Year in Review
2018 was an odd year for me. It started well, with high hopes for the novel that went on submission at the end of 2017--but as months went by, I lost hope. I got busy outlining a new project. This one proved difficult to get started. I tried two openings, searching for the right protagonist and the right voice, until I finally found it on the third try. Once I found the voice, the novel started taking shape. I was still painfully slow, but eventually I had a zero draft, and then the first, rough edit out to alpha-readers at the end of November. I'm still waiting for most of them to come back to me, but the early indications are that it's not going to be a total disaster… So that took most of my writing year. It must seem ridiculous to those who can knock out a novel in a month but I'm not that lucky/gifted. I'll take what I can get! Another development this year--not really writing-related, or only at a very long stretch--is that I decided to scra...