It’s been pretty quiet on here, huh. Probably because it’s been pretty quiet outside of here, too. I’ve been kind of drifting for a bit, occasionally dipping my toes back in to see how the water feels, if this is where I want to jump in and dive deep and see just how long I can hold my breath this time.

Writing has been a bit like swimming in the vast and unfathomable ocean lately, and no matter how well I can hold my breath, I’ve still gotta come back up for air. And there were a lot of deep dives that I think I’m only just recovering from.

But just because I’ve been drifting doesn’t mean that there haven’t been churning in the background. Now is as good a time as any to round up some of that churning – and prove I haven’t wholly been shirking.

In November, I celebrated the release of my first and yet somehow second book. I also turned in copy edits on The Unconquered City and kept working on the start of another story that had surprised and bitten me in August.

We also!! Celebrated the funding and completion of the queer women anthology, Silk and Steel!! Which, uuuh, meant I actually had to get cracking on the short story I’d been planning.

December saw the arrival and subsequent completion of page proofs for TUC, and the giddy realization that this book is going to be real just like the other two. I also got to participate in the LGBTQ Reads Better Know an Author feature, where I talked about favorite queer books, fanfic, and the importance of fantasy in imagining a better future for us all.

January brought a surprise round of page proofs for The Perfect Assassin.

But isn’t that book out already? you ask. I thought you were done with them.

I thought so, too! But TPA is coming out as a mass market paperback in April and that’s enough of a format shift to need to check it again. In was strange going back through a book I thought I was forever done with, but I’m glad I did. And soon it’s going to be pocket-sized, just like most of the fantasy I read and bought growing up! You can even pre-order that version, if that’s your preferred format. Honestly, I’m stoked to get to see it on the paperback carousel, chilling with all the Cool Books.

After page proofs round two (electric boogaloo), I finally got around to drafting and writing and revising my short story for the anthology. Which! I turned in! On time, even!

Between all that, I also went to my third ConFusion, which is my home con, and had a great time meeting new friends and old, as well as being on a handful of panels.

And then in February, which is just concluding, I did another interview – this time at Breaking the Glass Slipper, this time about the importance of shouting about queer books, tropes, and how far genre still has to go to actually be diverse – and then I took a break.

I didn’t stop writing altogether, but my wrists had begun to hurt even with just the few hours of active typing I do a day and I realized I needed to make a change before I was staring down the toothy maws of a deadline and forced to decide between potentially breaking my wrists or a deadline.

Since I knew I wouldn’t have anything due for a while, I decided to switch my keyboard layout from the standard qwerty I’d been using for over 25 years to the non-standard but supposedly much more ergonomical dvorak.

Fun fact: suddenly being unable to type more than 10 wpm when you’re used to 80+wpm is super frustrating!! Who knew!!

After 3 weeks, my wrists have stopped hurting and I’m up to a less-frustrating 35ish wpm and finally confident with these new keys to begin properly revising the novella that will be going up here in April. The one that, if you’ve read The Impossible Contract, takes place during a particularly stressful time in all of our friendly, neighborhood cousins’ lives.

So that’s where we’re at, here at the end of February and the fading beginning of a new decade. Things have been quiet, but that doesn’t mean I’ve been still. Churning, churning, churning, but soon – soon – taking a deep breath and diving again.

The decade ends in a little less than two weeks, an arbitrary endpoint to an extraordinary time. I went from being afraid I would never figure out what I Wanted To Be When I Grew Up (TM) to being exactly where I’ve always wanted to be – with sufficient wiggle room for growth.

It was, of course, not nearly as neat nor straight a path as that sounds. While I did set the intent at the beginning of the decade to take this whole writing thing seriously, there was rarely a point where I was confident that would bring me any closer to my dream.

Instead I got really good about keeping my head down and focusing on doing the next thing, despite rejections and discouragement, despite my own self-doubt. I got so good at it that I was already mentally closing up shop on my queries for The Impossible Contract and getting ready to move on to the next thing when my agent Kurestin offered representation.

And look where that’s brought us: closing out the decade with two published books and a third on the horizon.

This decade has been A Lot, as has this year. There are a multitude of lessons to be learned, that were learned, but I think the biggest is this:

You’re on your own path.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the endless possibilities of existence, to try and suss out a way forward before you’ve even taken your first step, to look at the journeys of others and figure out how best to mirror their success.

But success isn’t that easy, or that straight-forward. A whole lot of it, in fact, is just putting one foot in front of the other and seeing where that takes you. If you’d asked me at the beginning of this decade where I thought I’d be by the end, I couldn’t have given you an answer. I certainly would never have guessed here, living in Michigan, a published author with a wife, a Toddler, and two cats.

I’m not even sure I would have chosen all that, had it been presented to me back then. But I’m glad I’m here, now, and I couldn’t imagine it a different way. Because this journey hasn’t looked a whole lot like I imagined, nor a whole lot like the journeys of others, but it’s been mine the whole time.

Now I suppose it’s that time in the blogpost to get all reflective-y, to think back on all the highs and lows of the last decade. But you know what – we’ve had enough lows to last us another decade. I want to leave this decade focusing on the highs – those are what drive us forward, after all.

2010 started in Seattle and 2019 will end in Michigan. Two snowy, cloudy places that couldn’t have less in common. And in between: Arizona.

There was a lot to love this decade. I could go on for pages, but instead: an abbreviated list.

– Moving to Arizona. I wasn’t so sure about such a dry, seemingly empty place at the time, but I would never have made some amazing friends if we hadn’t, would never have dreamed of writing these books if we’d gone literally anywhere else.

– Getting gay married. I never thought this would be legal in our lifetimes, let alone within a few years of our ceremony. But hey! Not everyone can say they married the same person twice. And it truly has been a refreshingly normalizing experience.

– Hiking Hadrian’s Wall. A subset of getting married, as this was our honeymoon, but it was also an Experience with a capital ‘E’. We walked through rain and fog and cold and heat and up and down hills and through thistles and thirst and with shoes that pinched then hurt then flat-out made each step agony – but we made it from one side of England to the other and it was worth every step of it.

– Learning property assessment. I don’t often talk about my dayjobs on here, but I’ve had a few and they’ve been quite… varied… and I don’t regret any of them (except maybe that one, but we don’t talk about that one). I’ve learned something from all of them, but learning about property assessment and records has been the oddball gift that keeps on giving. Who knew property title could be so interesting and useful! Not me!

– Keeping chickens. Self explanatory. Did you know those tiny dinosaurs are both adorable and vicious?

– Biking to work. I learned the joys of living in a truly bike-friendly city, as well as the joys of freezing your water bottle and having it fully melt – and get hot – before you completed your 20min ride home. Arizona summers: not joking around.

– Baking cookies in the car. Again: Arizona summers.

– Discovering the joy of weightlifting. Exercise sucks. It just does. But weightlifting isn’t exercise. It’s whole purpose is to get strong and beat up out-lift your enemies. I can get behind that.

– Making friends. In Seattle. In Tucson. In Michigan. In the writing community and beyond. I’ve found so many wonderful, amazing, kindhearted people who have made my life richer in their own, unique ways and I am thankful for all of them.

– Getting published. There have been a lot of highs and lows with getting published – the ultimate of emotional rollercoasters – but as something I’ve been wanting and working toward for as long as I knew publishing a book was a Thing, it only makes sense that achieving that thing would be full of emotion, as well as conflict as the expectations built up over decades finally clashed with reality. But in the end, reality is pretty great, and having readers who not only get what I wrote, but are equally excited by it, has been the best fulfillment of my dream.

– Having a kid. Wow. Talk about an emotional rollercoaster. This deserves its own blogpost, but suffice to say that this was the best decision of the decade, hands down.

That was the 2010’s. Sitting just shy of 2020, I have no idea what to expect – but that’s kind of the point. We can only keep going down this path of ours, enjoying the journey along the way.

So here’s to another decade of the unexpected, of fulfilled dreams and fresh ones dreamt, of a path that is solely, genuinely, only our own.

Happy new year. Happy new decade. ❤