Pondering the Orbs of Time
Reviewing 2023 and Setting Goals for 2024
I started writing this on the 3rd of January 2024.
As I welcome 2024 with a headcold that has reduced my brain to a single-celled smooth organism it seemed fitting to reflect on the year gone and idealise the year ahead. First, I would like no more illnesses of any kind as four in twelve months is quite enough. Second, a mere thank you is not enough to convey my appreciation for you, the readers. This time last year I was sitting on a grand total of 7 subscribers and now there are 185 of you, a massive thank you to each and every one of you! Of course going into 2024 I would like to swell your ranks but I would also be happy with a dedicated readership returning every Tuesday and Thursday. I hope and pray my fiction writing abilities improve and develop to achieve that goal.
How does one go about improving and developing? Reading, and lots of it. Oh and writing, lots of that too.
2023 saw me read 45 books, 11’869 pages, of fiction and non-fiction. About 10 were audiobooks, which hit different than paperbacks in a way I am still trying to understand. Many haven’t lingered in my mind like a physical book would and so it doesn’t really feel like I read them at all. The handful of Conan books I listened to did stick around, however, which I am glad for as they’re brilliant. For 2024 I am going to be sticking to physical books (Advanced Review Copies, PDFs of expensive antiquarian books, ebook-only releases, all excluded). Hopefully this helps with another goal which is less time in front of my computer. I barely use my iPhone but I’m glued to my desktop and laptop so my screentime is too high (and most of it isn’t writing). I need to touch more grass or, in this case, paper.
READING GOAL FOR 2024 - 52 physical books
It’s important to know where you are to know where you’re going. While wandering is beneficial I feel it is a mode of travelling befitting the old and young but not those in the middle. Though I could easily flip that so what do I know, I’m ill, jacked up on Lemsip, and thinking is hard. Sort of like pushing playdough through one of those shape maker things but someone made the dough really tough and stodgy and there’s no water to thin it out and at this point you might as well toss the whole batch but we’re here now and so much time has been pounded into it that restarting feels like a waste so you just keep going and get more and more frustrated with the little plastic handle that feels like it’s about to snap as you shove the dough into the funnel and…
What I do know is that I wrote 39 short stories and completed 3 novellas. There is also the ongoing novella Forlorn Hope and the on-hiatus Moves of the Civil War. This doesn’t include a handful of stories that are unpublished/awaiting publication, as well as reviews and essays. While I never consciously set out to do the Bradbury Challenge, write a short story a week for a year, I am very close to completing it. It’s been a rather tumultuous year, creatively speaking. While writing 2 One Shots a week I was close to burning out. Having to create a new world every time was invigorating at first but after a few months became a burden. Some of those stories, I think, are among my top tier writing but splitting the week into One Shot and novella has allowed for much needed breathing room. The One Shot/Novella split will continue for 2024 and, at some point, a novel will be introduced I just need to pick a date.
SHORT STORY GOAL - 52
NOVELLA GOAL - 4 (~10 chapters each)
NOVEL GOAL - 1
A slightly different metric of writing is quantity of words. In 2023 I wrote 212’252 words. Not all of those made it to SubStack; a paltry 5000 were on an in-progress novel, 10’000ish on unfinished essays, a non-trivial couple of thousand were edited out, and anywhere from 25’000-50’000 were worldbuilding notes. I never managed to consistently hit 2000 words a day but I still intend to.
WORD GOAL - 732’000
That’s just silly. That’s more words than I have written in the last 3 years combined (648’322 - I have a spreadsheet tracker going back to 2017 when I first set out to write everyday). Even discounting weekends it would be 524’000 words. That is more attainable but doesn’t sound as ridiculous so I’ll stick with the almost three-quarters of a million words target.
BUT WAIT! I hear you say. If ~150’000 words made it to SubStack in 2023 what becomes of the 480’000 words extra? Well, dear reader, I plan to get ahead of myself each season so I can focus on writing and editing novels again. The original intent of this ‘Stack was to share my novels but I struggled to garner readers doing that years ago so I played around and did other things, novellas and short stories. These things worked, I enjoy writing them, and you, I hope, enjoy reading them. As such I must become a one-man weird tales magazine covering the three main genres, fantasy, sci-fi, and horror, and the three main lengths, short story, novella, and novel. To do that I need a bigger backlog of writing than I currently do.
Alongside all the fiction I will be posting the occasional review/essay/rant/non-fiction piece. There is no schedule for these apart from, perhaps, a monthly update on the various goals above. This is more to keep me on the straight and narrow but I hope they will prove enjoyable to all.
Essay wise I have a few ideas. One on Realism in Stories, what is meant by realism and whether it is actually wanted. For a time it meant something to do with hard-science-fiction, then it meant grey morality, and now it seems to mean a sort of groundedness. At no point does any of this have to be realistic to work but I digress.
Another essay idea is looking at Darrow from Red Rising and asking if he is the bad guy. This will focus on Darrow but is asking a broader question of just how much can a hero get away with. How much do virtue and action play on a characters heroism, or lack thereof?
Third would be a series going through Aristotle’s Poetics, a short book that is a fragment of a larger, lost, work. The surviving book focuses on writing dramatic tragedy and epics, with a focus on Homer.
ESSAY GOAL - 6?
This seems like plenty of work for the year. Lots to do. Thanks for reading!
Some questions before I go, what are your goals? Do you think mine are too ambitious, not ambitious enough? What would you like to see here on ROW? Comment below.
EDIT: I had erroneously put 26 for the Short Story goal when it should be 52.
For some reason, audiobooks bring a story to life for me. I usually have an even of 20ish textual and 20ish audio books every year, and the audiobooks are the ones I remember. A good narrator is crucial though - i'll often find myself distracted for hours of a poorly narrated book. Richard Armitage's narration of David Copperfield is the best I've ever heard - most of Dickens and other literary classics have great narrators.
I think the 750k word goal is the best one. It's a lot, but the best way to get better at something is to spend as many hours doing it as possible. I can't remember the exact quote, but in his book 'On Writing Well', William Zinsser said something like: "I became a professional by writing (and cutting) millions of words."
From my perspective, these goals seem ambitious, to say the least, but they are your goals and not mine. I believe that you will achieve them! I’m struggling to build a habit of writing. Struggling to focus long enough to finish a three-part story. Well, maybe focus isn’t the right term. It’s more of a struggle to find the right organization and planning method to make the writing process both efficient and organic. I’m very detail-oriented, so I’m trying to find the right balance of planning and writing so that I don’t suffer too much from analysis paralysis.
Here’s to a fantastic year of writing!