Happy new year!

I’m back at work, trying to not just get back into my old routine, but start some new routines that I hope will be more productive for me.

2023 was a bit of a mixed bag. I know I said that I was giving myself a year to get my writing business turned around or I might have to consider getting a regular job and scaling back the writing. That didn’t go so well. I made very little money last year. However, things did take a substantial uptick later in the year, which felt like enough of a turnaround to encourage me to keep going. I don’t know if I’ll set any kind of deadline for this year because this may be a big transition year for me. I’m pondering a big cross-country move, which is going to disrupt a lot of things. I’m currently veering wildly between “excited” and “terrified” at the concept, but I think what it boils down to is that I really don’t want to be in my current living situation anymore, but I can’t afford to live anywhere else in this area. I’m going to have to move some distance if I’m going to leave my current home. If I’m going to move out of this general area, I may as well make it to a place that doesn’t have a lot of the drawbacks to where I’m living now — mostly the climate. I’m not sure I can tolerate another summer like we had last year. It’s not the part about living in a totally new place that terrifies me. I’m fine with that, and if I could just teleport myself and my stuff into a new home, I’d do it in a heartbeat. But all the logistics of making that kind of move are daunting — selling my current home, figuring out how to ship my stuff (or if I should just ditch everything that doesn’t fit in the Subaru and start all over again instead of paying more than it’s probably worth to ship it), finding a new place to live, figuring out whether to find a short-term rental while I look for a home to buy and leaving my stuff in storage or finding a longer-term temporary place and shipping my stuff there to live for a while before I buy a house, dealing with things like banking and health insurance changes, etc. All that makes me want to crawl into a hole and stay where I am forever, even if I know it’s not where I want to be.

But if I’m moving, there’s no point in finding a job here. I’m considering looking for a job in the place I want to move to, which would have the benefit of allowing me to write some of the moving expenses off my taxes if I’m relocating for a job. But I would prefer to be able to really hit an upswing on the writing and not need that.

The good news is that Tea and Empathy seems to be doing pretty well. It’s already outsold Tales of Enchantment, which came with a built-in fanbase and which had a two-month head start. That suggests I’m finding new readers. Sales for all my books ticked upward a bit after that one was published, so those new readers seem to be finding my other work. I’m starting the brainstorming process for book 2 in that series and hope to get it done before I move.

I’m trying to focus really hard on my work for now. I’m treating it like a real job, with regular working hours and dedicated time for my key tasks. I’ve always been pretty haphazard with my promotional work, so I’m trying to allocate time and come up with a plan for tasks I can do in that time. For now, that means doing a lot of learning about things I can do. My weekend is already full of webinars I’ve signed up for, with one on Friday afternoon, one on Saturday morning and one on Sunday mid-day. The next trick will be actually applying what I’ve learned.

In 2023 I took my first real vacation (involving travel, more than one night away from home, and not for anything to do with work) since 2018 with my epic cross-country road trip that’s what’s kicked off this possible move, as I found that I really did like the place I’d been looking at online. Then I got the new (to me) car that’s suited for that kind of place.

I feel like I didn’t do that much writing. I developed and wrote Tea and Empathy, and I wrote the new stories for Tales of Enchantment. The rest of the year was spent working on a book that refuses to fall into place. I think I’m finally on the right track with it, so maybe I’ll finally get it done and to my agent.

I don’t remember a lot about last year. Just about everything before October seems like a blur. There’s a little more detail between October and June, and before June is blank. It was a weird year. This year is likely to be challenging, but I hope to be in a good place and ready to move forward at the end of it.