Jeez, Is 2021 Almost Over?

​I’m going to get a kick-start on my end-of-year reminisces to beat the New Year’s rush.
 
This has been an action-packed year. You’d never know it from looking at my blog, which I tend to neglect when life gets going, but a crazy (and good) number of things have happened.
 
The biggest and most momentous event was my manuscript THE NEW EMPIRE winning gold in Pitch Week for When Words Count and being offered publication with the fabulous Woodhall Press. This book was my first NaNoWriMo win many years ago, and it’s undergone a ton of changes and additions from that initial 50k words.
 
Here's the blurb:

---

The world undergoes a drastic change in the 14th century, when Chinese ships land on the west coast of what we know as California. Fast forward four hundred years to a much different America than we read about in the history books, a land dominated by a cross-continental tribal confederacy. This new empire has been built on the backs of enslaved Chinese political prisoners.

​Enter Jiangxi, son of the last Chinese Emperor, and now a slave of Onas, a renowned tribal Elder. As Jiangxi transitions from boy to man, his journey to find freedom will reshape not only the course of his own life, but the future of the two most powerful nations in the world.

Below is my new book cover, which I'm super excited about.

Depending on how the first book is received, a sequel is being planned to that book to follow the first one, which I'll talk about more next year.
 
As if that weren’t enough, I’ve also started writing on Medium this year. I’m thankful to my 900+ followers who read my articles, essays, fiction, poetry, and comics – I’ve published about 100 pieces so far on a variety of topics and genres. Check out my profile HERE to get access to all my articles. And here’s to even more next year!
 
I’m also thankful for a number of short publications in various journals, anthologies, and magazines from 2021. Since there’s a fair number of those, I’ll do a second blog post about them soon.
 
And, finally, I’ve got to add one more event of significance. I actually started writing again, which had stopped completely in 2020.
 
As some of you might know, I got sick with the coronavirus in 2020, right when it first hit the U.S. Long COVID took over my life, and I was unable to write for a number of months. In fact, it was pretty hard to function and take care of myself, let alone my kids.
 
I’ve come out of that period of my life, and I'm mostly back to normal. The vaccine helped with a lot of the physical ailments, and I also got a booster, which helped.
 
Last but not least, my kids were too young to be vaccinated until recently, so I continued to homeschool them. Now that they’ve gotten their shots, they’ll be returning to school with the new year. This will be good for them to be able to get our lives back to normal – both for my kids, who have done amazingly well with relative isolation and putting up with "Mrs. Mom" as their teacher, and for me and my own writing, which I had to squeeze into the bits and corners of my day after teaching my kids.
 
I’m thrilled to be able to enjoy the holidays with my friends and family, and I’m very excited to see what next year brings, too.