2024: The Year in Review
I Consult The Orb of Yesterday
As I write it is currently only a week till Christmas Day. The second half of this year has vanished like I tried to grab a handful of sand. Between being in and out of hospital and becoming a father I have had limited time to do anything other than life. It’s odd because a great deal as happened IRL, and continues to happen, while my online presence twindled to nothing for a couple of months. I have returned to rekindle it all and am happy to find what I knew before still applies and that I can still write passable fiction.
It is safe to say a large portion of this year did not go to plan, while another part was planned for but the plan became obsolete almost immediately. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Sure no one wants to have a chronic, uncurable, barely manageable disease but it has also forced me to slow down and to think twice about what I am doing, how, and why.
With all that in mind, how has the year gone? Reading back over my start of year post Pondering the Orbs of Time I see I wrote that with a headcold. The more things change the more they stay the same, though this time I am on my first cold of the year, with a side of cough. I almost went a whole year without one which I am grateful for, I doubt it will happen again now I have a daughter.
In January there were 185 subscribers, and, as of December 28th, there are 333 of you. Given I was absent for part of Summer and all of Autumn I’d say that is good going. Thank you for being here and do enjoy the reams of speculative fiction on offer. Now onto the metrics.
READING - 40/52
I aimed for 52 books and fell short, up until August this was going alright but I hit a huge slump that I didn’t get out of until November. Those books totalled 9’262 pages with the average being 231. There are a couple of children’s books in the mix, the highlight of those was The Library Lion, a story about a lion who roars in a library and is told he shouldn’t, yet something happens and he needs to. A good moral tale about how rules sometimes need to be broken. Solid children’s book stuff.
Last year I listened to too many audiobooks, they work for some people but didn’t really work for me so this year I aimed to read my books. I did that, save for a relisten to Harrassment Architecture by Mike Ma, a schizo book in a similar vein to American Psycho, read by Shazam Watkins who captures the essence in the book in his oration.
Some standouts were Conn Iggulden’s Empire of Salt trilogy which while competently written and entertaining isn’t really a single story but rather the same plot used three times with a little bit of character development for recurring characters, more three stories involving the city of Darien than an epic trilogy. Still enjoyable but not what I was expecting from a series called Empire of Salt.
My favourite book of the year was Horus Rising, the first book in Warhammer 40K’s Horus Heresy series. I am passingly familiar with 40K lore but have never played, nor painted the models. Reading one of the books makes me want to read more but it doesn’t make me want to play the game, in fact I suspect there is a venn diagram of 40K fans. Those who read and those who play with a minority doing both, but that’s just me guessing. The early books were almost impossible to find in paperback until they were republished a couple of years ago, still only the first 3 are back on shelves while the fourth can be picked up second-hand for a cool £85. It’s a 54 book series and for something based on plastic figurines used in wargaming is surprisingly good. Dan Abnett is an excellent writer and while the rest of the series is written by a dozen different authors, and from even more points-of-view, this first book is gripping while keeping it focussed on a few character stories and managing galactic scale politics. Very impressive tome all round.
Two surprise reads of the year that I found at my local library were Tales from the Cafe and Before we say goodbye which are in the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. Each is a series of connected short stories centred around a cafe in Tokyo that allows people to go back (or forward) through time. There are a number of rules, a person can only stay in the past (or future) until their coffee goes cold, they cannot stand up, and a ghost occupies the chair that customers have to sit in. They are cosy books with satisfying character arcs that keep you hooked. The books are translated from Japanese and the style is more telling than showing which is typical of Japanese books.
WRITING
SHORT STORIES (One Shots) - 36/52
Had I not been in hospital and taken an unexpected break this would have been accomplished but no matter. I’m happy with the short stories I’ve written this year and look forward to writing even more next year.
The year started with a Dwarven adventure - The First Explorer.
A fun romp about a couple of dwarves making it to the surface of their world for the first time in all of dwarven history.
The most popular short this year was - Gentle Waves and Starless Skies, receiving 18 likes.
A short short story about a man suffering after a shipwreck, or what appears to be a shipwreck anyway. A questing the self story rather than questing the world.
I used the idea of fishing as the main core for two stories, one about a man and a bucket, the other about a man wanting to fish but finding a date instead.
The Angler
He held The Fishing Rod with an iron fury. It was out there. The Wawalago, his white whale, his – nemesis. The titan of the waves called to him, its pining notes echoing across the eons. He didn't know what it was, not exactly, but he'd seen it in dreams and flights of fancy. He'd seen it in the salty sea and the sunless sea. Everywhere The Angler had cast his line, there it was always out of reach, never biting, a picotee blue phantom, swimming at the edges of lakes, rivers, and seas, even pools and puddles. Across the seven seas, thousands of lakes, hundreds of thousands of rivers, and millions of pools, puddles, and pints the Wawalago had evaded him. Worms, flying bugs, crawling bugs, meat, cheese, and even little swallows, the Wawalago refused to bite. Once he tried a sovereign, a coin of pure gold that could have bought him a plot of land, or sea, but even then the fish did not bite and the sovereign was lost to the sea. Now he consigned himself to The B…
A Fishy Date
Dmitry slung his fishing rod bag over his shoulder along with the duffel bag that held his less important belongings; his clothes, credentials, photos of his family, that sort of thing. Sprinting two hundred metres to find gate thirty-seven was not his idea of a good start to the day but his assignment had been clear, and one he’d applied for more than a year in advance. If Dmitry was going to be on a starship, between systems, with no planetside leave for a year he wanted, he
NOVELLAS - 2/4
Same old story. This year saw Hunted and Famfrit’s Jewel. Both are still free-to-read and will remain so for a little while.
Hunted follows Padoan and his crew as they are tracked across the galaxy by unknown forces. This series as, I think, my most popular character to date, the war robot Shogun. An arrogant, tenacious, combat droid who joins Padoan’s crew by force but has severe memory malfunctions. Fits in the space opera genre, though only 10 chapters long.
Famfrit’s Jewel is ongoing and will be wrapping up shortly. Dagnar sees his whole village and everyone he knows die at the hands of an ambition crazed wizard, in his hunt for revenge he is joined by a mysterious woman who claims to have also had her village destroyed by the wizard. Together they hunt him down but not all is as it appears.
NOVEL - 0/1
It will start when it starts and it will be announced well ahead of time.
WORD GOAL - 184’235/752’000 (as of Dec 28th)
Even if I hadn’t gone into hospital and then stopped writing for a few months I would have only reached around 300’000, maybe 350’000. 2000 words a day is difficult but it is a difficult I want to tackle. Having the energy for writing is the biggest obstacle, I can write everyday but some days will be thousands and others dozens, getting a consistent average of 2000-a-day is hard but, for me, attainable. Jimmy Doom has published a short story a day for over 1000 days. Harvey Stanborough has written over 1’000’000 words this year, the vast majority of them fiction. Incredible discipline and output from both, and quality writing too which is all the more impressive.
Having achieved a 1000 words a day many years ago I know that the more I write the easier it is to write and the more ideas I see to fruition the more ideas I have, the only time this wasn’t true was in 2023 writing two fantasy/sci-fi short stories a week. It was like a whirlwind and I much prefer writing longer stories and using short stories as a rest, hence my Short Story - Tuesday/Novella - Thursday split.
SubStack warns me I am nearing “email length limit” so I will wrap it up here. In the first few days of 2025 I will post a follow up to this with the goals for 2025. Thanks for reading and see you then.
