Happy new year, everyone!

I hope you all had a chance to spend time with your friends and family, and that you got to relax, think, and make some good plans for 2015.

Remember the last post when I talked about my goals for 2015? Well, I’ve refined those goals even further, and written about them as a guest post on the blog of Aprille Janes, a business coach. Here’s a snippet from that post:

Of course! So much of my inability to charge what I’m worth stems from a sense of guilt, of a belief that it’s wrong, even unfeminine, to focus on money. But now I felt myself moving from recognizing the problem to finding the solution; I felt I was approaching the edge of something, ready to peer over it and see the perfect word to encapsulate 2015 waiting for me.

I started writing notes down frantically about all the things I wanted to accomplish in January 2015 and all the loose ends from 2014 I wanted to tie up. At the bottom of the list, I spontaneously wrote this:

I need to become convinced of my own monetary value and self-worth. It is of no use to anybody if I’m too timid to charge what I’m worth, become overworked, burn out, and then shut my business down. Assertiveness means survival.

Check out the whole post, “Why 2015 is My Year of Assertiveness“, on Aprille’s site right now.

Bonus reading

Some more awesome news: A few days before Christmas, my writing debuted on xoJane! I can’t wait to write more for them. Here’s an excerpt:

Do I still mess up a lot? Yeah. Do I still need things explained to me about how I’m using the same thought processes as the people derailing the conversation? Yeah. Do I still have a lot of ingrained sexism inside myself that even my increased knowledge hasn’t fully extricated, like the assumptions I make about who the manager of a retail store is? Yes. Do I still unconsciously make my voice sound higher when I’m around unfamiliar men? Yup. Do I still sometimes commit the cardinal ally sin of apologizing just to let people know I’m oh-so-sensitive and that “I’m not like that”? Unfortunately, yes.

Are there people way more articulate out there than me who can deconstruct sexist and racist arguments with mastery because they have to live with that bullshit on a day-to-day basis while I don’t? Hell fucking yes.

Check out the whole thing at “xoGEEK: How Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Made Me a Better Feminist“.