Welcome to the Yearly Writerly Recap, which is sadly on the verge of becoming the annual “New Year’s seems as good a time as any for Barb to finally blow the dust off her poor, neglected blog” post.
Speaking of my neglected blog, I’m hoping to change that in the new year. For three years, I was distracted by this pesky little bugger known as grad school. Schoolwork bumped a good many things down the priority list, and blogging was one of them. But then this past May came, and I got me a shiny new master’s degree, at which point I was like:
So now I have more time for things I enjoy again. Like writing. Which brings us to the recappy stuff.
Published in 2014
- “Dream Logic” in Daily Science Fiction
- “Les Arbres Morts” in Every Day Fiction
- “7:74 p.m.” in Unburied Treasures
- “The Perfect Instrument” in NewMyths.com
- “The Whole of His History” in Stamps, Vamps, and Tramps
- “The Swan Maiden” was podcast in Far-Fetched Fables
- “The Holy Spear” was podcast in Tales to Terrify
- “The Girl Who Welcomed Death to Svalgearyen” was reprinted in The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine, Year Five and Unconventional Fantasy, A Celebration of Forty Years of the World Fantasy Convention
Forthcoming in 2015
- “Dream Logic” is going to be podcast in Far-Fetched Fables later this year
World Fantasy Convention
I finally had the chance to attend the World Fantasy Convention for the first time in forever, and it was amazing amounts of awesome sauce. Much to my surprise, I landed a reading spot on the programming, which was a con-going first for me. Even more surprising was not only having an audience for my reading (without resorting to bribery!), but having a couple people in the audience whom I didn’t actually know. Yay random strangers!
Writerly Progress
2014 was a rare year for me on the short story front in that I barely wrote any. In fact, I wrote only two, which is way less than I would have thought. One was a flash piece (the aforementioned “Dream Logic” that appeared in Daily Science Fiction), and the other is a 6,500-word fantasy piece that’s currently sitting in a slush pile, clamoring for the editor’s attention.
A good chunk of my writing time this year went toward reworking My Big Fat Epic Fantasy Novel. I had all these revision ideas I was excited about, but the project has been in my brain so long that objectivity had gone out the window, and so I was still clinging to elements that didn’t make sense in light of those changes. Thankfully, I had the opportunity to run a synopsis past some fellow writers and do some epic levels of brainstorming with them, which helped me finally notice pieces that didn’t fit in the puzzle anymore. Things like, “Do you even need this character? He doesn’t impact the plot at all. He’s just there to be awful.” Based on that, I spent a good month and a half totally retooling my outline. And there are handy-yet-insane plot diagrams now. I love my insane plot diagrams—because now when I change something, I can more easily see what other plot and character elements that change affects.
So that’s where I am as we we bid adieu to 2014. For the new year, I’ve got some short story projects I want to tackle (one is already underway), and then I’m going to dive into the novel revisions. Shiny 2015, y’all.
Barbara A. Barnett 