Well.

2014 sucked handsomely, didn't it?

I don't know about you, but for me things went really bad, with one of two huge exceptions.

On the personal side, my wife suffered an accident when traveling in the US last March. She's still there, awaiting for surgery. (Remember I live in São Paulo, Brazil, South America. This is approximately 4712 miles away from where she currently is.) She is fine now, but she's been through a very rough patch, and both of us experienced more distress and depression we thought possible.

On a less personal note, but still very important all the same, this year the writing community lost lots of good people. Some I got to know in person, like Jay Lake, others I only met via email exchange, like Eugie Foster (who was instrumental, in 2008, for me to enter the American market starting to write reviews for The Fix), and other I didn't know at all but admired at a distance, like Graham Joyce. Many others went gently into the good night, all of them too young, with many stories to tell.

I have no complaints regarding health and work: aside a case of the flu, I'm well and good, and started to lose weight again (no red meat, no refined sugar and *almost* no alcohol - doctor's orders, by the way, not a random diet). On the work front, I'm still at the university, and also translating a lot: in 2014 I had four books translated by me published in Brazil (among them China Mieville's The City & The City and Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire). I have several more good titles to translate in 2015 - more Mieville and Ann Leckie and John Scalzi among them.

I also published an academic book in Brazil. It was very satisfying, and I'm planning to write another one in 2015. But first, fiction.

I'm writing more in English now than I ever did - in fact, I haven't been writing in Portuguese for almost a year now. I didn't make an official count yet, but a guesstimate is that I wrote about 30.000 words - not much for a professional writer, but I'm improving slowly and steadily.

I only sold two stories - an SF one to Scigentasy, "The Woman, Long After" (http://www.scigentasy.com/the-woman-l...), and a noir story to Near to the Knuckle, "Nothing Hardcore to Me", using the nom-de-plume of Philip Casanueva (http://www.close2thebone.co.uk/wp/?p=...). I had approximately 70 rejections.

I have no particular New Year resolutions. I wish only good health (for me, my family, everyone - a particular shoutout here to my idol Pat Cadigan), because, as we use say here in Brazil, if your health is good, you can get all you want. Without health, the rest doesn't matter.

Oh, if I could really wish one more thing -

I would like to read more than I did in 2014. I didn't rise up to my Goodreads challenge, so I lowered the bar to 80 instead of 100 books. I want to read more than that, but I also want to write a novel, and I need to keep my expectations realistic after all.

2015, you better be good.