2015 You Were Big

2015 you were big, like a season of The Walking Dead, and just as episodic and climatic.  Occasionally suspenseful, gory and yuck, like that moment you realise that damn flying cockroach is going to smack into you, and you squeal.  You had to be there.

There were even moments where I considered cowering under a dumpster, except finding one felt like too much effort.  Still, nothing bad happened.

There was a lot of day job, which pays the rent.  A big re-branding project kept me vastly entertained.

There was a lot of cat supervision undertaken.  Cats supervising me that is.  Nothing unusual there.

There were a few choice Mum Missives.

There were three releases through Escape Publishing.

There was The Cafe Nix Anthology with fourteen fabulous Escape Artists.

That spun out the short Menu Choices and an extra scene for Insecure.

There was the release of the five book The Bliss King serial under the AA Paton name.

Offensive Behavior – book one of Sidelined got written and so did a goodly bit of Damaged Goods.

I have plans for other words to flow, if life and work doesn’t conspire to sideline me in 2016.  So many stories, so little time.

What else…

There was an online workshop with Charlotte Stein organised by Rhyll Biest.  That was cool.

There was the ARRA romance reader’s conference in March, which spun out drinks with Victoria Dahl and counting dead roos on the trip home from Canberra with Vassiliki Veros – roadkill count was high.  I suspect my ARRA highlights are not the same as others.

Kate Mayo and Jennifer Wu’s Trousseau came out with my short, Window Dressing inside.  The drawings of body parts were more popular.

And RWA in August, where Kate Cuthbert and I delivered our Dark Art of the Blurb / Deep Mysteries of the Synopsis session.  No one walked out before we stopped talking, but I think they’d locked the doors.

In October, I ran a Dark Arts workshop for fellow blurbers through RWA’s OWL program.  Some folk actually showed up for it.

I did some private blurb workshops and beta reading, some very fun writerly lunches and breakfasts.  There should be more of those.  So many more.  Though no one needs to get locked out of their hotel room, shoeless and desperate next time.  (No, that wasn’t me).

I read and read and read:  Elle Kennedy, Sarina Bowen, Megan Erickson, Santino Hassell, Cole McCade, Amy Jo Cousins, Damon Seude, Heidi Cullinan, Charlotte Stein, Alessandra Torre,  Cara McKenna, Joanna Wylde, Lilah Pace,  Anne Calhoun, Kristen Ashley, Megan Hart, Tiffany Reisz, M.O O’Keefe,  Leah, Rader, Kristen Callihan, Kylie Scott, Amy Andrews, Jane O’Reilly, Rhian Cahill and R Lee Smith.

And many many more.

I was so much better at remembering what I’d read when I had a physical stack of books instead of a Kindle and a trigger one-click finger, a reading appetite bigger than the number of hours in the known universe, and Bookbub.

There’s probably more.  It’s been a year of leaving the desk, or the office, or the house, only when pried out by necessity.  Cue a bit tired and cranky and ready for a few days at the beach.  No doubt there will be a book or two read.

See ya, 2015.  You were a productivity gut buster, ten releases, with cat supervision running on overtime.

Club BTA, I don’t even want to run a word count, you might want to smack me.  You read a lot this year.  My eternal thanks.

2016, be warned, we’re incorporating more sunshine and roses and even some lollipops – and that’s just for the cats.