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This year I have decided to discontinue the annual physical holiday card and accompanying chatty year-in-review letter. As I say in my profile, “This journal is the functional equivalent of a chatty holiday letter. Except more often.” And yet there’s a value in something of a year-end summary. Not everyone on my other social media reads here regularly, and might find something interesting here that they’d missed. (Pointers will be linked.)

Work and Home

This year I celebrated my official 10-year anniversary at Bayer Health Care in Berkeley. (The official anniversary doesn’t count the 8 months I spent as a contractor before becoming permanent.) I got a little lucite plaque, a gift of my choice from the corporate gift catalog, and a budget to have a celebratory lunch (which I never got around to invoking -- I was the victim of my usual social-organization paralysis there). But far more important than any of that, I get continuing regular validation that the company and my immediate management consider me a valued corporate asset and that their plans for me align with my own workplace desires (i.e., keep feeding me lots of fascinating, chewy investigative problems that require me to learn new processes). I don’t talk a lot in specifics about my work on this blog, largely for reasons of discretion. (The details of my investigations are often confidential and sensitive.) As brief background, I do discrepancy investigations for the manufacture of recombinant human clotting factor. A sort of “biotech industrial failure analysis” covering all aspects of the manufacturing process from physical plant to cellular metabolism to procedural and paperwork issues to all the myriad “unexpected events” that can happen during an incredibly complex process involving living things (both cellular and human). It is a wonderful and endlessly fascinating job and I have high hopes of continuing in it until I feel able to retire (whenever that may be).

I’ve been in my “new” home for three years now and it already feels like forever. Following my plan of gradual expansion, the garden grew significantly this year and I was able to achieve my goal of plentiful tomatoes all summer (although I don’t yet have so many I needed to do much preserving). I’m still experimenting with what other crops do well enough under my rather lacksidaisical care to become my focus. I still haven’t found the right equation for getting the expected explosion of summer squashes, and eggplant has also been little more than a promise that I may get the conditions right. The herb garden is extremely happy (and is the usual subject of my garden-porn photos). I’m still learning the degree of supervision that the automated irrigation lines require and have had a few minor setbacks due to things like squirrel chewing, thirsty slugs plugging up the drip-lines, and mis-judging the battery-life of the timer mechanism. I put in half a dozen or so new fruit trees and am starting to get tentative harvests from the trees I’ve planted in the last couple years. The citrus are all still getting their legs under them, but I had apples, cherries, quince, and medlars, as well as the plums that were already established. In the summer, it’s easy to be excited about projects around the house, but this time of year I only see the place in daylight on weekends and the work the cries out for attention is all leaf-raking and pruning.

Travel and Leisure

My travel and vacation time has been shifting significantly from SCA/medieval activities to writing/book ones. With the impetus of my new status as a published novelist (see next section) I’ve been working on getting back into the convention-going habit, with the added complication that I have two almost non-overlapping literary communities: SFF and lesbian. In 2014 I attended and was on programming for FogCon, the Golden Crown Literary Society Conference, and ChessieCon (formerly Darkovercon). Next year will be an even heavier schedule. Fortunately for my social life, my-girlfriend-who-lives-in-New-York shares my literary tastes and we’ve developed a habit of scheduling dates for conferences, which makes the travel more efficient.

Books, Books and More Books

Reading

So much of my life involves books. I regularly bemoan that I don’t find time to read as many novels as I used to, but this is the year that I fully embraced the idea of e-books and moved my fiction reading to the elliptical at the gym. I read a lot of short fiction too, since I wanted to do informed voting on the Nebula and Hugo Awards. I posted brief reviews of the Nebula nominees but didn’t manage to do so for the Hugos. I reviewed all the novels I read, starting with two that I actually read in November 2013, for a total of ten reviews (i.e., 8 novels read in 2014).

Mary Robinette Kowal: Shades of Milk and Honey; Glamour in Glass; Without a Summer
Nicola Griffith: Hild
Katherine Addison: The Goblin Emperor
Patty G. Henderson: Shadows of the Heart
Beth Bernobich: The Time Roads
Melissa Scott: Point of Knives
Nene Adams: Black by Gaslight
The Travels and Adventures of Mademoiselle de Richelieu (1744)

And I have every expectation of finishing and reviewing Kari Sperring’s The Grass King’s Concubine before the end of the year, and expect it to be my favorite book read this year.

As has become my habit, I blogged brief summaries of all the non-fiction books I bought (was well as getting caught up on the books I bought last year) for a total of 54 books.

Writing

The biggest book-related event of my year, of course, was the release of my first published novel, Daughter of Mystery, back in January. It’s one thing to fantasize about your book being published to rave reviews, massive sales, and adoring fans. In reality, of course, it’s a bit like social anxiety, except displaced from yourself to your work. Will they like it? I can’t tell whether they like it. Is it selling well? How well is well? What does this review mean -- did they like it or not, I can’t tell. Wah! Nobody loves my book! Oh, look, someone said something nice. Maybe at least one person does like it. Glowing review! I am loved! It’s a roller coaster. I started joking that I scheduled a book-related depressive crisis for every Friday morning. It’s hard having a small-press book and constantly comparing yourself to writers who have the power of a Big Five publisher behind them. Harder still to mostly keep my mouth shut about all these frustrations because nobody likes a whiny author. In an odd way, it’s sort of like job-hunting: it’s most important to present a positive and cheerful face when you most want to curl up in bed and cry. In the end, all I can do is keep writing and hope to grow a reputation.

My second novel, The Mystic Marriage, will be published in April 2015 and I’m currently working on books 3 and 4. I also decided to get some more short fiction out into the world and have one story currently in submission and another finished and ready for polishing. Maybe in ten years or so I can become an overnight success.

Researching

After the novels, my biggest writing-related project has been the Lesbian Historic Motif Project--an annotated bibliography of research materials relevant to creating historically-grounded lesbian fiction. This is something I’ve had in the works for a couple decades at least, but it wasn’t until I let go of the notion of doing anything planned and coherent that I started doing more than collecting materials. By the end of the year, I will have posted summaries of 75 individual publications (books or articles) for a total of 117 blog posts tagged “lhmp”. The project has been a real eye-opener. It was one thing to know that I had several bookshelves and a thick file folder full of relevant publications, but I’d barely skimmed many of them. Now that I’m reading in detail (and especially now that I’m taking notes), I continue to be amazed and pleased at how much data there is (compared to expectations) on women who desired, loved, lived with, supported, and even married each other in eras before the 20th century.

The project has gradually been attracting the attention of other people interested in the topic from various angles and I have hopes that it will become the sort of useful resource that I envisioned back in the ‘90s when I thought I’d being putting out something on paper...and that there was little enough data that I’d easily find a good stopping place to do so. (In a way, the LHMP has a story-arc very similar to the Surviving Garments Database. In both cases, dynamic “publication” in the internet is a far more viable framework than would have been possible several decades ago.) My working bibliography includes twice as many unreviewed publications as ones I’ve covered already, and more are being added all the time, so I don’t anticipate coming to a finish any time soon.