The Insecure Writers Support Group released the book it had members help create. You can read about that here.
I'll use this meeting to wrap-up my year in writing. Technically I made horrendous progress in my attempt to make people pay me for writing. I sold virtually no books and publishers were as usual completely uninterested in me and my inadequate attempts to convince them to think otherwise. I released a book in February and the one person who read it hated it. I mean hated it. Can I emphasize that any more? Hated it!!!
So, as far as my ego went in 2014, it probably has a number of bruises still looking to heal up.
But the thing is, I think this was an incredibly crucial year. I worked on a number of projects and had some breakthroughs that could very well lead to that golden future I aspire to. Yay me and all that. I'm not even just about talking my fiction. One of the biggest projects of several big projects I tackled this year came at the very start, something I finished after starting a year ago this month, a complete Bible commentary, something I hadn't even intended to do when I decided to finally read the Bible all the way through for the first time. I'm thinking of releasing that as a book. If any significant readership materialized for it, I'd probably have to talk myself out of a lot of controversy, but I'm okay with that. I more than okay. I'm at a point in my life where I need to start asserting myself.
The Star Wars project was a personal triumph and came with great creative fulfillment, and that's as much as any writer should ever really hope to expect. I think the more I pushed to finish it before the end of the year the harder I made it for the few readers who cared to continue doing so. That's okay. The "comic strip" I'm wrapping up soon went the same way. Early in the year I had a wealth of support, but it vanished the longer it went on. But for me, it represents closure, having finally figured out the full shape of a story I've been trying to tell since high school.
I finished writing a very long novel in the early months, and then tackled the start of a very short one in the closing ones. (Maybe I'll still finish the draft of that one before the end of the year. It doesn't matter. Circumstances I won't discuss here drastically affected the shape of the whole year, and my ability to continue writing as I normally would.)
And various insights on old projects as well the conceiving of new projects entirely.
But I should stress that 2014 also walloped me good! One anthology that would've been the culmination of a writing group filled with people I knew in another lifetime vanished. Another seems destined, officially, to go nowhere. The last of three comic book biography scripts has been spinning wheels looking an artist for more than a year now. I failed completely in a writing contest, not even being selected to enter the voting rounds. And I know with absolute certainty that if I expect anyone to randomly find my books on their own, much less like them, I can probably sell myself a bridge, too (but don't worry, it's a nice one with historic value and a whole ode dedicated to it by the poet Hart Crane).
Maybe next year I'll have better things to report...
