Although I’ve given up on posting specific goals each January and reviewing the extent to which I met them at the end of December, this time of year still seems to invite some kind of annual overview. In particular, as I’ve noted in a number of posts, 2024 was in several ways a transition year for me. I stepped back from my day job, although I continue to freelance as an editor and to provide digital formatting for the journal where I spent twenty-one delightful years. My mother passed on at the age of ninety-seven—a sad transition, of course, but hardly an unexpected one. And a month after her memorial service, we celebrated our son’s wedding, which was in every way a delight!
Although I didn’t get Song of the Steadfast to the point of publication, I did complete two drafts and collect comments, which as I mentioned a couple of weeks back I’ve been sitting on so that I could take enough time away from the story to approach it with fresh eyes. I also took advantage of having sufficient free time during the day to read academic books, setting the stage for Song of the Silk Weaver (Songs of Steppe & Forest 7).
As tends to happen with research, I have accumulated far more information than I could include in a 300-page novel without causing readers’ eyes to glaze over. But the point of the reading is to turn up possibilities that I might otherwise not consider, as well as to answer character-related questions—such as why an Italian merchant might stay in the Black Sea region after it falls under the control of the Ottoman Empire, rather than return home like most of his colleagues, or even something as simple as what a sixteenth-century Italian raised by an Armenian mother might consider comfort food.
In addition to my own writing, present and future, I’ve interviewed many other authors whose books came out this year. Fourteen of those interviews appeared on the New Books Network (NBN), but at least as many writers answered questions for this blog. Together they accounted for more than half the year in posts, and I already have six NBN conversations and five blog Q&As lined up for 2025. That’s a lot of reading, especially when you consider that for every author I interview, I read two, if not three, titles of my own choice. No wonder my Kindle app is bursting at the seams with books I have yet to tackle, as well as hundreds that I have already finished. I’m working on novels for February and March 2025 now, and when I finish, I need to write down my questions, introductions, and, of course, NetGalley reviews within a few days, so that by the time I get around to the interviews, I will have those memory boosters at hand.
One area I still need to work on is social media. I’d thought I could start improving my presence there as soon as I retired, but the personal transitions and readjusting my own head space got in the way. If anything, my performance in that arena has become more pathetic, not less. The shift on the sites where I’ve already created a presence away from posts that include outside links doesn’t help. Nor are social media an arena where I feel truly comfortable; I’m neither the right generation nor have the right personality to shine on BlueSky or TikTok, and although I tolerated Twitter, its transition into X makes it unsuitable for my purposes.
But it never hurts to set goals, and mine for the new year include not only writing and researching and developing characters but also putting more effort into learning to use social media effectively. We’ll see how well I do, and in the meantime, I wish you all happiness and success in the year to come!
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