Everyone seems to be talking about how crappy 2019 was. I know I had some pretty unpleasant things happen to me. But surely some good things happened too.
And in fact, they did. Here’s me looking back at the turbulent year 2019 and counting the blessings that I enjoyed.
I completed my third novel Celeste & the White Dragon, including all 247 bazillion rewrites.
I published my third book, the same Celeste.
The very first sale of Celeste in print form occurred by someone I’d never heard of.
I’ve gotten approximately halfway through the first draft of my fourth novel, Seven Sisters, the prequel to Celeste.
I worked on the stories that will go into the second anthology of my science fiction, Twisted Soul. Stories include “Alexandra,” “Godblind,” “DreamCatcher,” “A Face in the Window,” and “First Mormons in the Moon.” The first anthology was Twisted Mind, which I published in 2018.
I designed the cover for the fourth volume of the Celeste series, Blood King, after determining that what I thought would be a trilogy would work better as a single novel after all. This sets the anticipated size of the Celeste series at five volumes total.
I arranged with prominent local creative personality Dennis Moore (yes, I always think of the Monty Python song when I hear his name) to adapt Celeste into a dramatic audio format. His concept has been codified into a streaming service called Cerebral Cinema, where books are adapted into what he positions as “movies that play out in your mind,” where actors voice the characters and sound effects are added and the complete book is narrated. A sort of audio book on steroids. Planned launch date for the service is May 2020.
I wrote the script for the Cerebral Cinema adaptation of chapter 1 of Celeste. All 30 chapters will be adapted into 30 episodes, aiming for completion in time for the launch date. We’re gonna be busy in 2020!
I performed a marketing experiment on my books through Prolific Works based on the proposition that giving away some free stuff is an effective marketing strategy to attract attention and build a following. It has successfully been used by certain musicians and authors and others.
The jury is still out on whether my marketing experiment will begin a slow burn of word-of-mouth over my books, since the giveaway has a few more days left to it. But I did accomplish one important thing: my do-it-yourself efforts of publication that everyone said are best done by hiring experts to do them, namely cover design and blurb writing, attracted lots of attention. Celeste became the #1 book with a total of 221 ebook copies downloaded as of the end of 2019, out of dozens of books offered.
I also included my first published novel Brother Brigham in the giveaway, and it earned a total of 41 downloads, a respectable result for a book with a very niche audience in a giveaway aimed at a mainstream audience.
Even my anthology of science fiction stories Twisted Mind, which I have included in no group giveaway (just my own private one) and for which I’ve done virtually no marketing for and is an anthology which are usually nowhere near as popular as novels, received 4 downloads.
My son and I decided we wanted to invent a board game, so we both came up with concepts that we’ve done some work on, mine based on the Big Bang theory and his based on cybernetic espionage attacks. These are still works in progress that we dabble in now and then. This will mark the second board game I’ve invented. The first, completed many years ago, is Circle 7.
I met with an up-and-coming actor who’s making a name for herself in the independent film community, to see if we wanted to do a project together. She read my screenplay Pink Car Nation, loved it, and is now attached to it. It’s the coming-of-age story of a girl going to college for the first time. I’ll be pursuing that project in 2020 now that the holidays are over.
I’ve enjoyed the company of my three intelligent, fun, and savvy thinking kids whom I’m proud of, and my granddaughter who turned four this last year and becomes more and more adorable by the minute. She’s a firebrand with an unending zest for life who finds joy with creative play in any environment she finds herself in, as long as she’s not tired and cranky. She seems to have a talent for interpretive dance. Just put some music on and watch her! She’s a nasty little tease too, who loves to try pushing the limits every now and then and see what happens as she looks at you with a devious gleam in her eyes.
Again this year my best friends took me out to dinner for my birthday. It’s a long-standing tradition that I look forward to every year. They were friends individually, then I introduced them to each other, and they’ve been married now for I don’t know how many years. I keep telling them they owe me a successful introduction to my soulmate. (Hint hint.)
I ended 2019 with an overnight stay at the hospital after a vicious attack of vertigo that came out of the blue. This marks the fourth time over the years I’ve gone to the hospital for distressing symptoms that made me think my number was up. In all four cases, tests found nothing wrong that was going to kill me. My aging body seems to be the Trickster of Native American folklore that keeps screwing with me.
That counts as a good thing, right, to not be dying when I thought I might?