Poor Resolution

Ah, the New Year, that time when a young man’s fancy turns to belaboring his failures and swearing to God Almighty that he’ll do better if you let him live another year. By the way, this post will be all about me and not a rant on anything entertaining, so if you don’t like that, well, I’m still relatively convinced all my readers are fictional entities and this blog amounts to me sitting on a stage in a dark room talking to myself, so I’m not too worried about it. I don’t believe in you! But in case you’re real, and don’t like it, screw you. I don’t blog for you. I blog for posterity.

First, the recap: I made three big resolutions, one that was really out of my control, and two which I could achieve (oh, and the perennial favorite of “get in shape,” which gets the perennial response of “I don’t want to talk about it.”) Needless to say, the one I had no control over was achieved. huzzah! The ones within my control, the not-so-much.

My first resolution was to make a professional-level paying sale of short fiction. This I did, when Baen’s Universe (god bless their charitable souls) bought my short story Spamdemonium in, I don’t know, Octoberish (wedged between the months of Septomething and Notquitember). I say again: huzzah! Spamdemonium will/should/might be out in the June 2k8 issue. I’ll keep you posted.

Second resolution: to write a marketable story every month. Abysmal failure. In 2007, my unbelievably crappy tally is a whopping 2 marketable stories, 3 completed stories that might some day be marketable if I ever get off my ass and edit them which is not bloody likely at the current moment, and approximately 6 jillion half-finished little bleeders that might be stories someday. Wow. Oh yeah, and something like 12 Story Game stories, ranging from short and mediocre to considerably longer and pretty-darn-good-if-I-do-say-so-myself-which-I-do-cause-ain’t-no-one-else-here-okay-this-is-seriously-getting-old-quit-it. So technically, si! on the getting a story done every month, N'ole! on the getting with the marketability up in that piece.

Third resolution: Start that dern-bern-novel you’re always not talking about. First of all, let me say, I am writing this on December 28, and I have a good mind to make it a hootenanny of a weekend and get one going. So there. Second of all, I qualify this as a technical success: I spent about a month working on background and preliminary writings for what I expected to be a stirring scifi epic for the ages, only to find that it was. When written by Roger Zelazny. Fifty years ago. Curse you, Lord of Light! But the thing is, I started it, so technically that’s success.

All in all, not too bad. Of course, then there’s my 3rd-Q resolution, reprinted below, in which I promise (threaten) to write a story every month for something like 20 months or so. So far, I am on point with that. And I think I will continue to be on point, with some modifications, which I will discuss in my follow-up post regarding my real honest New Year’s Resolutions! Ooooh!

And yes, I am pushing off the Third Commandment into the New Year. Sorry, but this seemed more amusing. To me. Now excuse me while I push out through this wailing throng of broken-hearted readers to get to the door….