It’s still technically January, so I’m not too late for a 2024 recap, am I?
The Year in Reading
This year saw a big dip in my reading rate, mostly because early in the calendar year I started writing in earnest again and it turns out that as a parent and full time worker I only have so much free time. While moving steadily away from social media and doom scrolling did free up a significant amount of time and even more mental bandwidth, the hours in the day are still finite. With reading and writing, however, I find each activity feeds the other. Some reading highlights below.
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Cage of Souls is a book I keep thinking about even though it was the first book I read last year. Powerful Gene Wolfe vibes, but with an appealingly flawed and unreliable narrator.
I’d been putting off reading Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi for ages. A new Clarke book appears only once in a while, and I’d been saving it for a special occassion. Finally went ahead and read it and oh boy was that a treat for me.
Some really good, wildly different re-reads this year for research purposes. I went back to Lily King’s excellent Euphoria both to pull apart the mindset of “explorers” and to think about how to write romance that doesn’t suck. I also returned, as I do periodically, to dear Mikhail Bulgakov for Heart of a Dog as I work my way back into a project that I can only describe as Bulgakovian biopunk noir.
I do really enjoy tracking my reading, but should this be the year I switch to Storygraph? Goodreads is not a great platform, but all my mutuals are there.
2025 Goals: I’d like to stretch myself to read more nonfiction, as I find nonfiction and documentaries often seed my fiction writing. I’d also like to work my way through at least one chunky classic.
The Year in Writing
I don’t actually track “pages” in any real way, so I’ll just report out on projects.
One short story completed, currently submitting.
Two thirds of a science fiction adventure novel, theoretically the first of three, which may or may not ever see the light of day. My goal is to finish it this year – it’s been an excellent exercise in pushing myself to do something other than short fiction and I’m appreciating both the fun and the challenge of building something bigger over a long period of time.
One horror-adjacent experimental flash fiction story that came to me in a late night fugue state after reading this excellent article by Mia Sato about an influencer lawsuit and thinking a lot about social media this year. Currently editing.
2025 Goals: Finish the first draft of my adventure novel, and finish and begin submitting at least one more short story.
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