Month-in-Review Highlights: January 2023

A chocolate cake made with mayonnaise that I made out of pure curiosity. Lausanne, Swizterland. January 22, 2023.

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.)

So early in the year, everything still feels possible—which means everything feels on track.

I could pay myself on the back or admit that I won’t really know how I’ve fared against goals for a couple of months. Tempted by the former, I’ll go with the latter.

Without a lot of travel or events this month, I reveled in the opportunity to start the year off from a more centered, grounded, focused place. I don’t look at January and see a month that already, one month into the year, put me behind schedule on everything I need and want to get done in work and in life.

No, I didn’t get everything on either the work or the life front done that I would have liked to do, but I made decent progress.

On the play front—because why not start with play a little more in this life?—I baked a cake that looked a lot better coming out of the oven than it did when it fell a few moments later, due to underbaking. In addition, I made potstickers for the Lunar New Year, which I’d never done before other than at a friend’s house, where she’d done most of the work ahead of time. (They ate too fast for photo evidence.)

On the fiction front, I began reaching out to agents in January about the novel I mentioned in December’s postmortem, aiming to seek representation with someone who can help me bring it to a publisher and on through to publication. I’ve braced myself for a long process; as exciting as it feels to start putting into the world something that has lived almost exclusively in my head for such a long time, I need to have other areas of focus to float me through the long and bumpy waters ahead.

One of those areas of focus: The next novel. I planned it out in intervals with drafting and revising the now-in-query novel, so I have what I need to start the first draft. In the last two days of January, I outlined the first few scenes. I feel like I stand at the bottom of a deep valley gazing up a steep and craggy mountain, strapped into a long-haul backpack and clutching my hiking poles. Having climbed a similar mountain has its benefits and its downsides. I know what to expect and believe I can do it again—and I know what to expect and how hard the climb.

Nevertheless, here I go.

And though I didn’t have “work on short fiction” on my list for 2022 or 2023, I revised a short story late last year that I submitted to a literary journal’s call for entries—and the editors accepted it. Roi Fainéant press published “Negative Eighty,” in early January, and you can read it via this link.

Happy New Year!