I Did It! 2019 and Decade-In-Review Edition

For the past six years, I've tracked my annual accomplishments via an annual I Did It! list, originally inspired by writer Lisa Romeo. Previous posts can be found here: 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013. It's very easy to get to the end of the year and see all the goals you did not achieve, so this is an opportunity to celebrate the ones you did … and some other non-goals that you hit as well. First I'll give you my 2019 list, then we'll talk about the 2010s as a whole.

This is me, wondering why it's so hard to climb to the top of this writing business.

Writing I Did Its!
This year I felt pretty stuck in quicksand, writing-wise. I had a lot of big goals, but not a lot of forward momentum. Let's see how that shook out, by the numbers:

• Submissions: 8
• Acceptances: 1
• Short Lists: 1
• Rejections: 12
• Publications: 3, as follows:

"Persistence Is the Thing with Fins" A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis, December 2019"A Conversation with Caitlin Shetterly" Literary Mama, January 2019"Confluence" This Side of the Divide, February 2019

Okay, well, the numbers confirm that stuck-in-quicksand sensation. Dang. One of those submissions was the proposal for my book, which took all summer to write and therefore took time away from other writing and submitting activitites, so there is that, and I did work an awful lot of overtime between January and June, which didn't leave a lot of time or energy for writing or submitting. Let's see some more positive writing news.

• I reinvigorated my newsletter, sending out 17 issues since June, when I attempted to relaunch as a weekly missive. I've since scaled back to "twice-monthly-ish."
• I tried to reinvigorate my blog, and wrote 68 posts (including this one) over the year, which is a pretty low number, but 27 more than last year, and more than half of them I wrote during the last three months, the period of reinvigoration.
• I did another big revision of my book and wrote a book proposal which I've sent to one publisher.
• I attended three writerly events: a presentation on novel writing, a poetry festival, and a crime writing conference.
• I attempted to make contact with other writers, sending emails to two writers whose books, in my genre, I enjoyed, contacting two Maine-based writers and becoming "friends" with them via social media, and making one real-life writing friend.

Travel and Adventure I Did Its!

We didn't get out a whole lot this year, but we did manage a week in DC, which was terrific. E and I went to Boston for a day, E, Z and I went on a weekend camping trip with friends, I did some toodling around on local ponds in my new kayaks, and I took sailing lessons. C, Z, E and I also hiked the Precipice Trail up Champlain Mountain in Acadia National Park in October, which felt like a major accomplishment for my elderly body (see photo above). We also did a lot of local touristing and micro-adventures when my parents were visiting in the fall, and C and I went to two super-fun concerts (Howard Jones and Rick Springfield!!!) at a local winery, which I count as adventures.

Art and Craft I Did Its!
I'm pretty happy with my knitting results from this year, which I'll share at the end of this week. I also  finish-finished (as in bound off) my jeweled squares quilt, made an infinity scarf, made three fleece skirts and then three more, gave new life to an ugly old table with a coat of purple paint, and made a dozen sparkly little houses. I also did some drawing and watercoloring and taught a nature journaling workshop.

Household I Did Its! 
I focused a lot this year on giving our house a little spa treatment. I (with some help) repainted E and Z's room and, some months later, cleaned, repainted, and organized their closet. I also (again with help) patched and repainted the stair walls and (without much help) cleaned and decluttered the whole house above ground level (basement, I'm looking at you in 2020), none of which rated a blog post I guess. I had written that I need less clutter in my life when I was working on last year's goals, and I think I achieved that (above ground level) this year.

2010s Decade in Review

Writing I Did Its!
These numbers are approximate and mostly post-2014.

• Submissions: ~128
• Acceptances: ~ 21
• Rejections: ~93
• Publications: ~56 (not sure why acceptance and pub numbers are so out of alignment)
• Blog Posts: ~932
• Books Written: 1

I also got my MFA in 2014 and have been volunteering as Literary Reflections editor and senior editor at Literary Mama for about 5 years, and I taught a couple of nature writing workshops locally. And I got to spend a week at an artists' colony, where I worked on the first revision of my book.

That's all really great, but I started writing in earnest in 2005, started a print zine and took my first writing class in 2006, started this blog in 2007, started grad school in 2012 … and it just feels like I should have made more progress in all that time. Granted, I also gave birth to two babies in 2005, but they're nearly six feet tall now; shouldn't my writing career be a lot bigger too?

Travel I Did Its!
One of my greatest joys in life and the thing I always want to do more of is travel. I tend to think that we don't do much of it, but while there might not be a lot of variety in our traveling, we've gone on some pretty cool trips over the last decade.

Family Trips:

• Hermit Island camping trip 2010
• Lily Bay camping trip 2010
• Philadelphia 2011
• Hermit Island camping 2011
• Colorado Christmas 2011
• Hermit Island camping 2012
• Boston 2012
• Lily Bay camping 2012
• Hermit Island 2013
• Colorado 2013
• Hermit Island 2014
• Kids' first bakcpacking trip 2014
• Hermit Island 2015
• Colorado National Parks and Parks and Parks and Parks 2015
• Hermit Island 2016
• Boston 2016
• Colorado Trail Thru-Hike 2016 Part I and Part II 2016
• Mother-son road trip: CO, UT, WY, SD, etc. 2017
• Boston 2017
• Hermit Island 2018
• Lily Bay camping 2018
• Washington, DC 2019

Just Me Trips

• Colorado AWP Conference 2010
• Ireland 2013
• Walden Pond 2014

There was also a lot of local Maine travel, hikes, boat trips, etc. over those years, and I spent some weekends away with friends and went on several bird-watching adventures.

Art and Craft I Did Its!

• 50+ Knitting Projects (I became a knitter at the start of this decade and actually made improvement over the years since)
• Quilts for E, Z, and M
• Various and sundry projects from beanbags to sleeping bags
• I've been learning to watercolor
• I've been teaching nature journaling workshops around Maine

Other Life I Did Its!

• Trained to become a Maine Master Naturalist and joined the MMNP board of directors.
• Raised my kids from 8 and 4 years to 18 and 14, saw them graduated from middle school and high school, and sent one off to college.

This is supposed to be a positive post, but I can't look back on the last decade without pointing out that the 2010s were a complete bust professionally, a total failure, in terms of income, advancement, development, the whole shebang. I started the decade working maybe not my dream job but doing work that was interesting, challenging, and dear to my heart; now I make less money per hour than I did 10 years ago, and I'm basically just biding my time, adding to my retirement, waiting for my summers off, when we go broke but at least I get to hang out with my kids, write, and do some things I enjoy doing. My 30s-40s decade, the one where I *should* have been advancing in a career, was a crater, and, unless I can turn writing into something more than a really time-consuming hobby, it's likely that I'll never have a career or professional fulfillment. 

But, other than professional failure and painfully slow progress in writing, it's been a pretty great decade. What are you celebrating this New Year's Eve?

Finish it Friday ~ Holiday Edition

I didn't do a lot of hand-making this holiday, and the one big handmade gift I had planned likely won't be done for a long while, but I did put together little cardboard putz houses for the ornament exchange I do with my family (you can read more about the history of these houses here).



I had thought of making these a long while ago (maybe last Christmas), but of course I didn't get started until December, so there were a lot of late nights and assembly-line-style cutting and painting and gluing sessions. And my house looked like a glitter bomb went off in it for most of the month.

I found several patterns for these houses online, but ended up reading through their instructions and then making my own pattern using an old house I picked up at an antique store a while ago. After my first prototype house, I figured out that painting and glittering the pieces before assembling the houses was the easiest way to go. I also made the windows with orange kite paper rather than the transparent red tape I tried with the first house.

They looked so cute lined up with twinkly lights poked into the holes in back that I was tempted to keep them all for myself, but since Christmas is the time for giving, I sent them on their way to new homes, including the prototype, which I'd intended to keep until I realized I'd miscalculated the number I'd need.

Then I found out I needed an ornament for a Yankee swap at work, so I decided to make two more. These I made with simpler rooflines, because the double peaks were a little challenging to glue, and a little bigger, to fit with the larger bottle brush trees I had left. The bigger size made it possible to fit battery operated tea light candles inside, which made them even better.

December 2019 Nightstand

December was a slow reading month, in part because I was still finishing up one of last month's selections, in part because I went back to work, and though I don't read much during the day even when I'm not working I'm just too tired now, what with getting up all kinds of early, to read when I go to bed at night, and in part because my evenings have been taken up by holiday preparations—making and baking (and trying to finish up another round of watching Friends before it goes off Netflix).

But I did get a little bit of reading in. First, I'd picked up an Everyman's Library volume of Stories of Motherhood last month, a book I'm surprised I never ran across when I was in grad school specifically looking for short stories on this topic. Not all of the authors are mothers themselves (some of them are in fact men), and not all of them are written from the mother's point of view (one interesting example by Alice Munroe was from the POV of the daughter, even though most of the book takes place before she was born). I enjoyed it and enjoyed finding a few new authors or new stories by authors I was already familiar with.

Next, every holiday season I must read, at a minimum, "Santaland Diaries" from David Sedaris's Holidays on Ice. I thought I wouldn't have time this year and tried listening to the audio from This American Life while I baked cookies, but though it was very enjoyable, it wasn't the same and I squeezed in a reading in the bathtub later that evening.

Finally, I decided we needed to read The Outsiders as a family this winter break, when I found out that three out of five of us have not read it. I picked it up late the night before the night before Christmas, started reading while I waited for the Christmas stollen to bake and finished this morning. I didn't cry quite as much as I did when I first read it in seventh grade, or even as much as I did about six years ago when I gave it to M and reread it myself, mostly because people kept talking at me during the sad parts. I haven't yet convinced anyone else that they need to read this book, but I haven't given up yet, either.

Peak Grinch

I've hit peak Grinch this week. It happens this time every year, when expectations about how this holiday season should unfold collide with reality. The song "I hate Christmas" from the musical Scrooge runs through my mind on repeat, and I wish that Christmas could come at a quieter time of year, like February, or come but once every other year.

Each day, it seems, brings reminders of one more Secret Santa or Yankee swap gift I need to buy, one more dish I need to make for one more party. I obsessively watch the progress of the package I needed to arrive byTuesday as it ping-pongs back and forth between Massachusetts and Connecticut for five days. We haven't finished decorating the house, but it's already succumbed to entropy after all the careful pre-tree cleaning. I haven't baked a single cookie, and the handmade gifts, though few, may not be done till Valentine's Day.

I have, however, finally achieved my lifelong goal of reining in spending, gift-giving, and contributing to the too much stuff-ness of this holiday, though not through willpower or mindfulness, but rather because I don't get my first paycheck until Christmas Eve. Despite buying less, I'm having as hard a time as ever finding those very particular gifts I want to get.

Meanwhile, holidays with teenagers lack the magic of holidays with little kids that makes all of the headaches worthwhile. They don't ooh and ahh over lights. They sleep in late on a snow day rather than running outside in their pajamas to play in it. They're over all the holiday movies. They don't eve want to hang their own ornaments on the tree. I suppose I'll look back on these teenage holidays--when all they want is a ski pass, "soft, fluffy clothes," or a pair of black ripped-knee skinny jeans--with nostalgia in 20 years, when I'm mailing them gift cards for snow tires and a night out from their kids.

Don't worry about me--my heart will grow three sizes in five days, when all of the parties have been had, the gifts opened, the wrapping paper swept away, and the guests gone home. We'll crowd together on the one couch that remains in the living room after the other was evicted to make room for the tree, nibbling on cookies and candy and watching Scrooge, or perhaps all of the Friends Christmas episodes. Another holiday will have passed, pleasantly if imperfectly (what is perfect anyway?), and we'll enjoy the waning days of yet another year.

This post went out last week to subscribers of my newsletter, along with some bonus material. You can subscribe here.

Holiday Countdown Week 4 ~ Fire

We like to squeeze in a few fun, noncommercial, vaguely pagan celebrations where we can in the holiday season, and fire is always a hit with boys. First, before we could make new wreaths, we had to immolate last year's wreaths and release the wire forms. Wreath-burning is always fun, because you can twirl them around on a stick, and it's a tradition we used to do on spring equinox or summer solstice, but never got around to it this year (in fact never got around to taking the dried brown wreaths down off the house).

Another fiery celebration for us is Solstice, when we traditionally hike down to the river and have a small fire. This year we observed Solstice one day late, mainly because we were all too darn tired on Saturday night. It was a good choice--the night was mild and windless, and we were able to comfortably sit around the fire for a good long while, just chatting and enjoying a quiet, stress-free evening, with nothing to do except try to keep kids from setting themselves and each other on fire.

Which isn't any easier at 14 and 18 than it is when they're three.

Finish it Friday ~ More Skirts

I had so much fun making fleece skirts last month that I had to make more. A few birthdays I needed to attend to this month provided the perfect excuse.

This photo is pre-elastic, which I needed to go out and buy.

Once again I used this pattern/tutorial for all the skirts, but I added a jaunty little pocket to each one (the recipients are Millenials, so natch they will need some place to stash their phones).



The recipients are also all skinny-minis, and I think the pattern runs a little big, so I made them in x-small (the gray and purple) and small (the blue) sizes. I hope they fit!



To customize the fit, I left the elastic casing open, with the elastic held together with a safety pin. I included thread and a needle, so they can adjust the elastic to fit and sew it together/sew the casing closed. I love a quick, fun, and satisfying project like this one!

Finish it Friday ~ NA-SO-WRIMO

Last month I set out to conduct my own version of NANOWRIMO (National Novel Writing Month), which I called National Something Writing Month. My goal: to type up at least 1667 words every day from old journals to generate material for a few essay and memoir projects I'm working on.

I get a sticker on the calender when I reach my writing goal for the day—
sadly I ran out of autumnal stickers, but I got a lot of high fives!

And I came oh so very close—I wrote the minimum on all but three days of the month (including Thanksgiving!!). Two of those days I had all-day meetings followed by evening activities and the other one we had out-of-town guests staying with us. I totaled 46,767 words (the goal of NANO is 50,000) and I got through eight journals (only about 17 left to go!). True, they were mostly not new words (except for some editing/enhancing that took place as I typed), but they were words that needed to get out of my handwriting and into the computer, so I call that a win.

It's also the most consistent I've been about working on a writing project in a very long time, probably since writing The Book, although I didn't track either my time or my words then, so I know neither how how quickly or how often I worked (I do recall some days when I went hiking or got caught in the downward email spiral, and I think I mostly didn't work on weekends).

I discovered that I can type already-written words while a lot of other activity is going on around me—people talking, the TV on, etc, which was truly what made getting so many words possible (new words, that require a fair amount of quiet contemplation, would be much more difficult). I may employ this as a strategy in the future—doing my thinking and writing on paper and typing up later while watching Friends or Supergirl with the kids. My plan is to keep going through December with daily writing/typing, but with a lower word count goal of 1000, now that I'm back to work all day. Wish me luck!

Holiday Countdown Week 1 ~ Greenery

Thanksgiving came so late this year that there wasn't the usual lull of late November before the Christmas rush began, but instead here we are catapulted from one holiday to the next. We actually got our tree in November this year (which is anathema in this house, but at least it was the last day in November), because M was home for the weekend and we didn't expect to see him again until the weekend before Christmas.



My brother and my sister-in-law were also visiting for the weekend, so they joined us on our tree-getting expedition, which every year involves tromping through the woods and sizing up several dozen balsam firs and making the same tired jokes about taking a 30-foot tall tree or a hemlock, and pagan ritual of thanking the tree for givin its life to bring greenery and light into our lives. The tree right now is standing naked in our living room, until another weekend comes when we can rearrange furniture and haul ornament boxes up from the basement.



Once we settled on and sawed down a tree, we collected some extra greenery for wreath-making. Most years we go to wreath-making party at a friend's house and/or buy wreaths from one of the kids. This year our friend had her party the same weekend my brother was visiting, and, though E and Z were supposed to be selling wreaths for school, they both forgot about it until the last minute and couldn't find their order forms.



This was my sister-in-law's first wreath-making experience, and she did much better than C and I did the first time we made wreaths, back in our first apartment, when we bent green boughs into somewhat circular shapes and wired them together. They were a little wonky but had gorgeous bows that C had brought home from the gardening company he worked for that year. The next time, we wired boughs onto a wreath form, but it took a few tries before we learned about making bundles of fir tips and wiring those to the form. We still don't have the symmetry thing down, but someday we'll get there.


The traditional Maine Christmas wreath is made of balsam fir, which is what we used as the base, but we also incorporated spruce, hemlock, and white pine, as well as winterberry and red dogwood stems, for variety.



C went even wilder, literally, with a disk of larvae chambers from a wasp's next, pine cones, sumac fruits, and a polypore mushroom.



My brother and sister-in-law live in a condo, so they couldn't take theirs home with them. It now hangs on the playhouse, providing a little cheer and extra cover to the chickadees who visit this feeder.



We may be slow to get this whole holiday train moving, but at least we've got the greenery, just in time for the world outside to turn white.

Writing Gratitude and Gifts

My very first piece of published writing appeared in the online journal Literary Mama more than ten years ago. In 2014, after I finished my MFA, I became co-editor of the Literary Reflections department, and a couple of years ago I joined the Senior Editor team. You can read my editor's letter for the current issue, about all of the amazing talent on our staff past and present, and all of the wonderful content in this month's issue here.

Literary Mama is a wonderful organization to volunteer for, with the great mission of bringing writing about motherhood out into the world. It's also a complete labor of love for its writers and staff. We have no budget and no sponsors, and we're not affiliated with any institution. But earlier this month we were delighted to announce that we have become a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and as such now able to accept donations. We've begun the first modest foray into raising funds that will initially cover our operating expenses and, eventually, pay our writers.

Consider making a small contribution to this wonderful literary organization this Giving Tuesday. One of our other senior editors wrote this beautiful letter about her family's offer of $1500 in matching funds now through the end of December. If you have a mother or a writer in your life, you could make the contribution in her name as a holiday gift.

Thank you to those who have made a contribution and to all of you who read our journal each month.