2023 in Review
Well. At least that’s over.
I thought for a bit about leaving my review at that. Succinct. Relatable. Funny. But I like sharing with you all, and if I don’t voice at least some of the milestones that occurred in the last twelve months, it will feel like 2023 won, you know? Like it made itself so goddamn awful that no one speaks of it anymore. I’ll skip the world events (others have said more and said it better than I ever could) and focus on the personal stuff.
Let’s start with writing and career. I took a lot of classes and seminars, and got my work critiqued by a couple of my favorite authors. I did a lot of research in New Zealand. I finished the first sort-of decent draft of book two (SC), and started writing book three (PR) in November, just under the wire. Book one (CQ) spent the year being queried to agents, and it was certainly a learning process. I started out slow, up to 10 queries out at a time, since it was my first time doing it and if it wasn’t working, I needed to be able to use the feedback to refine my pitch to others. This approach became invaluable once I realized that everyone asks for the first ten pages, but only the first half of my book is epistolary, while the second half is regular-type prose with paragraphs and whatnot. I had to choose between sending sample pages that represented only half of the book’s style, or deliberately not giving agents what they specifically asked for. It was a tough call. I’m still figuring out if it will work.
Next was my home. Everything that could be maintained, fixed, replaced, and upgraded this year was. Part of the reason for this was that our hot water heater CAUGHT FIRE while spouse was laid up. So we replaced the rest of the major appliances and had all the different systems examined and fixed. Including installing a radon mitigation system and putting on a whole damn new roof.
I was able to travel a little bit, including the nerd cruise in March that we didn’t want to go on but had to unless we wanted to eat the $5000 we paid for it in December of 2019 lmao. New Zealand in May, as I mentioned above, and that was absolutely fantastic. Besides all the research for book one, I got to go to Hobbiton and Taupo, and visit my friends in Auckland. I would call it the trip of a lifetime but I want to do similar things again and again. I spent the holidays back home, a few weeks at the end of the year, which leads into another theme of 2023, which was…
Death. My grandmother, the matriarch of the family, died in November. One month before I was set to fly out to visit. It was unexpected. She had moved into a new living facility literally the day before. Her loss is something I’m still dealing with, and it capped the year after another death, of a long-time family friend, in August; as well as one of my in-laws’ cats, and my oldest and dearest cat, Tempest. It was a fucking awful year for deaths, y’all.
It was a fucking awful year for health issues, too! I started out New Year’s 2023 recovering from a surgery just a few days before, and at midnight my spouse woke me up and I discovered I had a raging throat infection from intubation. Spouse had ankle surgery in April and spent a month in bed with his foot up, so for about five weeks, I was me, him, personal chef, 24/7 nurse, emergency manager (see “house stuff” above), and sole household manager. My in-law was hospitalized for their own infection in July, and was hospitalized again the day before I left to visit family for three weeks, because they were in a terrible car accident. One of my surviving cats was diagnosed with heart failure (he’s still kicking and pretty healthy, considering, as I’m writing this), and yet another cat was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism.
And about fifty other lesser crises that, nonetheless, were dealt with while all this other crap was going on.
So 2023 wasn’t ideal. My hope is that 2024 is better. I started it in New England, which was nice, though I didn’t get much work done. But I had about ten years of in-person, family stuff to go through, so I’m not criticizing myself much. My Chinese horoscope for this year doesn’t include the words “crisis manager,” and says health challenges should be minimal, and that’s such a turnaround, I might get whiplash.
In the meantime, I’ll get back to work.
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