Month-in-Review Highlights: February 2024

February in this part of the world is eat-dandelions season, which I find absolutely charming. In keeping with the season, this restaurant put out a menu board on the sidewalk to advertise its seasonal dandelion menu. Lausanne, Switzerland. February 26, 2024.

I postmortem each month shortly after it ends. Previously, I used these posts to hold myself accountable on progress toward my annual goals. Starting in January 2023, I broadened these posts to address more generally my observations and experiences for the month. (To read previous months’ reviews, click here.)

Sure, February this year gave us an extra day—but even without the twenty-four hours of leaping, I’d say I made the most of the month.

As planned, I dove back into work on the novel I’d finished last year, which had rested for three and a half months while I did a full revision on the novel I’d finished in the previous year. To dig back into it, I read through the full manuscript and made notes on areas of revision and then did the noted spot revisions. Now I’m combing through the novel chapter by chapter, from beginning to end.

I aim to have a finished second draft by the end of May. For me, a draft comprises several revision passes—I call it a draft when I can’t see the work clearly enough anymore to know what needs fixing. At the wrap of the second draft, when I’ve hit the point at which I know the manuscript still has issues, but I can’t see them, I send it to a few readers to give me feedback ahead of the third draft.

While I dig back into revisions for last year’s manuscript, I repackaged the novel I’d finished revising in January to start querying agents for representation. Keep your fingers crossed for me, please.

And because I can’t just have one or two creative endeavors underway, February marked my opportunity to begin mapping the next novel I plan to write as soon as I can finish all underway revisions of the one I wrote last year.

Sounds like a lot of fiction writing, doesn’t it? And yet: I wouldn’t want to do anything else.

In fact, my challenge is that, quite often, I don’t want to do anything else. Yet other things must be done.

Despite the inner temper-tantrums provoked by pulling myself away from writing, I made progress on those other things as well this month. Administrative things and health things and financial things and other-work things—I trudged ahead on most of my other much-less-exciting fronts as well.

Though I did have one “administrative” matter in February that I anticipated with much excitement: Early in the month, I went to Geneva at the invitation of the French consulate to participate in a ceremony welcoming new citizens to France.

That’s right! After nearly five years of one hurdle after another, I’m now a French citizen. I’d received the news in late January, but as it came as a one-line e-mail to the effect of “your application has been approved,” it didn’t feel real. I figured something more ceremonial would need to happen for me to really absorb it.

Because, honestly, I am bowled-over honored and humbled and happy to now have French and European Union citizenship. I take the responsibility seriously. And I get to vote in my first-ever European Union election in early June!

Here I am with the French consul general and the assistant consul at the French consulate’s residence in Geneva, Switzerland, upon receiving my official citizenship paperwork (and before singing my first “Marseillaise!” Geneva, Switzerland. February 5, 2024.

After the ceremony, I posed nicely in front of the consulate residence’s window overlooking Lake Geneva, holding my citizenship paperwork. Geneva, Switzerland. February 5, 2024.

The welcome ceremony did make it feel more official, through the “I made it!” still hadn’t really sunk in until I went back to the consulate late in the month—as a citizen!—to apply for my passport and identification card and to register to vote and to enter the register of French foreign nationals in Switzerland. On the train ride back to Lausanne, I floated on a cloud of acceptance.

Otherwise, I had no small amount of other moments of wellbeing in February as well, including a midmonth museum visit, continued volunteering efforts with the Red Cross, lively e-mail exchanges with distant friends—always heart- and mind-nourishing, for me—and I had local friends and acquaintances pull me out of my writing cubbyhole for lunch and coffee on at least a couple of occasions.

Am I neglecting to mention not a few setbacks here and there? I am. Yet there’s so much good to recount that I’m choosing to focus on the good.

Onward, March!