2021 Review & What’s Happening in my Corner

[Insert cheesy New Year’s greeting of your choice.]

I’m back, and after going on hiatus for a couple months to focus on my academic work and then spend winter break doing some thinking, I have news.

To start, a quick, obligatory year-in-review.  Overall, 2021 was a success in the writing arena: I started a new novel and won Camp NaNo in July, left a workshop program I had been part of for years, finished and revised a novelette that had been on my to-do list for forever, completed the fiction writing track portion of my English major, and finally established a regular writing habit recently.  I’ve also been thinking about what I want to do with various parts of my platform.

First, I’ll be shifting the blog content.  The rest of my platform (what I write, Twitter, Discord, email list) is now built around increasing the amount of aspec (asexual and aromantic spectra) representation in YA fiction, so my blog is falling in line with that. Specifically, it will be targeted towards other writers who are writing aspec characters, so it’ll mostly be posts about writing and about being aspec & aspec issues.  (Although I’m definitely not deleting anything, so the Atheism posts and random stuff like college application advice will still be there if you scroll down far enough.)

Second, I’m switching from bi-weekly to monthly posts, both because it’s easier to keep up during the semester, and so I can save some articles for guest-posting instead of having to throw everything at the blog to keep up.  I’ll publish posts on the 1st of the month, and you should wake up to the email alert on the 2nd :).

(EDIT: I’ve gotten professional feedback on my platform strategy since publishing this post, and am keeping everything on one list. If you’re reading this paragraph after February 2022, please disregard the info.) Finally, I’m separating my blog and email list.  Currently, I have a single list that receives both new posts and the (pretty rare) email with other news.  However, I’m starting to have more news and other things to share with people, and as the list grows bigger I’m assuming not everyone will want both types of content.  So, to make sure people are only getting what they’re interested in, I’m keeping the existing list as just blog subscribers (since that’s almost exclusively what I’ve been sending to it already), and starting a second group for just email subscribers (obviously you’re more than welcome to be in both).  If you only want to keep getting new post updates, then you don’t have to do anything. If you want to be on my email list and get the other news, resources, and updates too, then you can subscribe here: [removed].

That’s all the big news I think.  Since it is the 1st of the year after all, here are my goals for 2022 while I’m at it:

1. Finish the draft of my novel by Camp NaNo, according to my “300 words a day” plan.
2. Do Camp NaNo in July, and also Go Teen Writer’s annual summer 100-for-100 challenge.
3. Submit something to 1 of the 3 journals for ace/aro writing, or somewhere else if the submission windows don’t work out.
4. Figure out what I need to do to become a sensitivity reader someday soon-ish – research, and work out a tentative plan for myself
5. Get at least 30 people on my email list (hopefully I’m underestimating, but I wanted a specific, measurable goal, so I’m throwing out a number here.)

So, what about you?  Anything you want to brag (or complain) about for 2021?  Goals for 2022 you want to share?

P.S. You may have noticed that Writing for Life is now purple instead of blue – this is because purple is the ace flag color :).