I’m still plowing on ahead with revisions for my middle grade fantasy novel.

This decade hasn’t been all sunshine and butterflies. There was a lot of rejection letters to get where I am now, including rejections from all the MFA programs I applied to, and I’d be lying if I said that didn’t hurt. In 2013, I had to have my right eye removed because it basically exploded. My year in Italy was really hard emotionally, as was my time at Harvard. We lost my special education advocate and close family friend for many years to cancer. My grandmother also passed away, as did all but one of my great-aunts and uncles, and my sixth grade math and social studies teacher whom I was very close to. My childhood dog, Kokopelli, also died, and if you have a dog you understand how heartbreaking that is and why I’m including him here.

But here I am, at the end of the decade, looking back at who I was ten years ago and who I am now and all I have been through and accomplished, and I am really proud of myself. I have a full-time job I’m enjoying, more of a social life than I’ve had in years, an awesome writing group, some truly wonderful friends, and more adventures ahead of me.

This is not only the end of the decade, but it’s also the end of 2019. I set some pretty ambitious goals for myself, and before I sign off for the year, I want to give you a quick rundown of how I actually did. I did graduate, pass the bar, get a job, and move with as little stress as I could manage. After my series of illnesses and injuries through the summer, I joined a barre studio in D.C. and I’ve been going three or four times a week. I’d like to do better with my eating habits—I kind of fell off the wagon around the holidays—and I want to get to the gym in my apartment building and do some more aerobic exercise, but I feel stronger and fitter than I have in a while, so I’m counting this as mostly a win. I set out to read 100 books this year, and today I finished my 109th book. I’m not going to finish another book before midnight, so I’m calling it at 109. And while I didn’t get to new drafts of three distinct projects, I did do an awful lot of writing this year, and everything else was so crazy this year that I forgive myself. Oh, and I blogged more, realized I was blogging too much, and became a lot less regular about it again. I’m still working on finding that happy medium, but I’m moving in the right direction. I did pretty well with all these goals. I haven’t decided what exactly I want to shoot for next year, so I’ll get back to you on that.

So how are you feeling at the end of this year and this decade? Did you meet your 2019 goals? What are your plans for the new year?

2019 Check In the Second

Hey there friends. We have reached July, which means we are halfway through 2019, which means it’s time for another check-in on my 2019 goals. I set some pretty big goals for myself in 2019, and while I’ve had a few setbacks, I feel like I’m doing well, all things considered, and I’m confident I will achieve all these goals by the end of 2019. I will certainly start making more progress once I get past the bar at the end of this month.

  1. Don’t freak out.

Okay, so a few weeks ago, I had a minor mid bar-prep meltdown. It was late, I was tired, I was pretty sure I was going to fail the bar and never finish revising my book and be really, really bad at being an adult come September, but this was like a two hour minute in which our fire alarm ran out of batteries and would not stop beeping. I pulled myself together the next morning, and I have since learned not to take practice test scores seriously if I take the practice test after 6:00 PM.

But seriously, I think I’ve been managing all this pretty well. I’m studying for the bar, which is nine or ten hours a day, seven days a week. I’m packing up all my stuff to move out of my apartment at the end of July, and I’m getting ready to move down to Virginia at the end of August. I’m also revising my novel, one baby step at a time. And I’m managing to feed myself reasonably and get a reasonable amount of sleep. A lot has been going on, and I think I’ve been handling it really well.

Oh, and since my last check-in, my stress levels have been helped significantly by the fact that I got a job! I was accepted into the attorney honors program at the Federal Communications Commission, and I’ll be starting in the satellite division (as in satellites in space) in September. This is exactly where I wanted to be, and I am so excited and so relieved.

  1. Get in shape.

I’m pretty sure I’m cursed on this one. Every time I start going to the gym regularly, something happens to bring me to a grinding halt. I got very, very sick three times over the course of spring semester, and then after investing in a summer gym membership and managing to go almost every day for most of June, I tripped down the stairs and sprained my ankle pretty badly. Like I thought it was broken and went to urgent care kind of badly. I swear studying for the bar has diverted important brain function like balance and coordination away from my feet. It’s been a week, and I’m still barely able to walk, so I’m not going to the gym any time soon, much to my chagrin. See what I mean? I’m cursed.

We are still only halfway through 2019 though, and starting in August, I won’t have the bar to worry about. My new apartment in Virginia also has a gym and an indoor pool in the abuilding, so I’m not giving up yet.

  1. Read 100 books.

As of the end of June, I’ve read fifty-five books. So I’m right on track with this one.

  1. Finish the next draft for three projects:

As I said, I’m plugging away at revisions to my middle grade fantasy adventure novel with my agent. I’m also in the middle of writing the climax for my middle grade sci fi novel (admittedly I’ve been in the middle of the climax since March), so I almost have a first draft of that project. So while I haven’t finished a single project yet, I expect to start making a lot of progress on this once the bar is over.

  1. Blog more.

I’ve already been doing a lot of blogging. I’m really enjoying writing book reviews for all of you, but I’ve been missing talking about other things with you all, like my life and writing. So I’ve been making plans for new things to talk about come August, because nothing new is happening until August. If you have any ideas for things you’d like to see me talk about, do let me know.

And that’s where I’m at for my 2019 goals. I hope you’ve all been making as much progress on your goals so far.

I’ll be back  soon with the rest of the book reviews for what I read in June, and in the meantime, I’m off to study study study.

How I plan to Conquer 2019 and Beyond

Another year is drawing to a close. I’m not gonna lie, 2018 has been kind of a mixed bag. Law school is still really hard, the news is soul-crushing, I still don’t know what I’m doing after law school, I didn’t write as much as I wanted, I didn’t get back in shape. I can go on and on about the ways I feel like I failed in 2018. But if I actually look back at 2018, that’s really just me beating up on myself.

This year, I finished my second year of law school, and I’m halfway through my third year. I spent a month working at MIT’s Office of the General Counsel last January. I learned French and studied artificial intelligence. I worked for two months at National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland, then came back to Cambridge and worked for five months at Analytical Space while studying for my fall classes, taking and passing the multistate professional responsibility exam, and starting my job search for after I graduate. At the same time, I faced the worst writer’s block I’ve ever dealt with, and I beat it. I finally finished edits on my middle grade fantasy novel, and I started querying agents with it. My story “The Year of Salted Skies,” which was third runner-up for the Dell Award back in 2017, was published, and I got some more good writing news I’m hoping to be able to share with you after the new year. I also put in a lot of effort to actually learn to cook something besides pasta (there’s a blog post coming about that I swear). And as of today I’ve read 174 books since January 1. I stress read.

Fine, there are some things I didn’t do that I wanted to do. I didn’t write as much as I wanted. I didn’t get in shape. This blog as basically become a  place for me to rant once a month about what I’m reading. But that’s why there’s 2019.

And I have big plans for 2019, people..

  1. I’m going to be finishing law school, graduating, studying for the bar, taking the bar, moving somewhere, and starting a new job. A lot of things need to happen for all of this to work the way it’s supposed to. So my first goal of 2019 is to do my best to not freak out. I’m not saying I need to stay 100% calm about it all. But I don’t want to be a walking ball of nerves for the next twelve months either.

1A. I want to get a job. To some extent this is outside my control, of course, but it is in my control to keep going. P.S. If you have space law leads for an entry-level attorney, let me know.

  1. To help with the first goal, I want to get back in shape. I’ve been spending too much time sitting and studying and when things have gotten really rough, surviving on diet Pepsi and goldfish. This will not get me through the next year. Exercise is a huge de-stressor for me, so during the spring semester, I want to build good exercise habits that I’ll be able to carry into studying for the bar over the summer.
  2. I’m setting my reading goal for 100 books in 2019, the same as it was originally in 2018. I contemplated trying for 200, but as I’ve already discussed, I have a lot going on this year. Also, I’m not sure it’s totally a good thing for me to be walking around constantly with my nose in a book, figuratively speaking of course.
  3. For writing, I plan to get to the next complete draft with three major projects: the middle grade sci fi novel, the memory-wiping academy novel, and the WWII Italy novel. My plan is to have a completed first draft of the MG sci fi novel by graduation, then to work on all the edits for the memory wiping academy novel over the summer in my non-bar-prep time (if such a thing exists), and then in the fall to finally do the rewrite for the WWII Italy novella. I’ve also been working on a short story collection set in my Phoenix Song universe, and I would love to finish first drafts of all the short stories this year if I can, but that’s above and beyond.

4A. I would love to get an agent in 2019. Of course, this is also to some extent outside my control, but I will continue to query and enter contests and network and all the other things you’re supposed to do to get an agent.

4B. To get all this done, I’m going to take a friend’s suggestion to set weekly goals for myself that are achievable, along with a weekly stretch goal that I get some reward if I complete. For example: my goal for the first week of January is to finish chapter 8 of my middle grade sci fi book. My stretch goal might be to write chapter 9, or to outline a short story, and if I also meet that stretch goal I get some reward. This system seems like it will work for me, so I’m going to give it a try and see how it goes. There’s also this #100DaysOfWriting challenge on Twitter I might try, but that might have to wait until I’m done with law school and the bar. There’s setting challenging goals for myself, and then there’s insanity.

  1. I want to blog more, and I want to blog about something other than books. Books are great. I love books lots. But there are so many cool things I want to talk about. I’d like to do some more posts from Neutron’s point of view, and I’m about halfway through that post about my cooking adventures I’ve been promising you for forever. I’m going to aim for weekly blog posts again, maybe every Friday. If there’s anything you’d like me to talk about, do let me know.

Spelling all that out, it definitely feels like there’s a lot I want to accomplish in 2019. But I also feel like going in to the new year feeling like I can accomplish all of this is the way to start out. So what are your 2019 goals?

Reading Through 2017

2017 is drawing to a close, and what a year it’s been. Personally, I survived my first year of law school, worked for the summer at the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, and started my second year of law school. I am now halfway through law school. After exploring and discarding several possible career paths, I have decided to go into space law—as in outer space. I also published two short stories this year. “Seven Signs Your Roommate is a Vampire: With Additional Advice On Surviving Orientation If It’s More Complicated” was published in issue #68 of Andromeda Spaceways, and “Polaris in the Dark” was published in the 2018 Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide anthology. Finally, my Seeing Eye dog, Mopsy, had to retire in May. She just became too anxious to keep guiding me safely. It was heartbreaking for me to retire Mopsy, and it’s still heartbreaking, even though she is now a healthy, happy pet with my parents. I returned to the Seeing Eye in July and was match with my second Seeing Eye dog, Neutron, and we’ve been flying around Cambridge ever since.

 

I also read a lot. I set a goal to read 50 books this year. I read 77. I did a fair amount of rereading of old favorites, especially around exam times. Favorite books are like literary comfort food.  Of the new books I read, most were fine, but they were just fine. A few were downright terrible. And some were truly exemplary. Here are my favorites:

 

Heartless by Marissa Meyer: I expected a lot from this book after Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles series. This book did not live up to my very high expectations, but I really did enjoy it. It’s the story of the Queen of Hearts and how she became The Queen of Hearts. The writing was great, and the world was a lot of fun, and the ending was hearbreaking and beautiful.

 

In a Glass Grimmly and The Grimm Conclusion by Adam Gidwitz: I read the first book in this series, A Tale Dark and Grimm, in summer 2016, but didn’t get to the second or third books before the end of the year. So I finished the series this year. It was great. While the first book retold all the stories of Hansel and Gretel, the second book told new stories about Jack and Jill (the ones who go up the hill and fall down). Except Jack is also the same Jack from Jack and the Beanstock, so there are giants involved. The third book is a mash’?eaup of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, The Juniper Tree, and The Boy Who Left Home To Find Fear (which is a great title), plus a truly amazing metafictional arc. The narrator’s voice and snark reminds me a bit of Lemony Snicket in A Series of Unfortunate Events, which made it super fun even with all the blood and guts. Seriously I was laughing out loud throughout this whole book. So if you like retold fairy stales, snark, and can tolerate a fair amount of blood and guts, you’re sure to enjoy these books.

 

Dangerous by Shannon Hale: Space camp goes wrong and teenagers get superpowers from alien techildrenlogy and then have to save the world from an alien invasion, all with a dash of evil megalomaniacs, conniving scientists, and teenage romance. The Goodreads reviews on this book were split between those who hated it with a fiery passion and those who loved it to pieces. I’ve always liked Shannon Hale’s books, so I gave it a try. I really enjoyed it, and I would say that it is a decently good book. It was fun, fast, and action-packed. There was a little too much romance for me, and the middle of the book got kind of weird. Also the protagonist is a half-Latina girl with a disability, and though some aspects of the representation of her disability were upsetting to me, by the end of the book most of my issues resolved. On the whole, I had a lot of fun with this book. There was space and science and space and geekiness and space and fun gadgets (seriously I want Maisie’s impact boots) and did I mention space? What I particularly liked about this book was that while the stakes were high with the whole save-the-world plot, there were also very high, very personal stakes that kept the story grounded. So if you like whacky science fiction adventure with space and aliens and superpowers and romance, this book might be for you.

 

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng: I read this book for book club, and there was a lot to enjoy about it. The emotions were so raw and realistic, and I enjoyed the multiple perspectives on the same moments. It sort of reminded me of the World War II Italy novella I wrote for my senior honors thesis at Kenyon (the one that is still languishing in a drawer but I’ve been thinking about it). There was virtually no overlap in the subject matter between this book and my WWII Italy project; it just had a similar feel to me. Lydia, the favorite daughter of the mixed-race Lee family, is dead. I’m not spoiling anything; that’s how the book starts. The story is about how the different members of the family cope with her death and try to understand what happened to her. We also get Lydia’s point of view throughout the book. I do have to say I could only read this book in small bites because either the emotions were just too much or because I got kind of frustrated with the characters. There were definitely times when it felt like one of those sitcom episodes where if the characters would just sit down and talk about what happened, all the problems would get resolved and no one would be dead. We decided in our book club discussion that Everything I Never Told You was a very apt title, because no one was telling anybody anything. But by the end of the book, I was in tears. Also, sentence to sentence, word to word, the writing is beautiful, and I can be a sucker for that (as long as the rest of the book is good too).

 

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell: This book was beautiful. It’s a new adult book, about a girl going off to college with her twin sister, but her sister wants to put some space between them, her creative writing professor is crushingly disappointed that she’s writing fanfiction, and basically she has to figure out life and friends and writing her own stories. This book hit me like a punch in the gut. A fabulous, fabulous punch in the gut. But there were definitely moments when it was too real. I can totally relate to so much of it. I don’t have a twin sister, and I never actually wrote fanfiction before college (and I’ve only started, and haven’t finished, a fanfic since I went to college). But I definitely had serious social anxiety around eating in the dining hall when I first went to college and I always felt kind of out of place in the creative writing program because I generally prefer to write young adult speculative fiction rather than literary fiction, and I felt like some professors could have an unfortunate attitude towards genre fiction in the creative writing program. Also, the ideas of growing up and Harry Potter ending and everything in this book were really relatable. Basically this book is beautiful and everyone should read it.

 

Flying Lessons & Other Stories edited by Ellen Oh: This is a middle grade short story collection produced by We Need Diverse Books, all about the impact that reading and learning has on kids. Each story featured a character from an underrepresented group in fiction. I really enjoyed all the stories—though some were a little younger than I like to read. They were fun and adorable and the message about reading and diversity is so important. I definitely recommend.

 

Miss Perregrine’s Peculiar Children series by Ransom Riggs: This whole series was a wild ride, but if you’re willing to go with it, it’s a blast. When his grandfather is killed by a monster only Jacob can see, he goes on a journey to learn about his grandfather’s past and winds up travelling through time (sort of) and battling the monsters and their masters alongside his grandfather’s childhood friends (who happen to still be children). This is the best description I can give. But it makes sense in the books I swear. This has to be one of the most bizzarre series I’ve read in a while, but it was a ton of fun and once I got into it I couldn’t put it down.

 

Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, and Anne of the Island by L. M. Montgomery: I read Anne of Green Gables years ago when I was growing up. I have it in Braille—it’s six volumes. This summer, I reread Anne of Green Gables in preparation for watching the new Netflix show, which is quite good by the way. I really enjoyed reading about Anne’s adventures, and it all took on so much more meaning now that I’m older. And then I discovered that Anne’s adventures didn’t end with Anne of Green Gables, so I kept reading. By this point, I have actually read the first six books in the series, but in my opinion the series goes downhill after the third book. Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, and Anne of the Island are definitely worth reading, though, whatever age you are.

 

Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue: This was another book club book. We read Behold the Dreamers  over the summer in conjunction with Lucky Boy, which I’ll talk about next. Behold the Dreamers tells the story of two families affected by the financial crisis in 2007, a family of Cameroonian immigrants struggling to get a foothold in New York and the family of the Wall Street executive they work for. The whole book is from the point of view of the immigrants, which I really love. We see the struggles of these two very different families, and even though their struggles are different, they are their struggles. This is a sad but realistic perspective on the American dream.

 

Lucky Boy by Shanthi Sekaran: This is another story about immigrants. We read Lucky Boy for book club over the summer with Behold the Dreamers. The two books actually pair really well tgr.d and I recommend reading them together. Lucky Boy also  tells the stories of two families, a young woman who immigrates to America illegally from Mexico, becomes pregnant along the way, gives birth in America, and struggles to raise her son, and a second-generation Indian couple desperate to have a child. The immigrant is detained and her child is placed in foster care with the couple, who fall in love with him and take steps to adopt him. This is an  intense look at the immigration and foster care systems in California, as well as a heartbreaking contemplation of parenthood, because there is no good ending to this story.

 

Hiroshima by John Hersey: I don’t normally read nonfiction. I do enough of that for class. But when I was at the Seeing Eye training with Neutron this summer, there was a library of hardcopy Braille books, and anyone who knows me knows that when possible, I prefer to read in hardcopy Braille. There’s nothing quite like holding an actual book in your hands. Hiroshima was one of the books in this library, and since anyone who knows me also knows I have a minor World War II obsession, one thing led to another and I read the book. I’m the first to admit that my WWII obsession is more to do with the war in Europe than the war in the Pacific, and honestly I didn’t know much about what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki except that an atomic bomb was dropped. I found the book Hiroshima, which chronicled the events in the city from the points of view of several people who lived through the bomb, to be rich in detail. Gruesome detail to be sure, but I think it is important to know these details, and I was glad I was able to read this book.

 

Flame in the Mist by Renee Ahdieh: I enjoyed this book a lot more than I thought I would, and this was a pleasant surprise. It takes place in a fantasy world mirroring ancient Japan. The daughter of an honored samurai is on her way to marry the prince when her convoy is attacked. Assassins have been hired to kill her. There were times when the writing was a bit telly for me, and I was underwhelmed by the romantic subplot, but the book gripped me from start to finish. The characters were really intricate, and the plot was fast-paced and full of secrets and complications. I’m really looking forward to the sequel next year.

 

The Book of Ember trilogy by Jeanne DuPrau: There are technically four books in this series, but the third is a prequel and is neither necessary to underst  the books nor worth bothering with, in my opinion. The main trilogy, The City of Ember, The People of Sparks, and the Diamond of Darkhold detail the adventures of two children from Ember, an isolated city in a world of complete darkness. The generator that powers Ember is failing, and when the kids find a half-destroyed set of instructions, they go in search of a way to leave the city. These are fun and action-packed science fiction books, with a lot of adventure and some really interesting world-building. I’ve been trying to read more science ficong books this year, and these were a great start.

 

Shades of Magic series by V.E. Schwab: I can’t believe it took me so long to discover these books. Acsually, I can because my to read list is over 500 books long. The best that can be said about my delayed discovery is that I didn’t have to wait for the conclusion. These books were just remarkable. There are four worlds, each with a city named London, each with different amounts of magic. Only a few people can travel between the worlds, but a dark magic is threatening all the worlds. I’m doing a poor job of describing these books, but they’re really fabulous. I was gripped from start to finish, and the books have stayed with me since. I would love to go back and reread them at some point, now that I’ve finished them.

 

Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate: This is another book club book. Half the people in book club really didn’t like this book, but I did. There are two storylines in this book: in 1939, five children are kidnapped from their family’s shantyboat on the Mississippi and taken to a brutal orphanage as part of an elaborate adoption scheme where poor children were sold to rich families from the 1920s through the 1950s; in the present day, a young lawyer comes home to care for her ill father and discovers her family’s secret connection to the past child trafficking scandal. In my opinion, the present-day story is bad, and the book would be stronger without it. But the story in the past is really gripping, and I was fascinated to learn about this episode in our own history which I had never heard of before. I would certainly recommend this book, though with the reservation that the present storyline is kind of a waste of slace.

 

Every Soul A Star by Wendy Mass: Three kids meet at a camp ground and witness a total solar eclipse. Each of the kids grows and learns and changes because of the other kids. This is a really sweet, heartwarming book which is also full of space nerdiness, so all in all, perfect.

 

Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan: This was another heartwarming middle grade book. When her parents are killed in a car accident, a twelve-year-old genius is taken in by a friend, and her journey dealing with her grief and aclimating to life with her surogate family changes her and all the people around her.

 

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon: This book was slow to start but picked up and had me in tears by the end. When Christopher’s neighbor’s dog is killed, he sets out to solve the mystery and ends up uncovering many more secrets about his family along the way. I think this book ,s a thoughtful representation of someone with autism, though of course it should not be taken as indicative of the experiences of everyone on the spectrum. I was particularly impressed with the amount of agency Christopher had, and I loved his voice and character and was routing for him the whole way. A very good read.

 

The 2018 Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide edited by Sean Weaver and Corie Weaver: This is a collection of science fiction short stories for kids, all featuring diverse characters—girls, kids of different races, and kids with disabilities. Yes, my story “Polaris in the Dark” is in this anthology, but it’s really a great collection of stories. Aliens, robots, space, science, and kids having adventures fill all the pages. I read this whole book in one sitting, because I was having so much fun. Each story was like its own little gem, and I recommend this book to everyone, whatever age you are.

 

The Fairy-Tale Detectives by Michael Buckley: When the sisters Grimm are sent to live with the grandmother they’d believed to be dead, they discover that they are descended from the Brothers Grimm and it is their destiny to solve crimes in the community of fairytale creatures. They’ve just begun their training when their grandmother is kidnapped by a giant. This was a really fun and exciting book, and I can’t wait to get into the rest of the series.

 

The Children of the Red King books 1-5 by Jenny Nimmo: I just finished the fifth book of this series today. There are three more books, but unfortunately I won’t be able to read the next three books in the next three hours. The first book, Midnight for Charlie Bone, was another book that i own in hardcopy Braille, reread this year, and discovered there was more to the series. I have really enjoyed these books so far. They’re not perfect, certainly, but they’re a lot of fun. Charlie is one of the Children of the Red King, endowed with the ability to travel into photographs and paintings and speak to the people in the past. Because of his power, he is forced to attend Bloor’s Academy, where he discovers all sorts of sinister plots and works to make things right with his friends. I’m looking forward to diving into the rest of this series in the new year.

 

And that’s it. 2018 is just around the corner, filled with new books to read, new stories to write, and of course more law school. I’m going to try to read a hundred books next year. I need to make a dent in that to-read list, after all. I also want to get back into blogging more regularly. Neutron is nudging me with his paw because he hasn’t had a chance to say hello yet. And I want to finish the ten or so writing projects I started in 2017.

 

Happy New Year!

New Year: New Goals

Actually, they’re mostly the same goals.

 

In 2014, I graduated from college. I was third runner-up for the Dell Award, and my first story was published. I finished drafts of two novels. I was awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship, and I traveled to Assisi and began my year in Italy. I applied to creative writing masters of fine arts programs for next year.

 

But now, 2014 is over, and 2015 is upon us.

 

This year, my goals are simple:

 

  1. By the time I return from Italy at the end of June, one of those aforementioned novels will be edited and ready to start submitting:

At this point, I’ve got three novels on my computer in varying states of desperately-needing-revision. So I’m going to revise. I’m going back to the small child magician novel, which I set aside before my senior year of college in order to work on my honors novel. I will definitely have this novel in submittable condition by June, possibly sooner at the rate I’m going. Maybe I’ll even get back to the honors novel too. But one thing at a time.

 

2.  I will keep this website updated on a semi-regular basis:

Really. I swear. It’s going to happen. I made myself a calendar of posts, and I always stick to my calendars.

 

3. I will actually use my Twitter account and tweet on a semiregular basis:

Last year it was Facebook. This year it’s Twitter.

 

4. I will continue writing and submitting short stories:

Pretty self-explanitory. I’m already doing it. So my goal is to continue doing it.

 

5.  I will make some decisions about what I want to do with my life:

I’ve had some experiences in the last few months that have changed my ideas about this. I’m not sure I want to get a doctorate in comparative literature anymore. I’m not even sure that being a fulltime writer is the best decision for me, even though it’s been my dream since I was little. Not that I wouldn’t be able to be productive, but I’m very close to being a full-time writer now, because I only teach in the mornings, and I feel like if all I was doing was writing, I might go insane. This doesn’t mean I’m not going to keep writing, because of course I do. And this also doesn’t mean that I don’t want to get an MFA in creative writing. I still want to do that, for myself and for my writing. But I need to make some decisions about what I want to do after that.

 

I have two other goals that are worth mentioning:

 

  1. To be accepted into an MFA program.

 

2.  To have another story published.

 

These are both obvious, based on what I already said. These goals are also out of my control. But that doesn’t mean I can’t take steps to accomplish them.

 

So here I come, 2015!

New Years Resolutions Take 2

Back in January, I wrote a post about my New Year’s resolutions, and now, at the beginning of September, I thought it might be a good idea to check in on how I’ve done, celebrate some successes, and renew the ones that could use some renewing.

 

1.  Post on Facebook Every Day:

 

To be entirely honest, I haven’t posted on Facebook every single day this year, but I do almost every day, and I have gotten myself into the habit of actually using Facebook like a normal person, which was the goal underlying the “post every day” bit. So I declare this resolution a success.

 

2.  Reach 200 rejection letters or get published, whichever comes first:

 

I’m not going to say exactly how many rejections I have because I don’t want to share and no one really wants to know that, but in all likelihood, I will reach 200 by the end of the calendar year.

 

On the other hand, I have made 200 a moot point. After 137 rejections, my story “The Year of Salted Skies” was named the third runner-up for the 2014 Dell Award, and after 150 rejections, my story “The Collector” was accepted for publication at Cast of Wonders! And it was published .

 

Victory!

 

3.  Blog semi-regularly:

 

So…

 

About that…

 

I could make all sorts of excuses for why I haven’t blogged—finishing my thesis and taking my honors exams, applying to graduate schools, waiting to hear from said graduate schools and from the Fulbright, graduating, preparing for a year in Italy, expanding the World War II Italy novella into a full length novel, all that important stuff. But I am not going to bemoan or attempt to excuse my lack of blogging activity. Instead, I am going to renew this resolution. 2014 is not over yet, and the new school year is about to begin. This year I will be teaching instead of learning, and this is strange and a little scary to me. Also Italy, which is awesome and must be blogged about. So I will make a new school year’s resolution to blog more. Please pester me if I don’t.

 

But, lack of blogging aside, I have to say, this has been the year! I graduated from college! I got a Fulbright scholarship to teach in Assisi, Italy! And I got published! And if I did all that—and kept my Facebook resolution—then I will get better at blogging.

 

And once I get better at blogging, maybe I’ll figure out this thing called Twitter.