Yuletide Reveals

I wrote two stories, the first for the main collection, the second for the madness collection. It's probably not a coincidence that they're both gen about female characters.

"Pick Yourself Up and Get On With Your Life" (AO3 | LJ), In Plain Sight, gen, 2000 words, general audiences, spoilers through season 4 for shameless2shoes: "So," Marshall said. "Mark's still on your couch."

"Adrenaline Junkies" (AO3 | LJ), Fast and the Furious Series, Mia, Letty, gen, 900 words, teen, spoilers through Fast Five for eternalscribe: Mia leaves while they're out. She puts the letters she wrote where Dom and Brian will see them, hitches Nico higher on her hip, and leaves her car in the airport parking lot with no intention of ever coming back.

December Writing Goals Report, January Writing Goals

Report on December:

• Write my Yuletide story. - Check!


• Start editing book two. - No. I decided that after Yuletide I needed a break and this could wait.


• Finish uploading all of my fic to AO3. (My goal is to do this before Yuletide reveals.) - Not quite. I did a lot, but I have about forty or so left. That will be part of tomorrow's to-do list.


• Write miscellaneous snippets as inspired. - Check.


• Say positive things on Twitter. - Eh. I don't think I was particularly cranky, so that's better.

Goals for January:

Today is my birthday and I have tomorrow off too, so these goals actually don't start until Tuesday.

• Spend at least fifteen minutes per day editing book two.


• Start writing book three. I haven't decided what this is going to be yet, so I'm not sure what's my daily goals are going to be. I have two days to figure it out.
  
• Write miscellaneous snippets as inspired.


• Say positive things on Twitter.

2011 Year In Review - Projects

For reference, my 2011 goals post is here.

Reading
I read more books this year than last year (I'll get the full list up today or tomorrow, or next weekend if I don't manage it before then). I still don't feel like I'm reading as many books as I want to; I need to start remembering that the internet will still be here when I get back.

Writing
From last year's list, I finished the second novel and the Leighton/Vicky-T story. I'm sure I did a lot more of value with my writing, but those were huge projects I finished. The downside to finishing them is that I finished them at about the same time and felt a little lost afterwards. I may still do the end of year fic round-up meme, and if I do, I'm sure I'll have more to say about my writing in 2011 then.

Social Life
I did not do as well with the friendship I needed to put some work into, but the rest of it has worked out fairly well. I got to spend in-person time with the people I wanted to see, and I got to spend more time with my local fannish friends.

2012 Projects and Goals

I've been feeling stuck recently, so some of these are directed at getting me to feel unstuck. I've also organized them into three categories that reflect my three main priorities in life.

Priority: Health (Physical, Mental, Emotional)

Start walking again. I haven't been going for my morning walk in several months because I have plantar fasciitis in one foot which makes walking very far hurt, plus one of the treatments is to rest until it heals. Getting back to walking relies primarily on my body's healing ability, but in the meantime, I'm going to continue doing all the things I've been doing to help it along. The thing I haven't been doing that I could possibly be better about is icing it. (That's a hard one to do in the winter.) When it does get better (it's better now than it was, and I'm hoping I can start walking again in February or March), I need to keep in mind that it will take some time to work back up to three miles, and I just have to be okay with that and not push it.

Go to bed on time. I'm so much happier when I get enough sleep, and I end up staying up late reading more than I would like.

Make at least two new recipes per month. Like most people, I tend to cook the same things over and over again. For the most part, this isn't a problem, but I've been bored with the same old things recently. That tends to lead to me not cooking and then cobbling together things I don't really want to eat that my body isn't always happy with. I need to shake up my cooking. As a bonus, I think this will help with feeling stuck. I will take vegan, gluten free suggestions of things to try.

Go to the beach. I was flipping through AAA's magazine, and there was an ad for some special at a hotel in Monterey. I haven't been to the beach in a while, and I think my soul needs it. Things I need to deal with: 1. I feel weirdly guilty for thinking about traveling just for me and not to visit friends. 2. I don't want to be away from the internet for that long.

Priority: Writing

Edit and sell books one and two. I don't think book two needs very much in the way of editing, and it's definitely good enough to be sold as is. Book one is probably more or less good enough, and it works as an after the fact prequel to book two.

Write at least one book. It took me thirteen months to write book two, but I did the math and I really only averaged a little over two hundred words per day. That means there are a lot of days I didn't write. Also, the bit of NaNo I did do showed me that I can easily write over a thousand words per day without giving up the other things I want to do with my time. I can write at least one book this year.

Finish/post all the little finishable/postable things I have lying about. I think I will try to pick a month (maybe March again) and try to have everything ready for posting by then, and then post one ficcish thing every day that month. I could make other fan fic related goals, but while I will probably end up writing a lot of fic, there is no possible way I can predict what it will be at this point.

Priority: Friendships

Plan a trip to Chicago at a time when eleanor_lavish can also go. If we can make this happen, then lakeeffectgirl, schuyler, siryn99, eleanor_lavish, and I can all spend time together as a whole group of fangirls. This would also guarantee that I get to see all of them this year.

Connect with the people I love but don't email every day at least once a month. In some cases (allegram and Brad) this means phone calls, in some cases (my family) it means hosting dinner and nudging other people to host dinner, and in some cases (norwich36 and idahophoenix) it means fangirl outings. Whatever it is, it's important to me to do it.

Make at least one new local friend. I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to do this. I might finally write the "fangirl seeks same" craigslist ad I've been thinking about for months. Or maybe I'll try to start a queer lit (of the lit about characters who happen to be queer variety) book group. Whatever it is, I think I need at least one more local friend. I will take suggestions for other ways to meet people I could be friends with.

Dewey Decimal Project: 791.437 Lane

Anthony Lane is the reason I started reading The New Yorker. My parents subscribe, and I used to flip through to read the cartoons. But then there was the day when I was lying on the living room floor paging through an issue when I ran into a truly arresting black and white photo of a pair of women. I have a very vivid memory of this photo on the page and the magazine on the dark brown carpet of my parents' living room. The article with the photo was Anthony Lane's review of The Dreamlife of Angels. I had no interest in seeing the movie, but I loved the review, and I started reading The New Yorker primarily for Anthony Lane's movie reviews.

Several years later, he published Nobody's Perfect: Writings From The New Yorker, and I'd been interested in reading it ever since. This year, I got it from PaperBackSwap and dived in on one of my trips that required air travel. I kept reading on my other air travel trips I took, and finished it in a final push yesterday. All in all, it took me eight months to read this book.

The first half of the book is entirely movie reviews. This is the part of the book I highly recommend reading, although not all in one sitting. Lane's writing is fantastic, but it can be a lot to take if you read very much of it at once. In the Introduction, he says that "the primary task of the critic, (and nobody has surpassed the late Ms. Kael in this regard), is the recreation of texture - not telling moviegoers what they should see, which is entirely their prerogative, but filing a sensory report on the kind of experience into which they will be wading, or plunging, should they decide to risk a ticket." I have not read any of Pauline Kael's movie reviews, but having read over three hundred pages of Lane's, I can say that he very much succeeds in this task.

The other aspect of the movie section that's highly entertaining is that I have seen many of the movies he reviewed. Lane started at The New Yorker in 1993, and the mid-nineties are the years when my mother and I went to nearly every movie playing at the local art house theater. Lane also covers many of the big name movies of the years, and that's half the fun of the reviews read at a distance. He praises the dance scene from Pulp Fiction as his favorite in the movie and calls Speed "the movie of the year." The delight of seeing what he thought of movies that I either remember or consider lots of fun even decades on (he hated Con Air, but people of my generation love it - or I do, anyway) fits in with one of his other pronouncements about movie reviewing: "Whenever possible, pass sentence on a movie the day after it comes out. Otherwise, wait fifty years."

We move from movies to books, and then to profiles. This is where I really had trouble continuing on with the book. Anthony Lane in small doses is fantastic. Anthony Lane on movies is always delightful to read. Anthony Lane on books and profiles, particularly more than three hundred pages of them, brings home how uninterestingly privileged he is. The books and profiles sections are primarily about white men, many of whom are dead, a fair number of whom are British, and none of whom I have any interest in knowing more about. Because I read The New Yorker selectively - I only read parts that seem interesting - I don't often notice the extent of its privilege, even though I know it's there. Lane's book really brought home the level to which it's there. Additionally, I found much of the books and profiles sections boring. I'm never going to read Thomas Pynchon, so I'm not sure why I would find a six-page profile of him interesting. What made this bearable was that even in the midst of these are Lane's delightful turns of phrase that make me laugh.