Happy birthday to me! Over the weekend I celebrated turning 38 with good frands, delicious foods, and fine escape rooms (we won!).

My birthday signals, of course, the end of the previous Feistner Fiscal Year. HAPPY NEW YEAR! 39 FFY. Update your calendars.

As is my tradition, I like to start the FFY off with a post about my accomplishments over the past year.

It’s been a frustrating year, to be sure. A common refrain was that ‘this month has been a garbage month, but next month will be better’. I’ve spent a lot of time feeling down in the muck, spinning my wheels. Part of that stems from the fact that so much of publishing is outside of my control and down to luck/timing. But I am doing my best to stay focused and putting my butt in my chair week after week.

Writing accomplishments:

• Queried Blackout Odyssey 100 times
• hit 50 queries each on Ashes and Creampuffs
• Sold three short stories (Ganymede Nights, Ganymede Riots, Spreading Light)
• Had three stories go live (Still Life, Ganymede Nights, Ganymede Riots)
• wrote three short stories and two novellas (Ulmaray and Beyond; That Restless Mediocrity)
• wrote two novels (Fletcher & Cooper 1 and 2)
  • combined word counts of the novellas and the novels is over a quarter of a million words
  • F&C allowed me to break my previous NaNo goal and reach 75K in a single month!
• posted Creampuffs to Wattpad
• got my first review (for Still Life)
• got my first review IN LOCUS (ditto)
• had to deal with two six-month setbacks to Space Crazies
• published Creampuffs as an ePub
• found a new developmental editor for Space Crazies and started in on the edits
• Collected 150 rejections by the end of July 2019

Along the way, I also:

• visited Boston for the first time
• finished a quilt I started in 2016
• began a weekly challenge thread in my writing group
• redesigned this here website
• visited Vancouver
• celebrated my cutie’s 40th birthday
• finished decluttering Sentimental Items, creating a scrapbook of mementos from the 80s to the present
• taught myself to use a serger, making clothes for the first time in like 10 years
• read 46 new books out of a goal of 52

My goal for this FFY is editing; I plan to finish the edits to Space Crazies by December’s #PitMad and spend the bulk of the winter/spring getting Embers/Ignition ready to be seen by human eyes. I doubt I will get all the line edits done by then but it should be ready to send to beta readers by my next birthday! And in two weeks, Cutie and I are off to the UK, so that will be an adventure and a half.

This past year’s been frustrating dealing with so much beyond my control, but amidst all that I wrote a quarter of a million words in a world I really, really love. There’s some sort of metaphor for life for you.

This year will be better.