I've been seeing more book buzz on Facebook and Twitter, but it's for the next few months. That suggests we can expect more books coming out in the future.
Consider doing some recapitulation, folks. It's incredibly helpful, and you may find it an ego-boost, too. You could have accomplished more than you think you have. Especially if you had goals to work with last year. They were a huge help for me, giving me something to focus on.
My greatest accomplishment in 2020 is, of course, remaining on my feet and as sane as I ever am. Professionally, though, here are my goals and objectives and what happened with them.
Goal 1. Concentrate on submitting completed book-length projects as well as completed short-form work.
Objectives:
However, I did make 50 submissions overall this year, resulting in publishing the following:
Fears That We May Cease To Be at The Blue Nib Literary Magazine
Dear Pastor Bill at The Haven
And I published the humor piece Well, How Many Masks Have You Made at Medium myself.
That was some progress with my short-form adult writing.
However, I took a six-week flash forms workshop this summer during which I wrote some pieces and then last month took part in Flash NaNo2020 during which I wrote nine more pieces. One of them was Dear Pastor Bill, which has already been published. So though I didn't do much with the planned objectives, I am happy what I did for the overall goal.
Goal 3. Work on the 365 story project
Objectives:
I did absolutely nothing on this and was planning to ditch it again for next year. However, just this morning I was thinking that now that I have more flash training, I should dabble with this again.
Goal 6. Stay On Top Of Upcoming Known Events
Objectives:
Goal 7. Continue collecting material and ideas for an adult scifi project, far in my future.
Funny story on this one. The adult scifi project I was thinking about was called Flu Season, and it was going to be a mystery/thriller set in a world that has recovered from a massive flu epidemic that took out a big percentage of the population a couple of generations back. The flu has never been wiped out, and people have learned to live around it. In addition, the world's population hasn't bounced back, so the world hasn't bounced back, so that makes for a different--though not necessarily bad--kind of life.
I had a lot to work out with this and hadn't started any writing. But I was thinking about world building. I was thinking about a world where everyone wears masks and gloves in public and makes fashion statements with them. Homes are renovated so people enter through laundry rooms where they strip out of their outdoor clothes and change into clean clothes. Everyone home schools. Takeout meals are a big, fancy deal.
Now, I'm not going to go anywhere with this now, but the thinking I'd done with it had an impact on how I've lived the last 9 months, and probably why, psychologically, I've dealt with this better than I might have. I was somewhat prepared.
I've been doing a lot of reader response posts lately, because I've been pushing with my reading in order to meet my goal of reading 50 books this year. I made it, going over by two. I know I did, because GoodReads says so.
GoodReads keeps track of my reading over the year--so long as I enter the books and remember to include a finish date. It makes a lovely graphic with all the covers of the books. Over the course of the year, it tells me if I'm behind or ahead of schedule. This year I was often behind, partly because I read some slow adult works. I'm looking at you A People's History of the United States.
In order to make my goal, I had to push this past few months, giving up my daily Zen of watching foreign TV shows to make reading time. I was not willing to approximate correct behavior on this one. Next year I'm going to set the bar a little lower. It will be less stressful to reach it, and if I go over, I can brag.
I'm not bragging this year, folks. My sister read 100 books in 2020.
Ellie and Jack, both middle school athletes with single parents, barely know each other, though Ellie certainly knows about Jack who is quite highly regarded. They end up swapping bodies and having to spend the weekend with each other's friends and families and dealing with each other's problems. The book switches from one point of view to the other, which I'm not usually of, but it works well here. Yes, humorous situations all over the place.
Some things I particularly like about this book:
So this was a good find, a good end-of-the-year read.
A particularly entertaining part of the book involves the fact that gramps has turned back time for his body, but not his mind. He's still, in reality, an older scientist, who has now been thrown into a teenager's world.
I thought Ellie's epiphany toward the end was a little abrupt, but, nonetheless, this is a neat book, both entertaining and with some different content.
I'm always saying that I'm not that big a fan of zombie books, but I seem to have read a number of them. I'm not attracted to the idea of walking dead, by any means, or horror. I'm attracted to zombie books that have a unique world for the zombies to exist within. That was the case with the Rot & Ruin books I read, as well as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Rot & Ruin was a zombie/contemporary western mash-up. P and P and Z was, of course, a zombie/Pride and Prejudice mash-up. Dread Nation is a zombie/alternative history mashup. It takes place in a post-American Civil War world in which the dead rose during/after the Battle of Gettysburg.
I believe I once read that zombie stories are never about zombies. That's certainly the case with Dread Nation. This book deals with race and politics, with a twist on a southern belle/mean girl secondary character thrown in, just in case there's not enough to interest you. And like with Rot & Ruin, the zombies in Dread Nation are not necessarily the worst things our hero has to deal with. Some of the humans who exist in this zombie world are pretty grim.
Fantastic main character who would have been a male a decade or so ago but most definitely is not. Even the ending is good, though the story is clearly set up for a sequel.
Seriously, I can't think of any negatives for this one.
The Hundred Dresses was published in 1944, and it's interesting on a couple of levels.
Stylistically, it is very elegantly written. It is more sophisticated in presentation than we see in middle grade books these days. And, yet, it also has a lot of illustrations by Louis Slobodkin. (Turns out I admired that Slobodkin site back in 2007.) This gives the impression that The Hundred Dresses is for even younger readers. However, that may have been common in children's books of that era. The Hundred Dresses is also written in the third person, something that's not very popular with publishers now. It sometimes is written from a point-of-view character, Maddie, who who is more of an observer than an actor in the story, and sometimes the narrator is more classically omniscient. I don't think that kind of switching would go over today.
This book is about a couple of school girls who humiliate a third one, a child of poor Polish immigrants who has to wear the same dress to school every day. They "have some fun with her." The main instigator is a girl named Peg, who would be perceived today as a head mean girl. That sometimes point-of-view character, Maddie, is her companion, complicit in her silence.
At a couple of points it seems clear that neither the omniscient narrator nor Maddie consider Peg to be a bully. In her era, she may have been considered just incredibly shallow and thoughtlessly cruel. But Peg would be considered a bully today. Reading how she behaves to her victim, Wanda, and how Wanda just takes it and takes it and takes it was disturbing to this adult reader who is aware of how those who are bullied have broken over the last couple of decades.
The ending was also disturbing. Wanda forgives Peg and Maddie. I'm not saying forgiveness is a bad thing. But those two little WASP girls didn't have to do a damn thing to redeem themselves, so they could feel better. Wanda does it all.
I've seen a few descriptions of this book that indicate that it's about Wanda Petronski, the Polish girl victimized by Peg and Maddie. I don't feel it is. I think it's about Maddie, the girl who stood to one side, did nothing to stop the bullying, and was a decent enough human being to feel bad about it. It is her thoughts we are privy to and we see what she sees. Additionally, the book is said to have been inspired by an incident in Estes own life, when she was in a Maddie position and was never able to apologize to the girl she didn't help at the time.
I think Maddie as the central figure makes The Hundred Dresses a far more interesting book than it would be if it really were about Wanda. We have lots of victim books. We have far fewer about the other people in those situations.
This would be an excellent classroom or family read-aloud.
*I originally published the title as "A Sixty-Four-Year-Old Children's Book."
Writers can manage some of the chaos in their lives by encouraging a similar attitude in themselves. Particularly in situations in which we've set up short-term objectives around a schedule, we have to be careful not to fall apart when (notice I didn't say if) the schedule can't be adhered to as we fantasized it would, when we can't reach the behavior we were hoping for.
Falling apart causes chaos.
Last month I took part in FlashNaNo2020. The plan/schedule for that was to write 30 flash stories in 30 days. I veered off into flash essays and memoirs, so I wasn't sticking to the plan for that right from week 2.
It also became clear at the end of the first week that I wasn't going to meet the planned, "correct behavior," writing 30 pieces of flash in 30 days. I had to put that correct behavior aside and accept that I was going to have to approximate it. The alternative to approximating correct behavior would have been to give in to the dread what-the-hell effect. "I'm obviously not going to hit the behavior I want, so what-the-hell? I might as well give up on this whole thing."
The what-the-hell effect is a lot like what passes for chaos at my house.
Oh, and this is a 2020 book! A pandemic book about my major out-of-house pandemic activity.
I wrote Dear Pastor Bill last month as part of FlashNaNo2020, my month of writing flash. So I originally thought of it as flash fiction. But is it "humor writing?" Is there such a thing as "humor writing?" What is this?
You can see why I referred to it as "my piece" in the first paragraph.
And, yes, I should do some research and tell you all about it.
In our Facebook discussion, a question arose on how writers can share their work and generate interest in it without blogging. Well, you know me. I have some thoughts on that. I think, therefore I blog.
Writers need to be very careful about "sharing" new work at a website or blog, even their own, because many journals and potential markets consider what they've posted as "published." Those markets, and there are many of them like this, won't consider that work for publication. It's now "previously published," and many places don't accept that kind of work. It doesn't matter how low your readership is, the material is, or at one time was, available to the public.
I never publish my essays and short stories here or at my website, because I want the option of being able to submit them elsewhere. While I was taking part in FlashNaNo2020 last month, I wouldn't even post any of my work at the group's Facebook page, in case doing so meant I'd lost the option to submit it elsewhere.
I write frequently here about a number of subjects--blogging and time management, for instance--that I might someday want to write something on and submit somewhere. However, I don't expect to be able to publish anything I've posted here as is. I would need to do updating, rewriting, and maybe some new research. I would need to come up with new "original content."
Well, I haven't made a new book sale in over--well, in quite some time. Clearly, I'm not the one to be giving advice on how to generate interest in your writing work. Not to worry. That won't stop me.
Three things you can try:
While thinking about the Facebook discussion I was part of, I searched Original Content to see what I'd covered on this subject in the past. Here are links to more of Gail's thoughts on blogging than you will want to be privy to. Some of these posts go back a while, so some links may not be working. My own words, of course, are timeless.