Meredith Shayne

First post of the year

2010 was quite a good year for me, particularly professionally, but also personally. I wasn’t under as much stress as I was in 2009 and 2008 (2008 was the Year of the Huge and Stressful Project(s), and 2009 was the Year of Ridiculous and Chronic Insomnia), and it really made a difference. Long may that continue.

I’m quite looking forward to 2011 – soon I’ll move into the house I bought, which I’m looking forward to so much I can’t even say. I think living in a house that’s mine will really make a difference to my outlook; maybe that’s silly, but I think it will. I’m really having to stop myself buying all new furniture for the place, haha! Those furniture places are so seductive with their rows and rows of bookcases and chests of drawers. I need another bookcase, too.

My goals for the upcoming year are relatively simple: write more (and hopefully publish more) and blog more. That seems achievable now while I’m still on holidays, of course; mind you, I have managed to fritter away the day and haven’t done a scrap of the editing I was meaning to do, so it’s not like being at work will make my procrastination any worse. I haven’t started packing either, but never mind. I’m not moving for 2 weeks, there’s still plenty of time! (Famous last words if I ever heard them.)

Not a Terminator sequel

It’s quite hard to believe that it’s almost 2011. I’ve dropped off the face of the earth recently, as I tend to do – something to rectify in the new year, for sure – because I’ve been quite busy. Apart from work stuff, which is always busy, I’ve bought a house and finished writing a novel. It’s quite hard to buy a house and try to finish a novel at the same time, I discovered. Very hard, in fact. But I did manage it, and I only wanted to shout at my lawyer and my bank guy a few times, which was a miracle, all things considered. Not that wanting to shout at them had anything to do with the novel. Not directly, anyway.

But I’m happy because now I have a lovely house that I’ll move into in a couple of weeks, and 66,000 words that manage to come together to form something resembling a coherent story, so yay. I’ve heard back from one of my betas, and once it’s back from the others I’ll shine it up and submit it in the new year, in between packing books into boxes.

So far it’s the longest thing I’ve written, with my two published things being shorts of ~8,000 words. Finishing something so long was a very weird experience. It was a lot like when I finished writing my PhD thesis, which took me 11 months (5 months full time, 6 months part time, ugh what a slog that was) – on the one hand I was so incredibly relieved it was done, but on the other hand it was very strange to come home from work and not have anything that I had to do. Right now I am enjoying having a little writing break over the holidays, but then I also can’t stop thinking about what to do next. I have a Color Box for Torquere due in April, but that’s a fair way away yet. I have some ideas for more short stories, which I can fit in with the Color Box, and also 10k worth of words for another novel in progress, which I can’t. But I can’t really decide what I want to do.

So far I am dealing with this paralysing indecision by lying around on my mother’s lounge watching cooking shows on cable and eating ice cream. Because that’s another thing, I’m not at home at the moment, I’m in Australia, at my mother’s for Christmas. I’ve been here for a few days and have a few days to go before I leave to go back to NZ. History tells me that I never write anything while I’m away from home, and given that it’s Christmas, that’s not likely to change now. So I probably shouldn’t worry about it at all and just continue to watch the Food channel and eat ice cream. Sounds like a plan.