It wasn't a present, I actually bought it on half.com for an insanely low price, but it arrived with amazing swiftness today, and now I have my very own copy of "Telling Lies for Fun and Profit", and I can stop borrowing the library's copy and paying fines when I "forget" to give it back. Happy New Year's Eve to me.

2004 has brought more good things in the closing days. I got a raise when I was hired on as a company temp.

And (even better) my brother proposed to his GF last night and she said yes! I like her a lot and was hoping they'd get engaged...although I didn't think it would happen so soon.

Askye, I don't know if I mentioned it earlier, but I got your card. THANK YOU! IT WAS WONDERFUL!

YAY !! I'm glad you liked it!

Xposted with my LJ:

The Good: Her name is Annabel Charlotte. She is beautiful and clever and mellow, and I don't know what two people as difficult as we are did to deserve such an easy baby. I'm looking forward to watching her continue to grow and change as the years pass.

Other than that one very big and life-changing thing--well. It was a year.

The Bad: The election. Republican triumphalism. Iraq. Still not feeling confidence that our civil liberties will last, especially all the lovely ones in the First Amendment. Does anyone else feel like they've been stuck in the Star Trek mirrorverse for a good four years now?

The Difficult: This time a year ago I was an arrogant little aspiring writer. I'd had my first magazine article published on my very first query. I'd finished a novel and was getting the kind of positively worded rejections from editors and agents that make you feel like a sale is just around the corner. I was confident in my own brilliance. I fully believed that 12/31/04 would see me with at least a dozen magazine and newspaper sales to my credit, and that I'd be at least agented, if not actually contracted, as a novelist. Oh, and I was going to finish my second novel.

In 2004 reality hit me in the face, repeatedly and with sharp, punishing blows. Freelancing while at home with a new baby turned out to be harder than I thought. I made some money on various freelance projects, though not anywhere near what I so confidently hoped. My income for the whole year was what I'd hoped to be making each month by the fall. I didn't send out as many magazine queries as I meant to, but the ones I sent out all got rejected.

OK, that's a slight exaggeration. Two articles are still under consideration for an annual publication that won't make its decisions for the next issue until March. And I sold a devotional piece on a query I sent out in 2003, but it'll be in the March 2005 issue. IOW, nothing came out under my byline in all of 2004.

And then there's the novels. Reluctantly I accepted that my first novel is fundamentally flawed. My prose may be elegant, my dialogue precise and significant, and my characters real and lovable, but the conflict is just too slight to carry a 100,000-word novel. And even a fairly extensive rewrite wasn't enough to fix it.

Between the baby and the extensive rewrite of Novel #1, I didn't manage to finish Novel #2. Not even close. That's now my biggest goal for 2005.

Later tonight or tomorrow I'll post goals and resolutions. For now, a toast:

To 2005. May it be a better year.

2004 sucked.

SusanW wrote a novel, and I didn't. See? Suckage.

2005 will be bland, because '5' years are bland.

You Buffistas might as well go ahead and have a happy new year, because who am I to stop you? The Eastcoasters are all going to be eaten by a tsunami when the Left Coast falls into the ocean from the Big Quake, anyway. Might as well party, in the meanwhile.

That's what I plan to do. I've got my Prosecco and my Buffistas, I'm armed for the New Year!

Who says Wire fans aren't happy people, eh, Gus?

Who says Wire fans aren't happy people, eh, Gus?

Who cares? They were all eaten by a tsunami or dumped into the ocean, anyway.

:: Gawd, I loved "The Wire." Here is hoping they come up with dollars for one more episode. Another season would redeem 2005 ::

I am totally the Anti-Gus.

2004 was an amazing (in so many senses of the word) year for me.

There was an unexpected marriage, even if it was nullified a few months later. There were births for my friends, other weddings for them too.

There was successful completion of National Boards for me.

Lori's arm on the Mars rover worked.

My students moved on successfully to a new grade and a new teacher.

My father is slowing down and is losing his memory, but my parents seem to be happily surviving co-retirment.

There were losses, some of them devastating. But so much good too.

Life has just been incredible and I feel blessed this year and eager to see what 2005 brings, good and bad.