This website was a victim of my malaise – I haven’t written an article for a few months now. It has been a combination of a lack of time and not feeling like I’ve had much to say. A poor excuse, granted.<\/p>\n
On the writing front, I only published one short story in 2015,\u00a0Authentic Empathy\u00a0<\/em>which was published in the special 200th edition of AntipodeanSF earlier in the year. It was a great privilege to be selected for the magazine (and if you’re interested in looking at the story, check out my bibliography<\/a>). The rest of the year I spent skipping between a few longer works, including refining the draft of my urban science fantasy novel (Unaligned<\/em>), and building out a fantasy long story into a novella length work. Both require a lot more work, but it was good to make some progress.<\/p>\n I also wrote the start of a science fiction novel (about 10,000 words) as well as a couple of chapters of\u00a0a middle grade novel, as well as the opening scenes for the sequel to Unaligned<\/em>. From this you can probably tell that I’ve spread myself a bit thin over too many\u00a0projects, rather than finishing a smaller number. There is probably a lesson in that.<\/p>\n I also accumulated a backlog of reviews I haven’t written, especially for the Australian Women Writers’ Reading Challenge. \u00a0I reviewed 4 books (reviews can be found here<\/a>) by Australian women authors\u00a0and read another 3, but didn’t hit my goal of ten in total. This certainly reflected my much reduced reading for the year, but I’m disappointed nonetheless.<\/p>\n On the podcast front, I contributed exactly nothing to the GalacticChat podcast this year. Stupidly, I should have thought about setting up some interviews when I was at GenreCon<\/a> in Brisbane – fellow podcaster Helen Stubbs and I both attended and there was such a wide variety of authors and other interesting industry types, good interviews couldn’t have helped but follow. Ah well, lesson learnt for next time.<\/p>\n So, what is in store for 2016? GenreCon in November\u00a0and a few weeks off work over Christmas has renewed my appetite for writing, which has been great. I’ve been transcribing a lot of my longhand writing from the year onto the computer over the last few weeks which has been surprisingly validating (I wrote more words last year than I thought!). I’d like to get the first draft of Unaligned<\/em> into fighting shape and finish off the fantasy novella. I seem to do better at writing first drafts than the editing process, so I will punctuate the editing with working on a couple of short story ideas (I think having some short stories published does help me keep a sense of momentum).<\/p>\n For this website, I’ve decided to work towards publishing one article each Sunday night, to create some sense of regularity. I will publish any news about publishing of my work\u00a0separately, so the Sunday night article will be either a review, a general musing or something that has caught my attention. This probably means finding some kind of project to help create content – I’ll add that to my to-do list.<\/p>\n