Twenty-twelve

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with. That’s about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what. Now try How and Why. – Margaret Atwood, “Happy Endings”

So, 2012…that was a year, huh?

At the start of it, I declared — half in jest — that it would be the Year of the Meeting. Had I only known how true that prediction was going to turn out to be…

At the start of January, a number of changes were already underway at work, with my boss’ boss having taken retirement at the end of 2011 and some of the organization in the company changing in the wake of that. Things

wouldn’t really change for my group until early March, however…and that, of course, is when the cold that I’d been fighting for the past few weeks was diagnosed as being a little pneumonia.

I spent a week at home, I suppose you could say convalescing, at my doctor’s recommendation, and at what turned out to be a very strange time for doing that. While I was out, two other people on the team were let go, which I got to hear about via e-mail, and then in a very odd teleconference call discussing the changes and the reasons for them. Shortly after I returned to the office, I learned that I still had a job…but that it would soon be as part of different group, with a different boss, on the opposite side of the building.

The new job, which I’ve had officially since the start of April, is probably a better fit. I’m still a development editor, working on textbooks, but I’m much more involved in the process, and slowly but surely working on projects beyond the narrow borders of psychology. (Which is where I’d been working exclusively before.) I like the people I work with, and for, even if that too has changed slightly since mid-year. And while it has meant a lot more work — many more irons in the fire, as it were — I’m in a good position for going forward. I miss the people I used to work with — I don’t even see them very often, and there have been a lot of other changes there, too — but I’m getting more of a chance to do the sort of development work I was hired to do.

Sometime in March, I also found time to go to my cousin’s wedding. It was a really busy month for me this year. It’s little wonder that I didn’t have much time or inclination to reflect on my also turning thirty-five.

The rest of the year has seemed almost dull by comparison.

I published four issues of Kaleidotrope this year. I’m still figuring it out as I go, but I think the zine has benefited from being published more often in a year, and from moving from print to online. I miss some of the physicality of print layout — let’s put this photo here, let’s put a little Easter egg in the margins there, etc. — but I don’t miss the costly and time-consuming photocopies, or the hours spent addressing envelopes and standing in line at the post office. The whole thing is probably just as much a money-losing operation for me as it ever was, probably even more so, since I traded those costs for upping my pay to authors. (To the still-far-below-professional rate of a cent a word for fiction.) In 2013, for instance, I will spend an estimated $2,000 putting out another four issues of the zine, which is, admittedly, a little expensive as far as hobbies go. It’s why I’ve re-added a donation link to the site. I’m going to try to lower my costs a little going forward, although that’s mainly going to be by accepting less. I’ve already decided that next year I’ll only be open to submissions from January to March, and even then I’m going to have to be even more choosy than usual. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I’m edging up to a $1,000 already for 2014.

This is at least part of the reason I don’t go on vacation very often. My parents went on vacation to Italy, my sister and her husband to Turkey. I went on a work trip to the University of Maryland, Towson, and, a month ago, to Hofstra, maybe ten minutes away by car. Oh, exciting times!

We did take my father fishing for Father’s Day, and that was fun.

And then, of course, there was Hurricane Sandy, many months later. There was the week of work that I lost to that, the power outages, the awfulness of the commute in the weeks that followed.

Yeah… 2012 sure was a year.

I’m looking forward to 2013, just a change — although hopefully not as much of a change as this year, this past March in particular, turned out to be. I would like to move out, to an apartment of my own, maybe sometime in the spring, but that remains to be seen. Beyond that, I’m not really making any resolutions. I want to — I have to — write more. (I have a membership in the Online Writing Workshop that would be wasted if I didn’t.) But beyond that, I’m just going to take it as it comes.