2015—at least the latter part of it—was the year I came out of my writing closet. I closed my eyes, jumped, and found a lot of things waiting for me after the fall. It was awesome. When I decided to take note of these things, I found a surprisingly long list. Apparently since July this year, I was able to:
- Finish writing and publish two books (Blossom Among Flowers in July, Songs of Our Breakup in August).
- Join a writing workshop that distributed my third book as part of a 10-story eBook bundle (Majesty in the #StrangeLit Darkest Dreams bundle, released in September)
- Release (and try several ways to sell) print editions of my books.
- Submit a short story that will hopefully be part of an online library (for #TalesfromtheMetro #WriteBreakupSongsAbout, submitted on November)
- Attend book launches. I was there for the launch of Mae Coyiuto’s The Year We Became Invisible, Agay Llanera, Chrissie Peria, Dawn Lanuza, Camilla Sisco, Bianca Mori and Kate Evangelista’s Spark books, and of course, of Buqo’s StrangeLit (see#2).
- Attend the first #romanceclass live reading experiment.
- Attend my first Filipino Readercon.
- Attend my first romance discussion for sports romance, with special guest Gabe Norwood of Gilas Pilipinas.
- Hear an excerpt of my book performed by theater actors (see #7).
Did I go into this writing year with the above goals in mind? Not at all. I had only one goal, and that was to write and release as many books as I could. The high of finishing a story and hitting ‘publish’ was intoxicating. Obviously I hadn’t thought much about marketing or any other activities. I only wanted to get the first book out there and make my first mistakes. And I wanted to keep writing.
But things happened, and people happened (thank you, wonderful, kind, talented people), so I let them and I just continued jumping. Goals are important, but learning (while having fun!) is, too. And I realized that sometimes the best way to learn is to just let things happen. Insights are welcome after.
As for 2016, I already have a to-do list:
- Publish my #StrangeLit story as a standalone.
- Publish my #WriteBreakupSongsAbout short story.
- Write (and finish!) a kidlit story for Bayong ng Kuting workshop.
- Write and publish 2-3 more books.
- Write and publish more short works.
My brain is spewing out a gazillion more things that I want to do next year. It’s overwhelming sometimes, but I guess that feeling is a good thing, because it means this whole new world excites me tremendously. And that I love the stuff I’m doing and the people I’m doing them with. So I’m very much looking forward to 2016! And cheers and a toast to you, 2015! You were a wonderful year 🙂
P.S. This was also the year I moved to a .com site from a wordpress.com site. And apparently that means foregoing the year-end appearance of the stats helper monkeys (bummer). Jetpack prepared a cool report here though, and here’s a summary.
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,900 times in 2015. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.
The busiest day of the year was November 19th with 139 views. The most popular post that day was Review: Vintage Love by Agay Llanera.
YAY! Happy New Year, interweb!
