Decade in Review

This is a lot. I actually tried to list all of it.
 
Writing

Works Available in Stores, 2010-2019:
Years listed are those during which I wrote and/or edited the story. How much work I did in a given year on a given book is wildly variable.
 

A Rational Arrangement (2013-2015)  

Further Arrangements (2013, 2015-2016)  

The Moon Etherium (2016)  

The Sun Etherium (2016-2017) 

Silver Scales (2003-2007, 2016-2017)  

Golden Coils (2006-2007, 2009-2011, 2014, 2016-2017)  

Demon's Lure (2009, 2017-2018) 

Angel's Sigil (2017-2018)  

Frost and Desire (2015, 2018; published 2019)  

The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince (2018-2019)  

"Insecurity" (2019), published as part of The Reclamation Project: Year One, a shared world solarpunk furry anthology. 

 

* 

 

Other Stories Posted 2010-2019:

Rabbit Hole Day (2006-2012): A kind of serial in a surreal paranormal setting. Written as 1-3 entries each year on Lewis Carrol's birthday.

Delight in World Tree (2010-2012): World Tree fanfic: the journal of Delight-in-[], an Orren furstyler/adventurer, with some correspondence and entries by her friends and relatives. Book-length, lots of different complete arcs about her life. 

The Unicorn in the Backyard (2009-2010): Two linked short stories. Portal fantasy with a mom and a grandma. 

 

This batch is all tarot stories, mostly very short fiction in response to prompts and tarot cards I drew.

Reconcilement (2012) 

The Reaping (2012)

Nightmares (2012) 

This is the Way a World Ends (2012) 

Smart Girl (2012) 

Just a Game (2012) 

Garden Variety Faeries (2012) 

A Guardian's Companion (2012): Also a tarot story, but in nine parts. A peace keeping officer and a viper dragon who doesn't fit into her culture look for an unconventional solution. 

A New Hobby (2012): Another tarot story, but ties in to a few older short stories in the "Everyday Monsters" setting, a paranormal fantasy of contemporary humans mixed with otherworldly creatures. 

 

Flight Rising Fanfic: No longer posted anywhere, but from 2013-2018 or so, while I was playing FR, I wrote ~100,000 words of stories and biographical details about my dragons.

 

Unpublished Works with Completed Drafts 

"The Mortal Prince and The Moon Etherium" (2018-2019): A novelette about the titular Prince from The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince. This was a ~12,000 word flashback that I excised from the book due to its length. I revised it to make it into a standalone story instead. Miro, Ardent, and Davikivida all have parts in it.  

The Twilight Etherium (2019): The third Etherium novel and a polyamorous fantasy romance between Miro, Ardent, and Whispers Rain. Draft is complete, needs more edits. Expect to release in 2020.

Spark of Desire (2019): The unnecessary polyamorous sequel to Frost and Desire. Draft complete, needs edits. Expect to release in 2020.

 

Works Unfinished

Sign and Sacrifice (2007-2011): a mystery set in a fantasy world. It's about 80% done and there's stuff I still love about this book. But I feel like it tripped and fell over my efforts at grappling with social injustice. I am not sure it's salvageable even if I put an ending on it.

The Lair of Dragons (collaboration with Christi, 2012): This is a polyamorous BDSM fantasy erotic romance Christi and I worked on together for several months. I love this story and it was so much fun to write with her. ❤️ It was about half done, I'd guess.

Fellwater (2016-2017): BDSM fantasy erotica. Around 80% done, don't know if I'll ever finish it.

"Smoke at Courthall": the "PollRPG" that I worked on in 2017. Unlikely to ever finish, at this point. Dreamwidth version: and Twitter Version 

The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady (2019): polyamorous fantasy romance in the same setting as The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince.  I will finish this in 2020.

Word Count
My total word count, for fiction, from 2010-2019, is 1,731,000. That figure includes about 250,000 words of material that I expect to release in 2020, and about 200,000 words of Flight Rising and World Tree fanfic, plus miscellaneous shorts and incomplete stories that I don't expect to finish.  It includes the PollRPG that I wrote in 2017 but not any of my PBEM RP material.

 

The number of words that I wrote and made available in stores this decade is 1,068,000.  

I also wrote a lot of other stuff -- blog posts and PBEM games and RP logs and such -- which I'm not including in these totals because I never kept track of word count on that stuff.

 

Reading

I didn't keep an exact count, but it looks like I read 100-150 books/novellas in the last decade (not counting my own). Far and away my most active period of reading was maybe six months in 2012-2013. For a little while, I fell in love with reading again, and then fell out of love. I don't know why.

 

Illustration & Visual Art

Book Covers

A Rational Arrangement (2015)

Further Arrangements (2016)

The Moon Etherium (2016)

The Sun Etherium (2017)

Frost and Desire (art from 2015, published 2019)

 

Header Illustrations

A Rational Arrangement (2015-2016): ~140

The Moon Etherium (2016): ~10

 

Simple character portraits:

Wisteria (2013)

Justin (2013)

Nikola (2013)

Fan Art

Coloring in MCA Hogarth's Coloring Books (2014-2015): 
The Three Rowyns (two page Three Jaguars tribute comic, 2015)  
Handful of dragon sketches (2016)

Some Flight Rising adoptables (2018)

3 character portraits for The Restless Dead and 3 for Would-Be Gods, both games run on Sufficient Velocity (2019)

Miscellaneous

30-in-30: 30 art cards completed (2010)

Art Ponies: 2 (2011)

5x5" sketchbook: filled 1.5 of these with pencil and color illustrations in 2014-2015 
Various digital paintings of Frost and other characters from that setting (2015, 2019)

Digital painting of Miro & Ardent (2016)
Gimme One (2018)
 

2015 was the Year I Actually Did A Lot of Illustrations. Most of the decade, I didn't do much visual art. Despite this, I want to do one of those "decade of art" collages. Maybe I will.

 

Roleplay

The Sleeth Named This: Online World Tree RPG I ran weekly on FurryMUCK, 2009-2011

+terrible butterflies+: PBEM I ran based on Bard Bloom's unpublished RPG setting & rules (mostly 2012, with brief resurrection in 2015)

Elect (2014-2015): PBEM where the player characters were powerful, immortal beings who'd been enslaved by mortals and got to break free of their masters over the course of the game. 

Health & Fitness
 

Exercise

Over the last decade, I've modestly decreased the intensity of my workouts: I used to do stuff like biking, jogging, and dancing, and now I pretty much just walk.  I've also increased the amount of time I spend exercising: in 2010 my goal was around 100 minutes of moderate intensity per week plus about 150 minutes of to-and-from-work walking. My average for 2019 is more like 450+ minutes per week, almost all walking. 

 

I don't know if this is a net improvement or not, but the important part is: still exercising regularly, after all these years.

 

Weight

I am up a net of 10 pounds over the course of the last decade, having started 2010 at ~160 and closed 2011 at ~170. This is an improvement from 2000-2010, when I gained ~20-30 pounds.

 

I've been losing weight very slowly in 2019 and plan to continue that for the next 4-5 years. 

I remain blessed with good health overall, for which I am grateful.

 

Day Job

In 2012, Teenage Bank purchased Toddler Bank, my then-employer, and hired me for their new-made loan reports department. In 2017, I dropped from 40 hours a week to 30 hours. At the end of the 2018, I dropped down to 20 hours a week.  At the end of 2019, my employers switched my position to salaried, but I remain full time. Before 2019, I did reports for the loan department on two databases: the bank's account-management software, and the document management software. As of 2019, I am doing bankwide reports on whatever database they throw at us. There are a lot of other databases. I never realized how many different databases different departments use. Oi.

 

Being part-time is honestly the Best Thing. If I felt more secure about Medicaid covering all Lut's healthcare needs, and the ACA exchange remaining alive, I might retire entirely.  As it is, I'm tentatively planning to stay at Day Job until Lut qualifies for Medicare in 9 years. I have a lot more money in retirement accounts than most people my age, but it's not enough to make me feel secure against potential health care costs. I might revisit this again in 2020, but we'll see.  I'm also expecting a stock market dive sometime in the next 0-3 years. I should probably move more of my assets to bonds, but bonds don't actually make money and interest rates have no real room to fall, so they're just not very attractive.

 

Other Stuff

I saved Lut's life in 2017.  That was good. Cancer sucks a lot but it's better than being dead.

Lut and I have been together 22 years now. 

Terrycloth and I have been in a long distance relationship for 12 years.

 

That's some enduring romantic relationships, there.  Dang.

 

I started dating Jen in 2018 and we've been seeing each other about every 1-2 months, for dates of a few hours at a time. It's low key but lovely. ❤️  

 

Traveling

 

Orlando, FL

Seattle, WA

Toronto (Canada)

Rome (Italy)

Venice (Italy)

London (England)

New York City, NY

St. Louis, MO

San Francisco, CA

Atlanta, GA

Durham, NC

Washington, DC

Portland, OR

 

This is an incomplete list. Most of my travel was to visit people, not places, with the exception of the Europe trip.

 

The Things I Don't Do As Much Anymore

 

At the start of 2011, I set a goal of spending about 30 minutes a day writing, where "writing" included blog posts, game prep, and fanfic as well as original fic. I didn't make that goal in 2011.

 

2019 Rowyn is astonished by how low 2011 Rowyn set her sights, to be honest.

 

This is the decade where I started publishing original fiction, and my newfound focus on writing, editing, and publishing crowded out some of my former hobbies.

 

Blogging: At the start of the decade, I often posted multiple times a week. By 2019, my Month-in-Review post might be the only one I make in a month. Even when I write blog posts, I often don't actually post them. It's some combination of "no one else wants to read this", "few people read my journal anyway", "people will think less of me for writing this", and "posting this will drag me into some tedious argument."

 

Part of it is that I've changed -- I don't spend as much time looking at blog posts anymore, and one of my biggest inspirations for posts was what other people were writing. And some of the things I'd want to write about, I already have written. I've been blogging for almost 20 years. There's a lot of archive.

 

Perhaps more importantly, the internet has changed. It's not just that Dreamwidth is a small community: it's that social media has largely stopped being about community. At its heyday, my LJ feed was full of people who knew each other and who would talk about the same topics.  Everybody wanted to write. Modern social media congregates more around "influencers" or "content providers" or whatever you want to call them. Most people are just there to read. They don't have anything to say. Most days, I don't feel like I have anything to say, either.

 

But I miss blogging anyway. I don't think the Discord or Twitter or Mastodon worlds of brief, transitory communication suit me very well. The "let's trade essays" thing of LJ's heyday suited me very well indeed. I am not sure I can go back to doing my part of that. But perhaps I should try.

 

Roleplay: Online roleplaying, either by PBEM or on MUCKs, was a huge part of my life from 1998-2012 or so, and I pretty much gave them up to write fiction instead. It wasn't a conscious decision. It just worked out that way. I do occasional one-shots now with Terry, but that's about it.

 

I miss RP as well, but in a much more complicated way than I miss blogging. I think about doing a PBEM again sometime, but I don't think I could do scheduled MUCK RP again.

 

Video gaming: I have cut way back on the amount of computer gaming that I do. I still play board games online with Terrycloth regularly, but I'm not playing any MMOs. I do some solo computer gaming: I'm currently playing Love Nikki and I play the distilling and alchemy puzzles in Puzzle Pirates now and again. But I haven't played a Civ-style game or an MMO in years.

 

Illustration: My feeling about me and illustration is that I'm way better at it than I deserve to be for how little time I invest in it. Not that I am actually good -- I'm not -- but that I have spent so little time and energy on it in the last decade that I ought to be completely inept, and I'm more in the 'amateur with some discernible amount of skill'.  

 

Here, let me make a scale:

 

1: Enthusiastic toddler with a crayon

5: Pretty good stick figures

25: Draws some types of things recognizably

80: Detailed, realistic illustrations

100: Michael Whelan

 

This scale is not intended to measure all artists -- many artists have no interest in realism and that's fine! -- but rather to measure skill at the kind of illustrations I want to be able to do.  I'd like to be able to do the sort that used to feature on fantasy novel covers: realistic-looking images of imaginary things. 

 

And I feel like my time investment should put me in the 10-25 range on that scale and it's more like 25-50. I think this is because I've been coasting for decades based on the effort I put in when I was in college, but I'm not sure. I've certainly put more than a thousand hours into drawing and painting over the course of my life, but it's never been a focus.

 

I very rarely want to draw.  I put it on my to-do list every week and then I don't do it. Given this, the odds that I will start doing more seem pretty slim. I'd need to find some motivation. A big thing here is that I don't have much interest in just "producing more illustrations". It needs to be about improving my skill as an artist, and I flounder at how to do that. But I put "more illustrations" on my goal list for 2020 anyway. We'll see how that goes.

In Conclusion

While I was not particularly impressed by my 2019 productivity, for the decade as a whole: AW YEAH I DID GREAT.

*pats Past Rowyn on the back* Great job, there. You are an inspiration to Future Rowyn. Thank you for all your efforts.