Here's hoping y'all had a fecking magical Christmakwanzakah! My very first Yule in Iowa City was low-key but full of delicious food and delightful friends, which suited me right to the ground. 


Earlier this month, I gave a reading at The Haunted Bookshop with the singular Marie Raven, friend and local NaNoWriMo municipal liaison. She was a damn hard act to follow, but I'm fairly confident that nobody fell asleep while I bumbled through a piece of flash fiction (contemporary humor/horror) and an excerpt from an unfinished novella (cyberpunk urban fantasy slipstream [axolotl]). 


The reading was a fairly manageable affair, with no more than thirty or so audience members, excluding the resident cats. I neither fainted nor vomited onto the front row's shoes. Afterward, I fielded a couple one-on-ones without, I trust, making a raging fool of myself. 

The ever enterprising Jenni Moody has compiled a list of the Clarion West Class of 2011's accomplishments since graduation, which ye can find here: Looking Back on a Year of Writing.

2011 is drawing to a close, and it shall be sorely missed. It was a year full of travel, of meeting shiny new friends and reuniting with comfy old ones, of horizons broadened and narrowed, of ups and downs and all arounds. This year was a lot of things, but it certainly wasn't boring. E. J. Fischer (shiny and new) tweeted that his 2011 was among the happiest years of his adult life; I'm not quite sure that I can wholeheartedly agree, but at the very least, my 2011 comes a very close second. How was yours?