It's almost 2017

Firstly, WHERE DID THE YEAR GO?! How am I still so behind on freaking everything?! No I'm not panicking about ALL THE SHIT I need to do nooooo.

Anyway.

Here's my one-gif summary of 2016:

Original? No. Accurate? FUCK YES. 2016 was a piece of shit year. If I list out all the ways, I'm just going to get sad and pessimistic and hate life. SO.

Here's some non-shitty things that happened in 2016:

I GOT INTO GRADUATE SCHOOL. Holy shit. Holy shit. I am going to be a scientist for real. It's been an entire 3 months of my 1st year and no one has sent me a "sorry, that acceptance letter wasn't meant for you!" email yet so maybe it's really for real.

• I get to study the thing I love and do cutting-edge research and I GET PAID FOR IT. 

• I'm already involved in a bunch of diversity in science initiatives including running my own coding mini-class focused on making coding approachable for all! WATCH OUT SCIENCE AND TECH, SI IS HERE TO SET SHIT ON FIRE (figuratively, figuratively >.>)

• I'm busy as fuck. Hence the sudden dearth of posts: adjusting to graduate school, moving, and all that ended up eating my life. But now I think I've got it down and will definitely start posting regularly again. But I'm busy because I'm DOING AWESOME THINGS. So life's pretty great. If exhausting.
• SCIENCE IS AWESOME THAT IS ALL.

Booooooooks!

• I read a lot of amazing books, mostly over summer! I have a terrible memory so check out my Goodreads for highlights. 
• In addition this year I started pushing myself as a reviewer and have been getting A+ requests from authors and publishers! I'm really, really excited about this. Especially because there have been so many gems of diverse books in my requests since I made it explicit that marginalized voices are the ones I focus on.
• I made hella incredible friends in the book community! 
• I bought way too many books >.>.

I started writing new stories, and haven't totally given up on them yet! Small goals, ok.

• How could I forget, I SUBMITTED A STORY to a zine for the first time! Ever! Got my first rejection too. Now I'm a legit writer.

• Now that I've better adjusted to my new life, I definitely want to make sure I write more, write more OFTEN, and actually get shit done. 
• I've been focusing on writing epic fantasies that I've always loved set in worlds inspired by my own culture, featuring 100% PoC characters. This is actually surprisingly hard, even if I'm WoC. One day I'll talk about how deeply insinuating the "othering" of marginalized people is, even to the point where it affects OUR OWN art. 

I discovered I can do a lot more than I thought I could. I'm a very high anxiety, intensely introverted person. This makes Doing Things (organizing, leading, speaking up) really fucking difficult. NEVERTHELESS:

• I'm organizing a fucking CLASS. 
• I'm taking no shit from people around me. Every single bigoted comment, no matter how mild at surface-level, is getting pointed out. I won't pretend this is easy.
• I'm dealing with my ridiculous phone anxiety to call my representatives weekly, and since the election I haven't missed a single week. Soon, I'm going to start helping to organize community phone banks campus-wide.
• I'm taking action, figuring out my local politics, trying to understand the morass that is our government. Because this shit matters, now more so than ever.
• And you know what? People ARE listening.Which, frankly, amazes me.

I don't doubt that 2017 is also going to be a garbage fire year. I got no comforting words or happy illusions about that. But you know what? We're going to survive. We're going to keep being here. We're going to raise our voices and make brilliant art and hold each other up because that's what we've always done in the face of people who want us to shut up while they try to bulldoze our lives.

I've got goals for 2017 which I'll post closer to the actual New Year. But feel free to comment below with yours! As the year winds down, upcoming on the blog are like ALL the damn reviews I've gotten behind on. There's some great books in the pile, so stay tuned.