18 things I'm grateful for about my writing career in 2018

What are you grateful for in your 2018 writing? Sometimes when we forget to count it feels like we're sitting still! 
Here are 18 things I am feeling the love about in 2018. 
Looking forward to more great stuff in 2019, and I would love to learn about what you-all are feeling great about!

1. I came second in the Windy City writing contest this year with a new manuscript. Cool. Validation!
2. I'm up to nearly 30 reviews (from strangers!) on my biggest thing published in 2017 (Caterina's Renaissance) and they include beautiful words that make me cry, like "best book I've read all year" and "this is one of the most addicting books I have read in a long time" and "I want more!" “Loved this story… Didn’t want this to end.” Motivation! I am contributing to the happiness of the world.
3. By rejecting a publisher who wanted Caterina's Renaissance, and deciding to aim higher than that particular opportunity, I've started to meet super-interesting writing and publishing people who are writing, publishing, earning, getting it done. It is really inspiring me! And teaching me a lot.
4. I got invited to be in boxed sets, which sold books and helped me meet more cool people who inspire me, introduce me to yet more successful writers, and teach me loads.
5. I learned about Book Bub builders and have found some great... media partners (business people) who help with that. 
6. I met a very good cover designer and I know she’s there to play with ideas with me when I need/want complicated covers.
6. I finally (after 19 years as a professional editor myself) met an editor for my fiction that I jive with and keeps me going and loves my work, and notices things like when you have two 6.s in a list of 18.
7. And I did one of my novella covers on my own with Canva this year and that actually worked fine (for that little novella starting off the Scottish Cream Tea series, which just makes me smile and feel all warm in my heart while also letting me bang my girl power drum).
8. I have about 8 plots and sets of characters just bursting out of me and waiting for me to find the time to get them all written. I look forward to the universe helping make that time for me to get that done!
9. I got invited to be in another boxed set, which required me to write a short thing, which I didn’t know I could do, really. So I learned about people publishing shorter books on Amazon. The new format and ideas about length are spurring on my creativity and letting me publish, dream, write, get energy from some fun shorter novellas (like the fluffy little “Scottish Cream Tea Series”) while I still work on the longer ones (like Blodwyn's Redemption, sequel to Caterina's R.)
10. I spent most of the year in France and learned, all through my body, heart, mind, and writing self, what it feels like to be truly relaxed, to have enough: enough time, friends, money, love. So loved, not just by romance partner but by everyone around me. Came back to North America, where most of the people you meet aren’t quite as openly joyful/loving as I got used to in my French home (though some are!), but I’m clinging to those lessons of happiness and enoughness and the easy, joyful, enabling bubble of no judgment. Grateful I know what that mental/emotional place feels like and believe that I’ll be able to recreate that in my heart wherever I am.
11. I am super-grateful for how fun and cool and beautiful and weird and interesting my characters and their adventures are. I love them. It’s always a treat to make time to spend with them.
12. Love how writing historically accurate time travel with magical realism is ALLOWED in the current market because I can make the rules and readers love it! In the old days we weren’t allowed to genre-bend like that. 
13. Also love how writing historically accurate time travel gives me an excuse (as if I needed one) to super-duper geek out on studying history, talking to history friends and meeting new history friends when I need to find people who know things I don’t know yet but wonder about.
14. Grateful that my world travels have given me so many enchanting places to locate new books.
15. People in my neighborhood keep asking if they can buy my books at the local store... I really need to go sort that out soon!
16. I love audiobooks for my own consumption (like trying to sleep when the old guy downstairs is watching noisy TV… interesting aspect of living in elegant 1920s apartment building with oldsters for  neighbors… they still watch blaring TV instead of Youtube with headphones!). And when I am ready to create an audiobook, thanks to the kinds of writing business connections mentioned above, I know who can do that and how to find more people who do that and particular issues I might need to know about. I feel so enabled! Know what I mean?
17. I’m super-grateful for my relatively comfortable and moderately adventurous life that allows me the inspiration and conditions to create stories that inspire others, make them happy, hand them bits of wisdom here and there, and for heart-warming friends like Mary and Minerva and Becca and Despina from the RWA, and encouraging friends on Facebook, who keep me going!

18. Amazon sends me bits and bobs of money every month... some month soon, that will be quite a lot of money! An amount that will let me write inspiring, adventurous, cool, romantic, delicious fiction full time so I can get all those eight plots down (there’ll be more springing to life before I’m done, like dandelions in spring time and all summer long) AND put my son through university. And it could happen any time.

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