In the new year, a lot of people post their round up, but I usually have more time while on vacation to think about what I’ve done. This year was an exception (stupid Knights of Pen and Paper…I finished the sequel in about four hours of solid playing but the first one had just too much grinding to get to the final bit) so I’m doing it here.

It’s been an amazing, if frustrating year. I’ve sold two things, both to Less than Three, both written in that fury of novellas that happened last August. I had sold five out of six of them and have and R&R on the sixth, which I know it needs, but I’ve been in this weird place with my writing.

I’m normally a serial monogamist with my writing. I start one thing at the beginning, write to the end of that, have a bit of a refractory period as I work out the next thing, then start it, but last year starting in November, everything changed. I got my nanowrimo up to about 54k in the month, then realized the brother had to be a MC, went to rewrite the beginning, and had the whole story change out from under me. But that was okay because a new epic fantasy erotica was forming at the same time. So for most of December, I was writing that until it, too, just needed an ending.

But then, at Christmas, I started a third all new book about a movie star and an Fae lord that consumed me. I got about 37k into that, when a completely unrelated novella that is hard to explain took over. For the April nano camp I was just going to finish all that but the seventh(?…don’t quote me) and hopefully final draft of Drunks Fools and Kings suddenly needed to come out. For my usual book a month to six weeks, DFK took me until almost July to write, and I was rewriting it to the day I sent it off to Nicole to see if she could do a read through in time for Pure Spec in August.

After Pure Spec, I realized Chizine’s reading period finished at the end of the month, so for the final three weeks of August all I did for fourteen hours a day was Beating the Troll’s Heart. The movie star and Fae story that I absolutely loved. Normally books take me to the second draft to start kinking up the plot line (kinking as in knotting up, not…if anything I took out about 23k of smut of the finished book in the rewrite) but everytime I had to stop and think “what would be truly awesome here?” the answer just came.

So that brings up to an exhausted September, which I spent writing a new ghost story that, you guessed it, still needs an end and re-re-rewriting book 2 of changeling. It’s in the fourth or fifth draft, but this feels final. In October I finished to the point I could sew what I’d written onto what I had, which only salvaged about 15k of the last draft.

And for the last week? I’ve been doing absolutely no writing. Vacation for me used to be where I could get a lot of writing done, but this last time, when my day job became writing, suddenly that was the last thing I wanted to do. So, yeah. 2015 has been a great, if frustrating year. I have four or five really good stories I’m really happy with that just need a final few scenes and their done. Instead of doing a nano this year, I might do a finish a book a week.

Happy 2015-2016 vacation year, everyone!