30 December 2015

2015 in review

2015 hasn't been terribly eventful.

I ran another Shatterdome Atlanta, which happened and people had fun. I went to my brother-in-law's wedding on Orcas Island, which took literally all day to get to from here (we had a 7 am flight and landed in Seattle at 1:30 pm and rented a car and drove 2 hours to the ferry, waited another hour + for the boat, then took the half-hour ferry to the island, and then had to drive to the other side of the island to the location, so we arrived around 9:30 pm, which felt like midnight to us, after a really long day.)

I started taking Russian at UNC. It's an interesting language, with a few bits of grammatical WTFery for speakers of Germanic languages (which includes English). A friend said I shouldn't learn it because it's too hard, but I said "pfff" and am doing it anyway. I got an A in 101, and I expect to get one in 102 as well. Going to the class eats 10-12 hours a week, plus another 4-5 of homework. I live half an hour from campus, but I use free parking that's not exactly close to campus, so I take a bus from there.

As to the goals I mentioned in last year's review... I accomplished two and a half. I ran a 5k (36:15), successfully chaired a convention, and made a small dent in my reading backlog. I have not sold a story (not for lack of trying...37 submissions, 37 rejections), and the novel is not in anything resembling a shoppable state (which is entirely my fault; I started learning Russian, which eats up a lot of time.) I'm working on it over winter break, but I still don't think I'll get it ready before classes start again.

I taught some German this year; after May, there was a lot of summer travel, so my whole 3 students and I said we'd reconvene toward fall. And there wasn't enough interest to make a class, so no class.

I read more. I even read books that were published this year! Naomi Novik's Uprooted, Ann Leckie's Ancillary Mercy, and Zen Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown. I liked the first one a lot, the second one a lot, and the third one OK.

For 2016, I'm going to keep trying to sell these stories, keep finishing this damned novel, and start figuring out the next one.