Another year, another decade. Welcome to the Roaring Twenties! I had an excellent holiday season, spending quality time with family and friends. Unfortunately, I wasn’t quite as productive as I’d like to have been.

A theme for 2019 was the seemingly never-ending battle with finding an anti-anxiety medication that works for me without side effects (and I keep winning the lottery for the really uncommon side effects). The medication I’ve been on for the past 6 months or so gave me incredibly vivid, absurd dreams every night. And no, none of them are good story fodder, hence the “absurd” descriptor. Lowering the dosage last month continued to manage my anxiety, but upped my levels of executive dysfunction (explaining the lack of productive time despite all my best intentions) and did not decrease the dreams. As of January 1, I’ve switched to a completely different medication class, so cross your fingers for me!

Here’s to a 2020 full of milestones, including writing the first draft of the FINAL full-length novel in the Steel Empires series. Which now has a title! Completing Steel Legacy will be bittersweet, but I’m looking forward to having a completed story arc and turning my attention to other projects I’m excited about.

December Wrap-Up

  • Despite some travel excitement into and out of Houston, Texas, for a day-job conference, I managed to complete and post my convention report for Starbase Indy 2019 in a relatively timely manner! You can catch up here.
  • The Steel Victory rewrite completion is in sight, despite my aforementioned productivity issues from last month. As a testament to how much I learned about writing during my time in graduate school, the final third or so of the book is much smoother than the beginning, which means I’m tweaking words rather than rewriting whole paragraphs. Overall, I’ve fallen in love with this story all over again.
  • Made some progress on the beta-reading project, and the end is in sight for that as well!
  • I survived the holidays, which included my birthday! This year, I rounded up my best (local) friends and subjected them to a medieval-themed escape room. We got out with less than 5 minutes to spare!

January Goals

  1. Complete Steel Victory rewrite, complete copy-edit of rewrite, and submit to editor.
  2. Beta-reading.
  3. Make at least two updates to the Worldbuilding section of my website, including adding more information to the Fan Cast page and launching another new section!

Luckily, I’m not traveling this month, which gives me four solid weekends of extra time!

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