Continuing with the Best of 2009 Challenge

December 21 Project. What did you start this year that you’re proud of?

Hmm. I’m waffling on how to define “project” here. Maybe I’ll just list “efforts” that I’m proud of. They are:

  • Using “waffling” in a blog post.
  • Using a lot of quotation marks in same post.
  • Making it to the quarterfinals of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest. But I probably could have gotten farther had my manuscript really been ready, so that’s a little bittersweet…
  • Earning my first royalties by experimenting with Amazon’s Kindle publishing platform. A total of like $25, lol, but hey, getting paid to write is getting paid to write!
  • Realizing I would probably be better suited (and happier) writing for people in their teens and twenties. This doesn’t sound like an “effort,” but believe me, it wasn’t an easy thing to put away the notions I’d carried about my literary career for over 15 years.
  • Writing Twenty-Somewhere for fun — and then having it attract the attention of St. Martin’s Press! Completely unexpected and wonderful, even though its chances of getting published are about as good as my chances of… ending this sentence with something clever and amusing.
  • Reading all of Kiersten White’s blog archives. Well technically I’ve only read 60%, but at the rate I’ve been devouring her words, it will almost certainly be done before the end of the year. Or maybe even before I finish writing this post…

All right, maybe it hasn’t been such a good-for-nothing year. In fact, maybe it’s been a pretty decent one. But I’m hoping 2010 will be even better. At least in terms of “projects to be proud of,” and specifically for my writing career. I guess you’ll just have to check back in a year to see how I fare! ;)

But enough about me. Seriously. What projects (or “efforts”) from this past year are you proud of?

16 responses to “A for effort?”