Successful Failure - a Year in Review

(Note: It's pretty damn late right now. I've got an early morning ahead of me tomorrow, but I've been putting off this post for WAY too long. I guess tonight's the night...)

So as 2011 wound down, I was looking back on my resolutions from last year, thinking about resolutions for the new year and generally checking my progress against my goals.

Basically, I was beating myself up. :)

Y'see, I didn't get a single damn thing I resolved done last year. To be honest, I can't remember half of my goals, and I can't be bothered going back and looking them up. There was some stuff about getting my back catalog in print, finishing new work, hell, I don't know. The important thing is, I'm one of those people sets goals and makes them happen. And in 2011... I didn't.

So there I sat, Brooding in my Vast and Forbidding Mansion (I'd had the parapets cleaned for just that purpose), when my brain had the nerve to actually wander back over the last year:

*One of my books spent a little time on an AmazonUK bestseller list. It didn't last, but I'll never forget the feeling of seeing my name sandwiched between titles by Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornwall. Freakin' awesome!

*An earthquake destroyed my city. I mean, loss-of-life, no-more-heritage-buildings, downtown-is-rubble, drinking-bottled-water-and-pooing-in-a-trench-in-the-yard, seriously destroyed.

*That earthquake destroyed my business. The foundation cracked, water and sewage and silt came up, the building sits vacant to this day.

*I opened a new shop, painting and decorating and hauling furniture, helping dig my friends and neighbors out of their own flooding problems, writing at night and tattooing from home to help fund the reopening. And I did it all with a broken right hand.

*I spoke at schools who had to share campuses because their own buildings had been destroyed, and in churches where the rec center was the only thing that survived.

*Through 9500 aftershocks, repeated loss of basic services and the constant presence of liquifaction, a noxious mud that dries on sunny days and becomes a noxious windblown grit, I built my business back better than it ever had been.

*I got to go back to New Orleans, where among other things, I met some of the best friends a blogger can have. :)

*And this year I had somewhere to go for Christmas. No doubt a relief to everyone who received one of my drunken insane texts last year...

Well, I don't have to tell you, freshly cleaned parapet or not, looking at it that way sure put a dent in my Brooding. Which was just as well: I was having guests around for Mai Tais, Margaritas and naked Twister. It's been like this ever since I hung a disco ball in the Vast and Forbidding Mansion. It's hard to get a decent Brood on when someone's always trying to paint mustaches on the gargoyles...

So, yeah, I failed at my goals. But I'm not unhappy with my progress. The year was horrible, absolutely horrible. And it was also great.

It was a successful failure! :)

PS. I guess my resolutions weren't total failures: I did in fact finish a rough draft called Mayhem. It's marinating a bit before I start editing...

A Deepening Madness

So here I am in Act II. Still approaching my Big Middle, already deep in the belly of the Big Madness.

Maybe it's because I plotted this one out first, but this time the madness took me quite early. I was barely a few chapters in when I hit my first bad morning-- instead of my usual 1000 words I did something like 100. This kept up for two, maybe three days before I had hit my first sleepless night. I got a lot written that night, dragged my ass through the next day.

Since then, this has become my process. I'm averaging two or three insomniac episodes a week. It's thrown my sleep patterns all out of whack-- I fall asleep suddenly, completely, and briefly, like someone stuck a naptime pin in my voodoo doll. Most days, my fatigue drags behind me like a black and rusted chain.

I tell you, it's enough to make me nostalgic for my razor-mania...