Obligatory 2016 Round-up Post

As we limp towards the start of a new year and 2016 gurgles its last few desperate breaths (hopefully without taking any more beloved public figures with it) it is traditional to sit back and reflect on the arbitrary period of time we have just completed. To think on everything one might have accomplished this orbit of the sun; which things one wanted to do and didn't, which things were a surprise etc. You've read year-round-up posts before, you know what to expect here.

Despite my initial instinct to say that 2016 has been a complete and utter dumpster fire (and in many respects it really has been) on a personal level this year has actually been the opposite. Productive. Good, even.

That's not to say that 2016 has been an easy year for me. It's done quite a number on my mental health. Apparently getting to the end of something as huge and intense as a PhD with no clear idea what happens next can take its toll on a person. I've had to learn that it's okay to take time for myself, to reboot and recharge the old brain. And initially I thought that when looking back on 2016 it would be the post-PhD funk that dominated by memories. I was wrong.

First of all I'd like to acknowledge the fact that I finished and graduated from my PhD because holy crap that is not a small thing. It's pretty fucking impressive, if I do say so myself.

This year was also the year I self published my first novel. Like an entire novel that I wrote with my own hands is out there in the world for people to buy. Which is a thing I try not to think about too much because otherwise it blows my mind.

I also sold my very first short story to a publication, which should be going live sometime tomorrow (the 31st). This joins the dozens of stories available for free on this very blog and the ones I've self published.

I got my first freelance paychecks this year,  and when they didn't quite make ends meet I was adult enough to go looking for a seasonal job to earn extra cash. It ate into my writing time initially but I'm better at balance now, and I'm hopeful I might be able to make it permanent.

At the beginning of the year I set myself the goal of writing a quarter of a million words and I hit that sometime in October. Right now I'm at just shy of 300,000 words, which was the stretch goal I set myself. Do I feel bad for not hitting that goal? No, because that is still a metric crap tonne of words.

I also set myself the challenge of reading 50 books (of any length) which I've missed by about four books. Again I'm not mad about missing that goal because on top of those 46 books I've read easily a couple of million words of fanfiction.

And speaking of fanfiction, this has pretty much been the best year I've ever had fandom wise. More hits, more Kudos, more comments, more subscriptions. Which isn't necessarily a surprise since I've posted more words, more stories than before. My fandom performance this year makes me hopeful my approach to self publishing will pay off long term.

I didn't think I'd say this, but I'm excited to see what 2017 has in store for me.

I tend not to make resolutions because often they're about changing something about yourself you don't necessarily have much control over in order to make yourself feel less shit and I'm not about that. I believe in attainable goals that can be measured, so what are they?

1. Pet more dogs.  Not really measurable but I don't care. Dogs are great and make me happy, so I'll do more of this.

2. Keep creating an putting art out into the world. I want to write 300,000 words across all the mediums I write. I will keep posting my short stories here,  and on Medium, and keep submitting to publications. I want to aim for releasing five novels next year, digitally and in hard copy, because I want so badly to be able to hold an actual book I wrote.

3. Continue to be unrepentantly, obnoxiously, unabashedly myself. I will keep talking about my mental health, my sexuality and issues that are important to me as much as feel I can. Because pretending to be someone I'm not is too much hard work.

4. Make a dent in the book pile they lives next to my bed. There's like 25 of them just sat there. I want to read about half in the next year.

5. Survive and be happy, even if it's just to spite those who don't want.  me to. Sometimes this is the hardest thing, especially when you live with depression, but meeting the rest of my goals will be impossible without this.

I hope you all have a safe and happy 2017, and I look forward to sharing my adventures with you. Have a good one, and take care.

State of the Tonks Address

I was musing earlier about how much I'd written this month. I had a vague inkling that it was one of my more prolific months writing wise (now that the dreaded thesis is out of the way—hurrah! Just the dreaded viva left) but I didn't really understand how prolific until I looked at the numbers.

With a day and a bit left to go I'm on track to have written 15,000 words during October, making it a pretty good month overall. Not my best this year, but pretty good.

Except, for possibly the first time in my life, the vast majority of those words have been for original fiction, quite a lot of which has been inflicted on an unsuspecting public. I'm quite proud of my output for this month wanted to take a moment to brag a little and point you in the direction of any stories that might have slipped under your radar.

October started off slow on the writing front. Mostly due to the fact I was on a cruise for the first nine days of it, but also partly because I was basking in the glory of having (finally!) submitted my thesis. When you've been working on a document for over a year it feels good when it's finally done. A little weird, but good. Nevertheless I managed to write a few words while ostensibly on holiday, but the real work started when I got back.

Since October 10th I have written three stories for the weekly whimword flash fiction competition. The prompts were Glow, Featureless and Hallow. I'm proud of all three pieces, but especially Glow, which was declared the winner that week!

In addition to this I cooked up 750 words of horror for a competition; results still pending on that one. When the results are announced I'll decide what I'm going to do with both the pieces I entered (one was written months ago) that is assuming I don't win, in which case they’ll be published elsewhere. Exciting.

Over on twitter the inestimable @FrogCroakley set up a SF story swap which has had a great response. Somewhere in the region of 60 of us threw prompts into the pot and the majority of us completed the task, resulting in something of a headache for Mr Frog. My piece is a slightly whimsical ode to some of my favourite childhood films and can be found over here.

I also sent in a bizarre spoken word piece (yes, spoken word; I know, with this voice) to the inaugural Lies Dreaming podcast. It's an eldritch tale involving Tim Henman and I'll no doubt post here when it's release to the world. Assuming they don't decide either the content or my voice are unsuitable for the general public.

I also wrote a triptych of flash pieces that I’m quite proud of, though I've yet to work out quite what I'm doing with them. They're a little to close to real life to be sci fi I'm not sure what else to call it. My big achievement though was the 4k words I wrote on a story I started way back in June or something like that, finally getting that done. That too was supposed to be a flash piece and is now sat at 6.5k words. Oh well, never mind; sometimes things get away from you. I'll be looking for a home for that in the near future too.

I went into this month wanting to be relatively prolific as a bit of a warm up for next month in which I will be attempting NaNoWriMo. This will be my first year but after two successful Camp NaNos under my belt I decided it was time. Next month I will be attempting a complete redraft of a novel I first wrote about 8 years ago. The original was a hell of an achievement at the time but I've improved a lot in the intervening years and it isn't really salvageable in its current state. So I will be starting again from scratch and looking to hit 50,000 words by the end of November.

With a bit of luck (and a lot of discipline) I'll be blogging here every day, recording my experience of NaNoWriMo. Possibly so that when I'm considering doing it again next year I have evidence of it being a terrible idea. Almost everything else is being put on hold for NaNo. I might do a whimword or two, but there are no guarantees.

And I still have a viva to sit next month too.

I keep pointing out that I'm not a sensible person.

After November? Well I'm crossing my fingers that my viva goes well and I'll be doing thesis corrections to submit before Christmas. Then it'll be time to look for a proper grown up job.

Writing wise my post November plans are to start sending stories out for publication, and finish my current works in progress. I have some exciting (and no doubt foolish) plans for next year and I want to draw a line under this year's efforts.

Keep your eyes peeled for more from me. My PhD is almost over but my writing career is just beginning. Just wait and see.

A Little Bit of Housekeeping

Judging by the stats for this blog I've either found a whole bunch of new readers or have suddenly become a lot more attractive to bots. I'm going to assume that you’re all actual people (or sentient robots, that's okay too) and act accordingly.

Hello! Welcome to my humble little blog.

Honestly this thing is a bit of a mess, since it collates every post from every blog I've ever owned right back to my teenage LiveJournal days. I like having it all in one place though so it stays up. I hope you enjoy reading about what an excruciatingly embarrassing knob eighteen year old me was.

(That said I have just hidden a bunch of posts that aggregated my tweets from 2009. No one wants to see that. And if for some reason you do, it's all there on Twitter anyway.)

The current focus of the blog is writing. Mostly me posting little bits of flash fic I've written, but occasionally I will write some advice that absolutely no one asked for. Sometimes I might do a bit of an update on how my life is going, but that's a lot less interesting than making shit up about fictional people.

So, welcome. Please do make yourselves at home; grab a cup of tea, put your feet up and I hope you enjoy the verbiage I string together.