2014: My Not So Terrible Twos

When you’re working on something really huge, you know, something like getting a degree, starting a business, becoming healthier or building a house– you do these little incremental things everyday that support that goal. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like much, right? We say things like I only wrote one page of my dissertation or got that one little corner of my website done. Or maybe, I didn’t eat that WHOLE cookie the size of my head, just half or I painted that one wall in the bathroom. It’s easy to minimize these daily successes, but the thing is– they add up. A few pages a day is a dissertation in a year. A house gets painted one wall at a time. It’s important to pause and see the thing from a distance every now and then.

I also believe that huge accomplishments rarely (if ever) happen in a vaccum. There’s someone behind the scenes who cooks dinner while you write those pages, who tells all their friends about your new business, who cheers you on when you make smart decisions and picks up a paint brush to help.

My huge thing is my writing career. And each and every one of you reading this is that person behind the scenes. You are telling all your friends about my books, cheering me on, lending your talents and perspective to my work, and making me dinner (okay, that’s really just one person, but you get the point). Thank you hardly seems sufficient, but I’ll say it anyway: Thank you. You’re amazing.

Here is what you supported me in accomplishing this year. I’m calling it the Not Terrible at All Twos:

• 2 books published, How to be Alive & How to Fall (plus, How to be Alive was my first paperback!)
• 2 articles published (at the Write Life Magazine & Women Writers, Women’s Books)
• 2 guest blog posts (thanks for hosting, Karen A. Chase & Kristi Tuck Austin)
• 2 short stories written for blog hops (First Kiss & The 12 Days of Christmaskwanzakah)
• 2 awesome conferences, where I met way more than 2 awesome authors (RWA and James River Writers)

Other exciting things, that didn’t happen to fall in increments of 2:

• Participating in a panel discussion about using research in fiction with the Focused Inquiry Department at VCU and being asked to lead a panel discussion for the James River Writers Writing Show in January (hmmm, I guess that is 2 things)
• Being invited to join the board of James River Writers in 2015
• My novella, Delayed, being featured as a Breakout Book by Apple iBooks in Australia/New Zealand (And as if that alone wasn’t awesome enough, I was featured next to my lovely and talented friend, Tracie Puckett)
• My novel, How to be Alive, receiving a 4-star review at Underground Books (and being called slightly reminiscent of Eat, Pray, Love and P.S. I Love You. What?! So cool!)

Again, thank you so much, for everything. Now, bring on 2015!