2008 in review: books

Books read: 57( The list )

Books acquired: 61
Books de-acquired: 62
Unread books in possession: 76, up from 64 at the end of last year. Any perceived discrepancy in the above numbers is accounted for by some of those read books having been in electronic format, mostly during my summer travels. A couple of the others were re-reads, too.

Also, that acquired/de-acquired balance is not as tidy as it looks, as about half of those were last year's purges that had been sitting in a box since November '07. It isn't at all clear that there's going to be enough shelf space to absorb the existing to-read pile, let alone any new acquisitions. (And many more of those are hardcovers, too. Now would be a good time to discover an extra room in the apartment.)

2008 in review: posts by month

January: Happy New Year! And 548 words before lunch.
February: I have no idea what this is; it's a fairly boring tree on the corner of the street, most of the time, but as I went past today I noticed it was flowering; this is the sort of thing for which a 12x zoom is useful. [Photo post]
March: I've been having a hard time settling down to read lately -- particularly this last week, when my brain doesn't seem to want to focus on anything longer than a typical LJ post. [Book post]
April: The hedgehog cacti are in bloom! [Photo phost]
May: I'm back, tired and brain-fried.
June: I'm off again in about three quarters of an hour. [There was another trip between these two!]
July: On Monday we made the canonical stroll through the woods to Whirlow Park, where the rose garden was out of order but there were plenty of other flowers to see, and moorhen chicks picking their way over the silted-up beds of the ponds. [Start of a rather damp summer vacation in Sheffield.]
August: There are some compensations to being jet-lagged at this time of year; the couple of hours after dawn are the best part of the day, when the heat is still gentle, the shadows are long, and the night-blooming cactus flowers can be seen in their glory. [Photo post]
September: Words! 603 of them, to be precise.
October: They're starting to put out the fall-winter bedding plants and let the summer grass die off in preparation for reseeding, and the temperature is supposed to plunge all the way into the eighties on Sunday as a storm passes through. [Photo post]
November: 2633 words so far. [Nano report]
December: This morning there was a cardinal, a flash of scarlet among the oleander foliage.

2008 in review: Travel

Cities slept in this year, away from home:

Tolleson, AZ (multiple visits)
Napa, CA
Washington DC
Fort Lauderdale, FL
Bozeman, MT
Sheffield, UK
London, UK
Boulder, CO

2008 in review: writing

It feels like a year in which I spent most of the time not writing. I do seem to have drafted about 85,000 words since Jan 1st, though -- 28K on a failed nanowrimo and the rest on the Behemoth novel mostly in an incomplete round of thing_in_150 earlier in the year. I didn't finish the Behemoth novel, let along the nano-thing (which is actually the exile planet novel, provisionally titled Thule), though, so I feel like a failure. Also, I didn't revise anything at all. (And I'm not at a point where I want to even think about submitting.)

I think for 2009 I should try not setting rigid wordcount goals; there are too many traps there. What I do want to try is something like writing at least something -- even if it's only a bit of outline or a few sentences -- say five days a week. The next couple of weeks are not a good time for starting new habits, as I'll be out of the country from Jan 2nd-10th, but I'll see what I can do.

Also, I know I haven't been posting much lately, and I haven't even kept up the Friday Flowers for the last couple of months. I'll try to be better about that, too.

Happy New Year!

It's the first time in a few years I've been up at midnight on New Year's Eve, so the calendars have been duly hung. Now there are fireworks exploding in the distance and noisemakers and cheering rather closer at hand, but I'm going to bed soon.