I didn’t publish as much writing this year, compared with priors year since I’ve been submitting work in earnest (2020). I didn’t submit as much either, feeling somewhat jaded about sub fees and in general unmotivated to submit. I had a near miss with having my short story collection accepted for publication, and a few other longlists but no offer, so I decided to take the novella from that collection and develop it into a full novel. I paused writing the novel I thought I wanted to write, which danced around the subject I’m interested in writing, and switched to expanding the novella, which is what I REALLY want to write. I want to spend more time with that character back in Arizona. I decided to stop submitting to manuscript contests if they require a fee. It’s just a disheartening process for me right now. Switching to writing the novel from writing more short pieces has been a shift, a delay in potential gratification, but I enjoy the world of the novel and trying to figure out the puzzle of how to fit these two timelines together now that I have largely written the “past” timeline with the novella. I was folding laundry the other night when I realized with a jolt that I knew how to resolve a plot hole I’d accidentally left in the novella, one I hadn’t realized was there until recently.

I published only a few short pieces this year. “Shadow Being,” inspired by my night terrors, was published in Penumbra and they invited me to record a reading of the piece. Daniel at Black Stone / White Stone kindly selected my “found” poem sliced from the Y-BOCS scale for the Found Things zine. I had a review of The Skunks by Fiona Warnick in The Masters Review, and a couple other reviews published loosely on social media. I had the experience of finishing a story, sending it out to only one place at a time, and having it accepted quickly (for me): “Terrible Tilly” in The Dodge. Proud of that story and also enjoyed working on it, which I did for about a year before sending it out. My piece from 2022 in Serotonin Lit was chosen for the Serotonin Anthology. And my prose chapbook Commuting was published as part of the Summer Series with Ghost City Press.

I thought this year didn’t feel long until I looked back through the books I’ve read this year and thought, oh god that was just earlier year?? It was jarring to recall what had been going on in the world while I had been reading a book.

[Some] favorite books read this year:

The Wilderness by Aysegül Savas // The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas // The Burrow by Melanie Cheng // Dressing the Bear by Susan Leary // We Were the Universe by Kimberly King Parsons // Negative Space by Gillian Linden // Home Movies by Michael Wheaton // Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt // Dislocations by Sylvia Molloy // Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino // Sunbathing by Isobel Beech

I got an email the other day from a print photo service I used years ago, warning they would archive my photos if I didn’t order. I ignored it since I have the photos somewhere, but caved after another email reminded me it was my FINAL CHANCE. The photos were from 5-15 years ago, not ancient history. But the photos from 15 years ago caught me off guard. In my head, doing the math, 2019 was only a couple years ago, and 2009 was only 5 years ago. (Never been great at math.) I saw memories I’d forgotten: moving into the house in Washington, visits home to see my family, road trips. My beautiful cat Gandalf. I felt sad but also something else. Just the passing of time, I guess. Happy that there were good memories even if I don’t always remember them as I age and my memories of past years become blurry, replaced with the more recent past, like I forgot how I got here. Yesterday, my cat E curled up for the first time ever–though we adopted her almost 3 years ago now–in the cat bed Gandalf used to sleep in before he passed over 3 years ago. I almost thought she was someone else, seeing her asleep there. A blip in the timeline. The bed has rested in front of a window in the bedroom, unused, until she suddenly took interest in it, curling up in the fluff as if she’d been there many times before.

Neat things I saw this year:

my first aurora borealis // watched a mother elk nudge a baby elk in the middle of the stream on the beach in Oregon // stars above my childhood home // so many neighborhood bunnies // a backyard cat I hadn’t seen for about a year, like seeing an old friend

xx happy solstice, happy end of 2024, and if you’ve ever read any of my words anywhere, thank you, thank you