(Only in my head does that sound like a marriage proposal. But anyways…)

Tomorrow I’ll be heading out for a repeat viewing of Sherlock Holmes 2: A Game Of Shadows with a fellow writing group member but before I will be picking out a new Moleskine notebook. Not a hard-cover, but one of those slender soft-cover ones. I used one at random for an older, throw-away project and hadn’t considered using it for a novel until I’d gotten tired of the bulky, spiral bound notebook I’d decided on for Blood of Wolves. Portability is really key. So, new Moleskine, and then collating all my random notes into one place. And then, February, next novel.

As for Blood of Wolves, I’ve made some next-novel notes (if I’m lucky enough to see it come to that) and I am waiting on the Betas before tackling last story massaging and line edits. (See? There it is over there. Shiny. Incomplete, but shiny.)

Is it crazy to hope that I could start drafting queries and sending it out in the spring? Maybe. It may also be crazy to try tackling the final edits while drafting something new, but hey, I’m gonna try.  I want to start staggering the writing process, and since I’m beholden to no one, the only things that can be inconvenienced are the cats, who do a lot of inconveniencing themselves. The short stories will be the monthly side project: every month, one gets polished up, and then starts making the rounds. Besides that, the only thing left on my January writing to do’s is sending out a revised version of The Big Picture to the Tesseracts 16 anthology slush pile. The story might be a perfect fit for it, and thanks to Andy for the tip. Fingers crossed.

Oh, and the January vacation writing project has hit 8,500 words. Mua-ha-ha.

Not the Conan Doyle version so much. I’ve read some of the original canon, and enjoyed them, but always felt that Conan Doyle held back too much, so you couldn’t ride along really. Then I got hooked on the Laurie R. King books. (Terribly hooked.) And since then, I have become utterly obsessed with the Robert Downey Jr./Guy Ritchie version and the BBC Sherlock series.

The finale for Season Two of Sherlock aired the other night and it was epic and awesome. Series co-creator Steven Moffat tweeted before the airing: What a melancholy day. A day for a great man to fall and a good man to cry. The end of an era begins at 9 o’clock tonight, BBC1. #sherlock

Now, everyone’s been screen-capping Sherlock and John in various states with those words used quite literally. They show Sherlock falling, and they show John desolate, either watching Sherlock fall or at Sherlock’s grave.

But I don’t think that’s what Moffat had in mind when he said it.

For viewers of the series, remember back in the first season, (possibly the first episode, I’d have to check) John is asking Lestrade why they put up with Sherlock. And Lestrade answers, “Sherlock Holmes is a great man, and some day, if we’re very very lucky, he might even be a good one.”

We watched a great man fall, but before that we watched a good man cry while he said goodbye to his friend, John Watson.

At least, that’s how it all makes the most sense to me.

Now, hopefully we don’t have to wait two years to get to see Season Three.

In fact, looking back, I’d have to say that 2011, as far as years go, was my best in a while. A long while.

This was the year when I felt for the first time validated.

External validation, however much I’m not supposed to need it, came with my first publication in a small press and my acceptance into Viable Paradise — two things I thought were years away, if possible at all. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to express how much they meant to me. It still feels like my shell has been cracked open. Besides the take-away of meeting an incredible bunch of talented and funny and dear people on top of the accumulated knowledge of decades of publishing and writing acumen by professionals whose work I enjoy and whose opinions I trust and value, I left Viable Paradise knowing, at long last, that I’m not crazy. That what I want to do is valuable, and that it’s within my grasp so long as I continue to reach for it.

(Not that my Writing Group hasn’t been awesome in that regard. Sylvie, Aura, Julia, Andy and Randy have been so very important to me these last years. But we are friends, too, and there is always the worry that kindness born of friendship can hold back the critical tongue.)

This was also the first year where I validated myself. I turned my wishes into promises, and kept them. I submitted stories. I applied to Viable Paradise and when I was accepted I didn’t talk myself out of it because of fear of not being any good, of not belonging, of not having the money, of being scared shiftless of flying — any of it.

Fuck fear. 

I also completed (even if it was cutting it damn close) the first pass of the novel revision. Not done, as I constantly remind myself, but a milestone, one that had I missed would have spiraled me backwards into that nebulous never-where of writing/not-writing. It was the first external goal that I didn’t talk myself out of or let slip by through inaction.

And like the first completed draft, the first completed revision, the first anything, once I’ve done it, the mental stumbling block is lifted away and there will be no going back. I could go on about wishing I hadn’t wasted the last 20 years of my life not doing what it is my heart has been singing since I was born, but fuck it. No more whining about what’s gone. All it does is eats up today, and all my tomorrows.

I write. This is what I do. Nothing else matters worth a damn.

So here’s to 2012. I expect good things of it, and myself.

And I’ll share it all here.

Only in the sense of not having a big old novel hanging over my head. Doesn’t mean there will be no writing. Just … I’m going to be stress-free about it. I have some fiddly bits I want to organize — there is a Canadian anthology that I think might be a great fit for one of the two stories I workshopped at Viable Paradise, for starters. Get the revised novel draft out to my Beta Readers. Nail down the plans for the next three months. A 2011 Did Not Suck blog post brewing.

(And I’m writing a little fan fiction. SHHH. Don’t tell. I’m having way too much fun with it and sending it in pieces to the writing group. It’s my January fun-project. Going to focus on dialogue, plot and description.)

And schedule emergency surgery on my Macbook. Poor thing has been oddly twitchy as of late. The curser was starting to jump randomly in bodies of text, making for interesting input errors, but in the last three days they stopped being so random. Upside is that I’m confident I am not imagining it or that I am having invisible fingers typing and selecting text while I am unawares. Downside is that it will involve opening her up and trusting her to a friend to figure out and repair the issue. The last three days especially — using my laptop has become very difficult. Makes me sad. I’ve written so much on this laptop! It can’t die yet! (And I’m too cheap to want to buy a new computer, as dead sexy as the Mac Airs might be.)

Little Macbook, I am replacing my iPhone, not you! I love you. Be good, little Macbook! Be good!

I might have to turn off the trackpad and get really familiar with the keyboard shortcuts. Really familiar.

The ball dropped, we wooped, we pulled the crackers apart with a satisfying bang and a whiff of silver fulminate, and out popped the favor. Mine was a pocket pen.

Brought it home. Tried it out on a piece of paper, but nothing came out. I ran the ball point round and round, pressing circles into the paper.

Not very auspicious, I thought.

But I kept at it. Surely it couldn’t be dead, right? Round and round and round, and I was just about to give up and count it as a loss.

And then finally — sputter, ink, and long, black loops start to flow smoothy.

The naturally occurring metaphor. Not so rare after all.

@ 8:19 am I’ve just posted to the blog. I have iPad Today running on the Apple TV. My coffee is beside me and it’s time to get working. These next two scenes are among the largest of the novel. They cover some of the most important action in the novel and offer some of the biggest emotional punch. The length of these scenes has been a sore spot for me. They are two to three times as long as any of the other scenes, and it upsets my sense of symmetry. But it may be a spurious concern.

@ 11:56 am Breaking for now, some 2,400 words under my belt. As for that big scene I was worried about? Chopped into three pieces, not two, and now have to rewrite from two separate viewpoints. (Next novel? NOT SO MANY POVs. Sheesh.)

@ 7:14 pm End total for today is only 3,300 words. I took a longer break than I’d hoped thanks to a mad attempt to buy a bus pass (failed, as they were closed), returning library books (also closed, but the drop-off flap prevailed) and then an interlude with Assassin’s Creed 2 (foiled as all the menus have defaulted to Dutch, making it closed to me). Clearly, the universe was taking me to task for not keeping my arse in the chair. Still, not bad.

December 28th

@11:30 am About 1,400 words into the edits this morning, after coming to it very late. Why, no, Assassin’s Creed 2, whose language issue has been resolved, had nothing to with the delay. Nothing at all. Nope.

@1:26 pm Finished that big scene, and now onto the third part that I had ripped out. Stripped away all the action, attribution and kept the dialogue. Now trying to rewrite the scene from the other character’s POV. This is trickier.

December 29th

@5:38 pm Okay, so there was an EMBARRASSING amount of Assassin’s Creed 2 played after that last update. Let us not speak of it. Now, the new goal is to see if I can get all this work done by the end of the 30th, so I can join some locals in a New Year’s viewing of Sherlock Holmes 2 at the theatre before some imbibing. We shall see.

Bonus round: If I get this done, I am given myself permission to buy Sherlock, Season 1, on BluRay.

@7:02 pm Ass in chair has worked. Two scenes are done, one that POV rewrite. All in all 2,800 words. I have … oh lesse … 5,900 words. I’m not sure if they are all keepers, though. That’s spread over 8 scenes, only two of which has any real wordage to it. I’m betting I can cut some of them out altogether.

December 30th

@6:54 pm Well. Grocery shopping really cut into tonight’s writing time, but I have a solid three hours. Looks like I will be taking the laptop with me to the New Year’s Eve bash at a friends tomorrow — good thing the friends are 85% writers, and as such have promised to cheer me on. I have awesome friends. :3 Onward! I have 5,900 words to go. Plus a new ending.

@8:08 pm *rewrite rewrite rewrite* *cut cut cut* *lather, rinse, repeat* 4,100 words left to go.

@9:53 pm I have 2,100 words to go. All in all, really pleased. This self-imposed deadline is actually working for a change. I’ll be bringing my laptop with me, though. But I think I can do it.

December 31st

@5:22 pm I am MAD. Clearly, that is the only explanation. But I only have 1,300 words to go. Came right home, started cleaning up the text, and soon I am heading out to watch Sherlock Holmes 2 with my writing buds. Then back to their place where I will finish this first revision, giving me Blood of Wolves 2.0! I’ve already gotten 800 under my belt.  And now I have a sucky cat pinning my arm. *sigh*

@5:58 pm So close! Only a 600 word scene to tidy (and possibly expand) and then a final epilogue. And then I’m done! I can do this! I have to get ready for the movie, so it’s time to pack up the laptop and the cords and my notes. Phone is also charged, so if I have to tether for lack of wifi, I’m good. But my peeps are nerd peeps. I am sure there is wifi.

Yanno, let’s bring the USB just in case.

@10:11 pm Okay, Sherlock Holmes 2 was AWESOME. And I have less than two hours to get this done. Let’s do this! And I have wifi. WIN!

@10:44 pm My ‘friends’ are giving me a shot Crystal Skull Vodka. Re-evaluating friendship. (KIDDING.) I believe the increase in capital letters is directly attributed to swishy drunkeness setting in. Must write faster.

@11:03 pm Finished the scene, now writing the end/epilogue.

@11:19 pm Done. 124,000 words. First editing pass complete. I am off to get drunk now. There may be exuberant shouting. And alcohol.

I AM DONE MY FIRST PASS REVISION!

Anyways, survived! But surviving the holidays means some pretty stark life-slacking to balance out the seasonal expectations, especially since I worked the the whole damn time and had no vacation days. (Now, that’s a website I would like to see: Life-Slacking. Things that everyone tells you you’re supposed to do, but do you really need to and how can you get out of doing it? Anyways…)

That’s mostly meant that the WIP has been left alone for nearly a week. I really wanted to put this to bed before the new year, and now there’s a week left in this calendar year. And who doesn’t love a shapely, round culturally significant number? This gal does.

So here’s the deal: I have about 16,000 words left of this first editing pass (editing for character, story, and grotesque narrative lumps). And I have about five days left, two of which are my normal days off. THIS IS DOABLE.

And I’m going to track my progress. Instead of inundating the blog with daily updates, I will Twitter bits here and there, but mostly I will be adding updates to a single blog entry that I will schedule to post on midnight of the 31st. I’ll pop in and add to it daily (or more) and then whatever is there in the entry will post when the ball drops.

I really, really want to post I’M DONE. This was my major goal for 2011, that I would have a first-pass revision done on Blood of Wolves. I don’t want to see the end of the year come and go without that milestone being reached.

Today and tomorrow, my normal two days off, are where the bulk of the work will get done. There will be significant life-slacking happening while I push through. I want to be able to lift my head on January 1st and look at some of my other projects — namely the short fiction I have set aside while I slog through this WIP and the first exploratory work on the next novel. I’m also going to be launching my own self-guided writing plan, which I will post about come the new year.

Not that Blood of Wolves will be finished. Sadly, no. But the story will be (should be) whole. When I got back to it (hoping for February) that’s when I will be digging into the line edits and final tweaks. Once spring hits, I would like to start querying. (This may be a mad-woman’s hope. We’ll see.)

(And I am in love my parenthesis. This, too, shall pass. One hopes!)

Coffee is brewed. Time to get to it!

This terrible burden is lessened only by the knowledge that I have an abundantly fat and succulent To Be Read pile that has fed well this past year and it’s past time to bring it to market. It’s a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, and I can say with a clear conscious that except for a couple that were impulse buys, they are mostly all books I am eager to read. Like, foot-hopping eager. Giddy swooning takes place. Possibly with squealing action.

Pre-ordering the soft-cover release of Jo Walton’s Among Others feels like a natural book, thematically, to mark the temporary suspension of my book-buying privileges. I had tried ordering the hard cover version, but Amazon.ca was unable to source a copy. Once its replacement arrives, it will be the last book I buy until I clear out the backlog.

Which, I can do in the space of a year. Maybe even 6 months. I read over 60 books last year. My GoodReads challenge really pushed me, and now my TBR pile doesn’t look like an ever-growing, unscalable mountain but part of my every day normal learning/reading work flow.

I was inspired to do this by a member of my writing group who has put herself on a book diet for the next 4 months. She pointed out she has tons to read, and can sit tight on her hoard until then. And looking at my own pile, I know I can, too. I have stuff from Susanna Clark, Karl Schroeder, Elizabeth Bear, Roger Zelazny, George R. R. Martin, Joe Hill, Jacqueline Carrey, Robert Charles Wilson, N. K. Jemison, Glen Cook, Steven Brust, Elizabeth Hand, Connie Willis and gobs of short fiction anthologies. Not to mention some really cool non-fiction, covering everything from future technology to Victorian murders. Truly, I will not be going without! The shelf is way full. I will soon be shelf-less. Unless I start making shelves out shelves. Hmm. It may come to that.

Of course, I’ll be making a (possibly huge) all the books I still want to read. A virtual TBR pile, if you will. One that takes up far less room. And once I’ve whittled down the pile, if there’s a hot new title that I must read immediately, I can, guilt free.

Spare me your cries of disbelief. I don’t really believe I can get through them all before buying another book, either, but I’m going to try. Time to trim a bit of bacon off that TBR pile.

2012 is going to be a great year for books.

(Mmm. Bacon.)

So what follows are my top three favorite reads of the year, fiction-wise, as well as a smattering of non-fiction that either changed the way I think or offered me a front-seat pass into worlds I have not entered before.

WARNING: There will be unabashed gushing ahead. Onward!

Favorite Fiction of 2011:

Deathless by Catherynne Valente. When I first saw the cover for this, I was hooked, beyond being already interested in it when I heard who the author was. After reading Valente’s Palimpsest, I knew what I would be in for and wanted more. I was not disappointed. She does magical things. I can’t think of any better way to put it. It was such a powerful, engrossing read, the kind you lift your head up from and wonder how the hell you got to this drab place when you were just someplace else that is just so much more vivid than where you are now. It pushes all my buttons: dark, fantastical, historical, with rebirth hidden under the ashes of loss.

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart. Apparently, I break for good covers. The pop-culture/retro cover had called out to me for a while, but the setting of the book and the strong voices of the two narrators were what held me from page one. Culture here blends and twists in wonderful ways — with history, technology, commerce and individuality — that even though I might quibble with some of his extrapolations, the way he nails people makes everything intensely believable and relatable.

Welcome to Bordertown edited by Holly Black and Ellen Kushner. I just finished this book, but even half-way through, I knew it was going to end up in this blog post. I loved it, every piece of it, and raved about it to my local writing buddies. And by raved, I really mean holding it up, talking about it too fast, and admitting that I cried several times while reading it. It’s billed as YA, but doesn’t feel like any of the YA I’ve ever read. It’s also billed as Urban Fantasy, but it doesn’t feel like any of the Urban Fantasy I’ve read. (Which has prompted lots of pondering. Still pondering.) Anyways, the collection is lovely and not to be missed.

Other Great Reads of the Year:

A lot, actually. It was personally a good year for me when it came to fiction. Some highlights in random order:

• Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton.
• Starfish by Peter Watts.
• The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin.
• The God of the Hive by Laurie R. King.
• The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.
• The Name Of The Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.
• The Sea Thy Mistress by Elizabeth Bear.
• The Land of Mist and Snow by Debra Doyle and James D. MacDonald.
• 7th Sigma by Steven Gould.
• Agyar by Steven Brust.

Non-Fiction Favorites:

Part of my reading strategy this year (which sounds so clinical, but frankly thinking about this sort of thing has been nothing but a benefit) is to make sure I am reading non-fiction. Not just non-fiction I pick up for some quick and dirty research for my current WIP or writing how-to books. I’ve been too insular in that regard. So I decided this year to make a point of regularly wandering the library and picking up books that seize me, whether or not it’s related to current writing. Part of the ‘well-filling’ approach. I have not been disappointed, either.

Standouts include Mary Roach’s  Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void and Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us – two books I, once again, raved about to the local writing group.  I don’t write space-faring SF, but by god, Roach’s book makes me want to. Meanwhile, Weisman’s book, an impulse purchase, ended up becoming one of the tent-poles for a future project. (Alongside a slew of serendipitous discoveries. Universe is trying to give me a big, whack-a-mole hint. I know.)

As far as writing books, a subject I’m not entirely weened from as of yet, by far the best one of the lot I’ve read in years was Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain. My brain did lovely, lovely things with this one.

Here, again in no random order, are a few others that really sparked me.

• The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones.
• Rhetorics of Fantasy by Farah Mendlesohn.
• Making Book by Teresa Nielsen-Hayden.
• No Logo by Naomi Klein.
• The Next 100 Years by George Friedman.
• Booklife by Jeff Vandermeer.

So, there we go. That’s a snapshot of my favorite books of the year. Of course, your millage may vary, but that’s the best part, no?

What about you? What were the books you read this year that you are compelled to talk about?

If you haven’t lately, check out the Bookshelf link you can find on the upper tool bar. It links over to the books I’ve read for this year, and underneath you can get the link for the 2010 Books Read list. In a couple of week’s time I’ll be migrating the current list into its own sub-heading and start with a brand new page. #nerdlife

I’ve wondered why I’ve kept this reading list going since I do use GoodReads. Can’t say why other than I like it and find it fun to do. I suppose it feels more intimate, like I’m musing aloud. I don’t like rating books as I don’t find it useful. Taste and experience and the reader’s headspace is as much a part of the reading experience as the book itself, sending us firmly into your millage may very territory right from the start. Here I feel like I can just talk about the things I liked or didn’t like. That’s useful to me, and maybe to other folks. Who knows?

Speaking of books, I just finished Jeff Vandemeer’s BookLife, which has been on my TBR shelf for way too long. When I first thumbed through the title, I saw that the front half was loaded with career advice. Career? I thought. I need to have one of those first, right? So I put it aside until later, hoping to take advantage of the advice when I had a career-type thing. I picked it up now because I really wanted to read the second section, about balance, and since I can’t read a book out of order (it’s a disfunction, I swear) I started at the beginning.

Really, really wish I had read this when I bought it. I have some hard thinking to do, and some planning. While I work on the edits, I am working on my battle plan — one that will be  actionable come the new year.

It’s gotten cold in these here parts. Winter has locked into the ground and the air. I’ve got to get used to writing at night again, after being spoiled with sunshine these last few months. Still, spring’s coming. I’ll tuck myself in with keyboard and books and will make this winter a productive one.

‘Tis the season for family, friends, and hopefully some creative work, too.

Now hit the books!