New Year’s Eve seems a great time to reflect on my personal highlights from 2011—at least the ones that got mentioned on the blog, which I am pretty sure most of them did.

And no, not one of them will have anything to do with an earthquake. Although these, with their associated ills, have undoubtedly been the dominant feature of 2011 there is absolutely no sense in which I would describe any of them as a “highlight.” And that is absolutely all I am going to say on the subject, because this post is about celebrating the positives.

And here they are—the highlights:

🙂 On New Year’s Day, 1 January 2011, I completed the first draft of The Gathering of the Lost, The Wall of Night Book Two—now that gave me a real sense of achievement!

🙂 In February, The Heir of Night received a Single Titles Reviewer’s Choice Award from Catanetwork

🙂 March 3 saw The Heir of Night launched in the UK, 6 months after publication in the US and Australia/New Zealand

🙂 For NZ Book Month, I was the guest of the Invercargill-based Dan Davin Literary Foundation, giving a number of workshops to high school students throughout the Wakatipu-Southland region and a public address in Invercargill

🙂 On May 31 I celebrated the birthday of the blog: ‘Helen Lowe on Anything, Really’  was 1 year old!

🙂 And posted a photo of my cat.

🙂 In June I was delighted to be a Guest of Honour at ConText, the National Science Fiction Convention; and also

🙂 To receive the 2011 Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Novel, for The Heir of Night; jointly with Lyn McConchie for The Questing Road (Tor)

🙂 And despite everything (you know, the ‘E’ word that I’m not mentioning) I squeaked in under the wire with a final revised version of The Gathering of the Lost so my editor could get it into the production process and out to you in  (the northern hemisphere) ‘Spring 2012’

🙂 On July 18, The Heir of Night was published in The Netherlands as Kind van de Nacht (Luitingh)—the first ever translation of my work!

🙂 I was invited to guest post on SF Signal (a ‘weblog about SF and stuff’) and my first post was “Looking at the Stars: Why Epic Fantasy Keeps ‘Speaking’ To Us” (To check out other guest posts, look under Categories: Guest Blog Posts in the far right side bar.)

🙂 I was also privileged to launch two books on behalf of fellow authors: Oracle’s Fire (The Chronicles of the Tree, Book Three) for Mary Victoria, here; and The Corrosion Zone (HeadworX) for Barbara Strang, here.

🙂 I got to see the cover for the German edition of The Heir of Night, to be published as Die Erbin Der Nacht (Blanvalet), for the first time—and it’s very cool!

🙂 And I was absolutely thrilled to learn that I had been awarded the Ursula Bethell Creative New Zealand Residency in Creative Writing at the University of Canterbury from January through July of 2012, sharing the honour with David Eggleton.

So there it is—a quick tour through the highlights of my year ‘in brief’ and ‘on blog.’:)  Thank you all for visiting ‘ … on Anything, Really’ and sharing in the moments: here’s to 2012 being an even better year for all of us.