The days are long, the years are short, and we must have something to do with the hours.
Reading
GOAL = 12 BIG books
2026 is the year of the big books, the stonkers, the doorstoppers, the weapons of the literature world. I have a big list of big books, some are entire series I am treating as a single book, to choose from and almost all of them I already own.
If you want to follow along, or just see what I am reading, you can follow me over at Goodreads and/or Storygraph.
First on the list is War and Peace, my first book of the year. I started it in 2023 but got sidetracked, this time it will be read in its entirety, I am already beyond page 500 of 964 and having a blast. It’s a period drama with wars interspersed. Think Downton Abbey but instead of focussing on one aristocratic family it’s several and with more politicking and grand strategy discussion about Europe and the ever present threat of Napoleon.
Next up are the Four Chinese Classics, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, Dream of Red Mansions, and Outlaws of the Marsh. Of these I have read RotK twice before, it is my favourite book, and made it about 1/3 through Journey to the West. I have not even cracked the spines on the other two. All of these books are over 2000 pages long and are the 4-volume Foreign Languages Press editions.
The Lord of the Rings, I have not read this much to my shame so I figure it is time to rectify that.
I recently set out on the journey of The Wheel of Time, made up of 14 chunky books, ranging from 700-1000 pages each. I do not believe I will finish the series in 2026, only because reading the same author/style/story can become tedious. I read the first book, The Eye of the World, many years ago and found it okay but after watching Daniel Greene’s summary dove into book 2, The Great Hunt, which I loved and plan on diving into The Dragon Reborn, book 3, right after War and Peace.
Other fiction on the list includes Count of Monte Cristo, Battlefield Earth, The Deed of Paksenarrion, Le Morte Darthur, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, and The Man Without Qualities. A noted series missing from this big book year is Malazan which I will get to at some point but not in 2026.
As for non-fiction I am looking at Toynbee’s A Study in History and Mankind and Mother Nature, Villages of Britain, Our Political Nature, and Carlyle’s The French Revolution.
This is more pages/words than I suspect I can read in a year but I want a selection and chose an arbitrary cut off of 600 pages. Anything over 600 pages is a big book but preferably a BIG book is 1000 pages or longer.
There are two categories of books that are not big but I will continue reading, first are books by independent authors, such as The Ghosts of Tieros Kol by Lisa Kuznak, but I will limit to reading them between BIG books.
Are you an indie writer? Post a link to your book in the comments, either an Amazon link or right here on SubStack, and I will check it out, I may not have time to read them all but I will try.
The second excluded category is my “China stack” which is a collection of books on Chinese history and thought that are serving as research and reference for a very long and intricate writing project that will likely take me many years to complete, some of these are BIG BOOKS in and of themselves but most are not.
What do you view as a BIG BOOK and do you have any suggestions for me?
Writing
GOAL = Write Everyday
As I said in my 2025: The Year That Was essay I am now full time parenting my 1 year old daughter and as such writing time is far more limited than before which has led me to re-prioritise my projects and as a result the schedule for 2026 is much changed.
Twice weekly posting will no longer be the norm.
Short stories (One Shots) will be reduced from one a week to once a month (maybe two a month).
Novellas will be paused until Easter and I aim for one, maybe two in the year.
Instead of a word goal I will aim to write everyday, even if it is only 100 words, and post to SubStack Notes each day with what I have written. Alongside this I will make update posts about projects and how they are progressing, either on Notes or as a proper post depending on how much I have to share.
My main focus will be back to novels, i.e. long form, as it was before I had a SubStack, which will not be published until ready. How these will be published is in flux, either serialised or on Print-on-Demand through Amazon (or similar) or both, we shall see. I am focussing on the writing first.
The first of these long form projects, a stand-alone fantasy novel, is about one-quarter written (25’000~ words). This will be my primary focus for the first half of the year. More will be revealed later this year. I aim to write it this year and edit it next year, if my estimate of it totalling around 100’000 words is accurate.
The second long form project is what the China Stack is for, a Chinese-inspired epic fantasy, and while I have chapter-by-chapter plan for the first arc/novel of this multi arc story I have not settled on a writing style or the Points of View and in the last few months shifted some world building details around and emphasised previously background elements so that the current plan needs altering. I will continue to chip away at this one, slowly creating the world, populating it, fashioning the history, the philosophies, the fashions, and all the other gritty details because I want all of that to be integral to the story itself, because the world is a character too and from it the stories and characters emerge.
Short form projects, short stories and novellas, will be written alongside the long form. I should come up with a day-by-day schedule so nothing is neglected, whether I can stick to such organisation is, however, unlikely.
I currently have 2 short stories in progress, an entry into the Ever Present Chaos series, and a LitRPG experiment (a genre I have never read so it will be probably be quite amateurish, though the genre itself has only just entered secondary school).
Last year I wrote a few stories that I was attempting to sell/enter into anthologies, The End of Days was successful - Steelhearts An Anthology, BUY IT NOW! - the others were not and I need to consider sending them out again or simply publishing them here. All were fantasy, one sword and sorcery about secret cults and saving a princess (for hard coin, not love), the other low fantasy about mercenary politics, kidnapping, and the fineries of contracts.
Novella wise I have been writing a story following the droid Shogun’s attempt to escape the clutches of the Qing Corporation. For those not aware Shogun was a fan favourite from my 2024 novella HUNTED and I have long wanted to go back to that universe and him in particular. This story is at 7000+ words, without a plan, so I am not sure if it will reach novella length or not just yet but even still it will need to be split into parts before publishing.
As to non-fiction I have an essay discussing Short and Long Form Fiction, their value, purpose, and what I want out of them as a writer, and a Deep Dive on Under the Silver Lake looking at the various ways of interpreting the film, each more surreal than the last. There are other Deep Dives I have in mind, one on The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, one on the contentious dichotomy in Dark Souls between the worldbuilding and story versus the gameplay, and an essay I have written three times in the past on Kreia from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II and what her philosophy is because her position within Star Wars is a critique of Star Wars, the Force specifically, and while a villain (sort-of) in-universe her philosophy beyond that is not villainous. To be honest if I ponder enough I find I have a lot of non-fiction topics to write about but they take a lot longer to craft than fiction does so I always put them off or work on them so slowly that I end up disliking what I have written and start again.
Looking through my SubStack drafts page I have odds and ends titled Is Darrow the Bad Guy?, this being an analysis of the main character from the Red Rising series; On Routine, which is an essay in the dreaded writing-about-writing category on the importance of training the muscle of writing as often and regular as possible rather than waiting for inspiration; Do Heroes Have to be Tragic?, a look at a long list of history’s most famous figures and how plenty died pretty young and whether that is a prerequisite for heroic status; and, finally, On the Nature of Chaotic Good, an essay detailing exactly what this alignment is and making the case it does, in fact, exist - this was originally in response to someone else’s essay, which I cannot find, claiming that chaotic good was impossible but this, in my view, is an issue of perspective.
To be honest the only essay from the drafts I am still interested in is, Is Darrow the Bad Guy? which would require a re-read of the 6 current Red Rising books, given book 7 should be either 2026 or 2027 then I will be doing this at some point “soon”.
Otherwise I would tackle two writing-about-writing, one on short and long fiction tackling the idea that a story is as long as it needs to be and assessing the purpose of the two forms. The other would be about worldbuilding and why I do a lot of it before writing a single word of a story, the longer the story the more world that needs to be built beforehand.
Do any of the draft essay titles perk your interest? Or is there something else you would like to see me write about?
My history with essays is pathetic, something I wish to rectify as talking about the craft, while niche, seems popular on SubStack because a large portion of the audience are themselves writers and I never really get to talk craft with people I know in meatspace.
Conclusion
I am already thinking this is quite ambitious for my new daily life but I like trying to stretch myself to do ever so slightly too much as that pressure spurs me on. I also love writing and crafting worlds and stories so there are always more ideas than I could handle, another reason why I am going back to novels. I have had many ideas over the last 4 years, some that I’ve taken to chapter plans, but haven’t started or have and later abandoned but I may only be 33 but the years are quick (and the days are long) and if I don’t write these things now I never will. Better to start, or restart in my case, than leave it till some unspecified point in the future, i.e. they’ll never be written otherwise.
What are your plans, if any for 2026, either regards reading, writing, or something else entirely?
Many thanks for reading! Make sure you’re subscribed to see how I do and to hold me to account when I fail.