![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Annual State of the Writer
Feb. 19th, 2025 08:18 pmA post that feels a bit silly to write given the state of the everything, but as we cling to our shreds of normalcy...
Boskone has come and gone (although I was not at it and will not be at it unless it starts requiring masks again) and as Boskone is the anniversary of my deciding to take my writing career seriously, it is also when I take public stock of my writing career, of which there has actually not been much this year. One publication, one sale. The sale, incidentally, was an exercise in matching story to market-- me looking at a story going "This is quite different in tone from most of the other stuff I've written; it will probably want to be in a magazine a bit different from the ones I usually submit to." And indeed it will be. I don't know exactly when yet because publishing timelines, but I'll tell you when I do.
I suppose if one is looking at the year generously one might say it was a time of skill building. I got deeply into fanfiction exchanges (which I am now stopping for a while because I do not have the spoons to do those and original writing and work on the long-term fic projects; I will likely reappear for Fic in a Box and Yuletide each year), and writing to prompt in a variety of different fandoms and genres did a lot to stretch my writing abilities. Honestly, writing to deadline on no spoons did a lot to stretch my writing abilities in and of itself since it forced me to work down from "everything must be a wholly complete epic" to telling smaller, shorter stories just so I could get them done in the allotted timeframes! That is a skill that will serve me well in submitting to anthologies.
Writing the long DS9 epic continues to teach me things about constructing a long, heavily-foreshadowed story, particularly in terms of ingraining "trust the story." The story will get me where it needs to go if I keep writing and don't think too far ahead. It knows where it wants to be; I just need to let it get there.
As far as non-writing aspects of writing career... well, the thing I actually wanted to do when I set out to become a Published Author was become a person it was reasonable to have on convention panels. And I do seem to have become that; they let me be on 5 panels (the maximum I said I was willing to do; I was a bit surprised they actually gave me five) at Arisia, including the potential lightning rod of the Neil Gaiman panel and one panel where the other two panelists were people with incredibly longstanding, impressive careers.
So now I need a new writing goal. I am not certain what that should be, although it should be something achievable within the current state of the world. I am not going to be the person who writes the Great Resistance Novel. (Or at least I'm not going to be the person who sets out to write the Great Resistance Novel. Whatever's going on in the world always seems to creep into the writing anyway--just look at "Flight Plans Through the Dust of Dreams," in which I was tapped into the zeitgeist enough to write an examination of terrorism just before January 6-- but any time I set out to do that it winds up being terrible.) Becoming the kind of person who could be a plausible guest of honor at a convention is a much more long-term goal. But I should come up with something. Because my whole life cannot be how the world is awful.
Boskone has come and gone (although I was not at it and will not be at it unless it starts requiring masks again) and as Boskone is the anniversary of my deciding to take my writing career seriously, it is also when I take public stock of my writing career, of which there has actually not been much this year. One publication, one sale. The sale, incidentally, was an exercise in matching story to market-- me looking at a story going "This is quite different in tone from most of the other stuff I've written; it will probably want to be in a magazine a bit different from the ones I usually submit to." And indeed it will be. I don't know exactly when yet because publishing timelines, but I'll tell you when I do.
I suppose if one is looking at the year generously one might say it was a time of skill building. I got deeply into fanfiction exchanges (which I am now stopping for a while because I do not have the spoons to do those and original writing and work on the long-term fic projects; I will likely reappear for Fic in a Box and Yuletide each year), and writing to prompt in a variety of different fandoms and genres did a lot to stretch my writing abilities. Honestly, writing to deadline on no spoons did a lot to stretch my writing abilities in and of itself since it forced me to work down from "everything must be a wholly complete epic" to telling smaller, shorter stories just so I could get them done in the allotted timeframes! That is a skill that will serve me well in submitting to anthologies.
Writing the long DS9 epic continues to teach me things about constructing a long, heavily-foreshadowed story, particularly in terms of ingraining "trust the story." The story will get me where it needs to go if I keep writing and don't think too far ahead. It knows where it wants to be; I just need to let it get there.
As far as non-writing aspects of writing career... well, the thing I actually wanted to do when I set out to become a Published Author was become a person it was reasonable to have on convention panels. And I do seem to have become that; they let me be on 5 panels (the maximum I said I was willing to do; I was a bit surprised they actually gave me five) at Arisia, including the potential lightning rod of the Neil Gaiman panel and one panel where the other two panelists were people with incredibly longstanding, impressive careers.
So now I need a new writing goal. I am not certain what that should be, although it should be something achievable within the current state of the world. I am not going to be the person who writes the Great Resistance Novel. (Or at least I'm not going to be the person who sets out to write the Great Resistance Novel. Whatever's going on in the world always seems to creep into the writing anyway--just look at "Flight Plans Through the Dust of Dreams," in which I was tapped into the zeitgeist enough to write an examination of terrorism just before January 6-- but any time I set out to do that it winds up being terrible.) Becoming the kind of person who could be a plausible guest of honor at a convention is a much more long-term goal. But I should come up with something. Because my whole life cannot be how the world is awful.
