This is my third year continuing my writer in review tradition. I don’t know if these are valuable to anyone else out there but me, but I really enjoy the forced opportunity to reflect back on the work I’ve been doing. Sometimes in the thick of it, I don’t see any progress, but then you look back on a whole year and can see real changes. So without further ado, a summary of last year.
Another year has passed in my great writing adventure. My birthday was yesterday, which is making me feel old as I’m now officially in my late 30s. But it’s been a year in which a lot happened, so I am hopeful that things are heading in exciting directions. Without further ado, here’s my year in review!
2022 was a year of everything everywhere all at once. (Loved that movie!) I was constantly so busy that my to do lists grew always longer and never shorter and I had to put off things that really should have been done in order to put out the fires.
One thing I learned about myself is that I volunteer for too many things just because I could do them without thinking of whether I should do them. A lot of my writing time and energy has been eaten up by the PTA and political campaigns this year. I need to discipline myself to say no a little more often and/or downgrade the quality that I expect of myself in these volunteer assignments. I have a hard time just letting things be bad and done when I could make them better.
Family-wise, the kids are doing well in school, settling in after the pandemic and moving between states. George started a new job with a software start-up in Utah. I’ve made some friends in my new ward and started a book club, so things are feeling more normal than they were in 2021. I feel like I’ve been waiting at the starting line of my life-after-stay-at-home mom life for several years now, but 2022 made me feel like it was beginning to get somewhere.
Let’s check in on how I did on the goals set in the 2021 Writer in Review:
Decide whether I want to go for an MFA – I actually ended up deciding that I’d rather do an MA than an MFA. Basically, I decided I could do a lot of the improving of my writing craft part on my own (see the next goal). Reading lots of books and theory and being able to discuss them with other smart people felt like more of a value-add to me. Plus I couldn’t make the more agonizing choice between applying for fiction (which I want to learn and am currently bad at, maybe not good enough to get in) and creative nonfiction (which I feel competent at but don’t necessarily want to spend 2+ years improving). This way I can avoid deciding and keep dithering with both. Yay!
The decision to head in a literary studies direction was precipitated by a graduate class at BYU titled “Fairy Tales and Other Speculative Fictions: Young Adult Literature and the Search for Justice.” It was taught by Jill Rudy, and her feedback and advice was pivotal in my decision to go for it as a scholar. And the conversation in class reminded me how generative it can be to be in an environment with others who are also thinking about the same things.
My application for BYU’s English MA program was turned in last week, and the deadline was this week. From what I can gather through anxious Google-ing the bowels of social media and the English department website, it seems like they send out decisions around the end of March, so keep your fingers crossed for me. (They are offering a class on dystopias in the fall which I’m dying to take–please!)
Join or start a regular critique group – I did this! I formed the Paper Wizards critique group this year with some other aspiring authors I met at LTUE. We’ve been meeting regularly every-other week to exchange work. I should write a post someday with the lessons I’ve learned in organizing a critique group, but suffice to say, they have been instrumental in improving all the stories I wrote this year.
Attend three conferences related to my interests – I attended LTUE, MHA, and LDSPMA last year, in addition to watching the AML conference online and attending Dragonsteel 2022. Each of these conferences was helpful to me in its own way, and it was a good balance of speculative fiction fandom, Mormon studies, and writing professional networking between all of them. I’ll definitely return to LTUE this year (next month!), but I may shake things up with some new-to-me conferences this year.
Write at least 4 short stories and 4 personal essays – Let’s see. I completed four short stories this year: a 1000-word flash fiction piece called “Arm of Mercy” that a beta reader called Star Trek Mormons, “Birthright,” “Reclaiming the Desert” (working title: Solar Punk Utah), “Memories” (working title: Robot Nanny). I feel that each of these was better than the one before it, so I’m definitely learning something (thanks, critique group!).
On the essay side, things are more numinous. I finished one piece, “Self Portrait in Cookies.” I have a few other substantial fragments that didn’t quite make it to the finish line, one about my relationship with A Wrinkle in Time and one contrasting my two grandmothers. I’m still actively working on my Landscapes of Faith essay which I hope to finish in the first quarter of this year.
Suffice to say, four stories and four essays in one year was not the lowball goal I thought it was. Lesson learned.
Start a podcast – Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree launched in March, and we made 20 episodes in 2022. I am so proud of what the podcast has done so far and looking forward to creating season 2 this year.
My singular creative publication this year was on the very last day of the year: “Self Portrait in Cookies” was part of Young Ravens Literary Review issue 17, a special issue about womanhood. I shared an Author’s Note about this piece last week.
“Birthright” earned an honorable mention in the Writers of the Future contest for volume 39, quarter 2. It’s currently on submission to a great market and has made it past the first wave of cuts. I am hoping to hear back from them by the end of February, but I’m not holding my breath. I think I’ve found a critical flaw in the viewpoint of the story, so if it doesn’t get picked up, I may pull this one back and rewrite it completely.
“Reclaiming the Desert” and “Memories” are also out on submission.
A couple of big projects this year in the Mormon Studies arena. I put out a few useful guides on the Association for Mormon Letter’s blog. The first was an attempt at an exhaustive list of Mormon podcasts. I’m in the process of updating that list this month, so expect an updated version in the next month or so. I also compiled a conversation on the AML Discord server into “Mormon Horror: An Incomplete Guide of Where to Find It.” There’s a lot more out there than I knew, so hopefully this can be helpful to others as well.
In June, I presented at the Mormon History Association this year on “Confronting Colonialism Through Magic: Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive as a Reflection of Mormon Colonialism.” Not many people got to hear it, unfortunately, because there were so many amazing panels going on at the same time. The general drift is examining the role of the Parshendi in Stormlight through the lens of the Lamanite narrative in LDS theology, history, and culture. There is a recording available with a digital conference ticket purchase, but I feel that I need more of a theoretical grounding in post-colonialism before I can work this up into a formal paper. I’m hopeful that I could publish this work somewhere in the future.
At nearly the same time as MHA (while also taking that graduate class at BYU), I was also reviewing “Under the Banner of Heaven” for Public Square Magazine. You can get the links to all those pieces and my thoughts on the series in this blog post.
Speaking of that graduate class, I wrote a really fun paper for my final project on Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, the pandemic, and the necessity of art and religion to maintain hope in an unjust world. I haven’t done anything with the paper since then, but maybe I will look into submitting it to an academic conference this year.
I also have forthcoming a book review in Dialogue. Haven’t seen signs of it yet, but the link will definitely be here when it comes through.
Complete at least 6 new creative pieces this year. I’ll leave myself some wiggle room as to whether these will be fiction or creative nonfiction. But I need some new cannon-fodder for submissions so it’s time to actually finish things up. Hopefully this next goal will help me with that.
Grow my tolerance for daily writing to regular 1000-word sessions. One of the troubles I’ve had with maintaining a regular writing practice is that I find creative work pretty exhausting. I love having done it, but doing it takes a lot out of me. As a result, I’m really good at avoiding it and suffering from the anxiety of not doing it instead. (Thanks for that.) Like with long-distance running, there’s value in showing up daily and doing the work, even (especially?) when you aren’t inspired.
So this fall, I set a goal of writing 250 words at least 4 days a week. In December, I bumped that up to 500 words which is still a stretch right now, but I think that by the end of 2023, I could reach the point of comfortably writing 1000 words a day. That level of output is really necessary to make writing regularly in all my genres achievable, and something very possible given my current stay-at-home life. And yes, I’m including all genres in this: fiction, nonfiction, academic, even outlining counts, so long as it’s advancing my own work forward. If I’m admitted to grad school, a lot of my wordcount would likely go to essays and assignments, so building up the muscles for that is another plus of this goal.
Submit at least 40 times. In 2022, I made 19 submissions, so this is basically doubling my current rate. I’ve been attempting to send in a submission every Friday this fall, and it’s been a helpful practice. I have doubts that this number is really achievable given that I don’t have a huge backlog of work, but I’m okay with reaching for the stars here and perhaps falling short.
Double the listenership of Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree. I know, it’s not a good goal because it’s not under my control. However, I don’t want to bore you with all the specific numbers and strategies. Suffice to say, I want to put in a good amount of work on marketing the podcast this year and hope for it to pay off. I feel like there is a good audience for this podcast out there who just doesn’t know that it exists yet. I’ve pulled the subscription numbers from all the various distribution platforms to hold myself accountable on this one.
Gain some editing skills by working on Irreantum’s genre issue. Not so much a goal as something that will happen, but editing is my final frontier in the world of writing, the part of the process I have yet to do much with. I think it’s something I could possibly be good at and I have a few ideas for projects in the future if I enjoy how this goes.
Make at least 24 posts to this blog. I’ve gotten in the habit of posting my book reviews at the beginning of each month, but I’d like to provide you with a little more value. Hopefully, I will write at least one additional blog post each month of the year.
In addition to these, I also have some personal reading projects for 2023. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for indulging my personal reflections. I’d love to know what your writing goals are for this year, either through the comments, social media, or email. I’m always in need of new people to be accountable to. 😀 May this be your best writing year yet.
In September, I set out to participate in the Story-a-Day challenge. If you haven’t heard of it, Julie Duffy runs a challenge called Story-a-Day in May and September. As the title implies, she emails you a different prompt each day from which you are challenged to complete an entire story, beginning to end, in one day. These stories can be as short as you want; the only goal is to finish them. Ideally, by the end of the month, you’ll have 30 completed story drafts.
If you’re familiar with human nature, you won’t be surprised to hear that I did not end the month with 30 finished stories. I wrote 12 stories, 4 of which were complete drafts and the rest of which were outlines or ideas or the first third of a story before I ran out of time or lost the will to finish.
So do I consider my Story-a-Day experience a failure?
Continue reading “The Story-a-Day Challenge and How to Set ABC Goals for Writers”
In January 2020 I set myself some writing writing goals. Let’s look at how I was doing on those before, you know, that thing happened.
Continue reading “Writing Goals for the Post-Pandemic World”Observations from reading a collection of stories by a science fiction master
Confession: I haven’t read short stories since graduating from college.
This is probably not much of a shock to you. Unless you are a writing professional, you probably don’t read short fiction either. Novels really are the prevailing art of the day. But I’ve been trying to get back into them because they let you see a whole idea very quickly. I will never be able to read as many books as I wish I could, especially since I read so many genres. But with short stories, I can at least get a taste of what an author is like.
A great tool for this has been the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. I recommend it to everyone. It’s like Reading Rainbow but for grownups! And the vast majority of the stories fall into the SFF genre, so I’m getting exposed to a lot of authors I wouldn’t have time for otherwise.
But I set a goal to read one whole collection by a classic SFF author this winter. I wanted to really understand what one author was about without having to spend a year reading their whole backlist. I picked Ray Bradbury merely because I was looking for authors who had written about time travel, and his story “A Sound of Thunder” is, as far as I know, the origin of the butterfly effect as used in fiction.
Well, turns out most of his other stories are not about time travel, but I did enjoy reading A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories by Ray Bradbury. Some of my observations from the collection:
Continue reading “Writing Lessons from Reading Ray Bradbury”