Post Christmas retrospective

I have emerged from Christmas, and yet I still don’t feel as if it actually happened this year. It’s an odd feeling, comparable to going through some frightening initiation rite and coming out the other side completely unchanged. Something ought to have happened, but it didn’t.

One of the things that didn’t happen was a blazing family row, so that’s a plus. I also got a wonderful haul of presents including a new tuneable whistle in the key of D. (My previous one was untuneable, which meant that everyone else had to adjust their expensive, complicated instruments to sound nice with my simple cheap one. Now I can adjust my, still relatively cheap and easy to adjust, whistle instead and much annoyance is spared for everyone.)

This close to the end of the year, with nothing much due to happen between now and the beginning of 2012 it seems like a good time to look back on 2011 and get an overview of what that year was all about.

Although all I’ve published in 2011 was By Honor Betrayed, a single novella, it’s been a busy year behind the scenes.

I have written, sold and edited Under the Hill: Bomber’s Moon and Under the Hill: Dogfighters, which are coming out in April and May 2012. I’ve also written, sold and edited a second novella due to come out from Carina in June 2012, which is still going by its temporary title of Poison and Poetry, but will have a new one soon. (I’m waiting for its new name before I give it a page on my website.)

So 2011 was a productive year, writing wise.

In personal achievements, by June 2011 I had completed my task of losing 3 stone (42lb) in weight, and I’ve now kept that off for six months. I had three days of “eat ALL THE THINGS!!!” over Christmas, because it is a feast and it’s only right and proper to pig out on important feast days. But I’m now back on the diet again to shed whatever I put on over those days. They say that after losing a lot of weight 95% of people put it straight back on. I am trying to be one of the 5% who don’t.

This was the year I got my first (and second) tattoo.

2011 was also the year in which I learned to play a melody instrument. Like everything else, this turned out to be a matter of putting the effort in every day and just not giving up.

Other achievements: after many years of avoiding pigeonholes altogether, because I could never find one that fitted, I slowly came to some conclusions about my gender and sexual identities – I am genderqueer and asexual. I can’t remember who introduced me to AVEN or if I just stumbled upon it myself, but frankly the fact that I have lived this long without knowing about this stuff indicates to me that it would be a good idea to pass the link on here for anyone else who feels like they just don’t get this obsession with sex at all. We may be weird, but we’re not alone.

As if to crown all that achievement with a reminder of death, late this year I began the change from Mother to Hag. I’m looking forward to it, on the whole, as the hag is the only female archetype I actually feel I vaguely understand, and I would far rather be considered scary and powerful than “nurturing” any day of the week. Even if it does mean I have to be on the lookout for mobs with pitchforks, and children who want to shove me in the oven head-first while they eat my house.

2011 was quite a momentous year, now I think about it.