Boring Introspection Ahead.

Now that we're into 2004, I thought I'd try making a bit of sense out of 2003, and hell…I can't. I genuinely don't know what to make of the year now gone by. In a lot of ways, it completely sucked, but in other ways it wasn't that bad at all. My hope is that 2003 will be one of those years that, while unpleasant, turns out to be where some of the building-blocks of my future "good life" were put down.

My big goal for 2003 was to get moving on my freelance writing career, and sadly, I was never able to get out of the starting gate on that. This was for a lot of reasons, but they were mostly financial: spending the year unemployed, I never had the resources necessary to really market myself, especially in an era of economic downturn when companies are tightening belts already. Instead of blasting out 500 or 1000 sales letters and brochures at once, and joining the Chamber of Commerce so I could attend networking events, I could only muster tiny mailings here and there (we're talking between 20 and 40 letters at a time). It wasn't that I couldn't achieve critical mass, I couldn't even get the clump of snow rolling down the hill. That is by far my greatest disappointment of 2003. All the books say not to quit your day job when you're trying to start a freelance writing career, but they're not exactly long on advice for people who have already crossed that particular bridge, for one reason or another.

As I mention, spending a year being unemployed was not remotely what I had in mind. There's an obnoxious vicious cycle where you lose your job in a downsizing/reorganizing maneuver, and then the only jobs out there are lower-paying, so you apply for those en masse; but the few interviews you get come to nothing because employers know you'd be taking less pay than your last job, and ergo, obviously you'll leave the second something better opens. Add in the companies that advertise for positions that don't even exist, and, well…I'll stop complaining now.

My fiction writing didn't produce my first fiction sale, as I had hoped, but I still plug on, despite the fact that I've slacked off seriously in the short-fiction department, something which is high on my list to rectify this year. My main fiction goal in 2003 was to get The Promised King, Book One out to a publisher, and this I did. My main goal in 2004 is to finish the first draft of The Promised King, Book Two, and then move on to the idea for a horror novel that I've been nursing for four years now, before the idea gets tired of sitting in my brain and goes off to nest in someone else's.

Basically, I think that 2003 might end up being personally important to me more for what I figured out about myself than for any actual event or accomplishment. It's always been a no-brainer with me that I'd be happier making, say, $100,000 a year writing than making the same amount doing anything else. But 2003 forced me to confront the more likely scenario: Would I be happier making $20,000 a year as a writer than making $100,000 a year doing anything else? The answer to that, I finally realized, is yes. In the choice between writing and doing something else that is more lucrative, I really would find it better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

So here we go. As Van Miller would have said, "Fasten your seatbelts".