Wow, I sure didn’t plan to literally not blog at all this year, nor did I plan to nope out of Twitter or fade off Facebook and Instagram. I feel like saying this has become an annual tradition, but it’s been a crazy year.

Have I mentioned that I have a rare disease? Yeah, it’s called acute intermittent porphyria. The short, not-a-doctor explaination is that certain stimuli make my blood cells stop carrying oxygen. Starting mid-2017, there was a lot of certain stimuli. So this Janury, I started a 3-times-a-week infusion regimen. That pretty much consumed my life for the first half of the year.

By summer, I was improving, so I was able to taper down to twice a week, then once a week by fall. Time to do SO MUCH WRITING now, right? Lolnope, time to catch up on all the everyday stuff that had fallen by the wayside.

While all this was going on, I did manage to start querying the YA fantasy novel I finished drafting last year. Part of that was participating in a Twitter pitch event called #DVPit, which exists to help marginalized authors get their work noticed. I still don’t have an agent, but it was encouraging to have several agents actually request my query!

The #DVPit coordinators are a fantastic, supportive group of industry professionals. If you’re a marginalized writer seeking representation, I encourage you to check it out. And if Twitter pitch events aren’t your thing, still check out the #DViants community that grew from writers who connected through #DVPit.

Believe it or not, with all of that going on, I’ve still been working on the final Thalia’s Musings book. I promise I’m not going to pull a George R. R. Martin on y’all. I have a complete, chapter-by-chapter outline, and the manuscript is about around a third of the way done. And since you’ve been so patient and so encouraging, here’s a tiny SPOILER: The book opens with a wedding!

Signing off with any kind of hopeful, proactive declaration about 2019 feels like challenging the Fates, so by way of New Year’s resolutions, I’ll leave you with this.