Wow I Really Didn't Post Anything All of 2021
In my defence, most of my actual blogging happens on some very verbose posts on Instagram - this includes book reviews, event promotions, and cooking notes.
It’s been a habit for some of the local writers to post an annual roundup of their submissions - basically to show others the ratio of accepted : rejected and demystify the whole process. This year (even if you don’t count the big chunk done in December) I sent more work out than I did in 2019 and 2020 combined, and just by law of probabilities, received a number of acceptances. As always, I am honoured each and every time someone has read my work, and taken the time to consider it. (I received some very nice rejections!)
I finally managed to put together a manuscript, though it is of course, still a work-in-progress. The bones of it have been laid though, and I’ve sent it around to publishers, and we’ll see if anything happens after. I am at the same time, heavily contemplating independently publishing it while doing a simultaneous second print run of my first book. At the same time (as I bemoaned on Twitter) - the work of that is enormous, and I am reluctant to do it until I have a bigger space to store my copies, along with packing and postage-related items needed to handle shipping myself.
Things that I am still astonished got published include a silly short thing on fanfiction tropes in Jellyfish Review, a literal Sekiro fanfiction poem in Cartridge Lit, as well as an early draft of a poem on army ghost stories in Strange Horizons (that poem has since been edited and is, I think, much much better and I can’t wait to share that when I can get a publisher for it). I’ll probably be anxiously waiting to hear back regarding the last nine submissions for the next few months, but really, it’s been a good year on the publications front.
In other writing news, I managed to eke out 13 (13!!!) fanfics of varying length and quality between January to March alone, and then just stopped writing prose after that. I’ve gone back to working on a new project, which I started in November, but it’ll be a very long time before I get through that and put it up somewhere. (My guess is that it’ll eventually hit 80k words?) I’ve been neglecting it after the productivity spurt in the first couple of weeks, but at least that writing muscle is being flexed there.
And I read some 26 books (finishing two more on 1 Jan 2022, and with another four half-read somewhere). A bunch of them were rereads, but I did manage to make a good dent on the stack of ‘Not-So-Freshly Bought and Still Untouched’ pile. I’m starting to realise that I’m moving away from general fiction and sticking to fantasy - so I guess nothing has really changed.
Books I really enjoyed reading for the first time include:
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky (I loved it enough that I bought a copy for my own)
Rereads that I loved enough to come back to include:
Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (and I am so excited for her new novel Persophone)
Video games I’ve enjoyed include Disco Elysium, in which you play an amnesiac police officer trying to solve what looks like a lynching. The voice acting and art is fantastic, there is no shooting or action until the very end but you can run around and have amazing dialogue options to pick from. It took me a while to get into the roleplaying mindset of a trashheap of a man (early on I kept screaming “WHY WHY ARE THESE MY OPTIONS I DON’T WANT TO SAY THESE THINGS”) but it’s very fun and I started a third playthrough because there are so many different ways you can play the game. It’s also 55% off on Steam until 5 January.
The other game was Horizon Zero Dawn. To be honest, the sidequests are mostly very lame subquests, but the main storyline is so good and is, as I keep telling people, proof that just using known-tropes is not automatically a bad thing, this game was full of them, but was told so well and with so much heart (and horror) that I almost cried at that last cutscene. Oh and the combat is very, very fun. The game is also currently 50% off on Steam, and I have put myself on a waiting list for a PS5 for the sequel (I was told the list is a year long and balked but I shall just wait for it).
I’ve just placed an order for Lindsay Ellis’ books ‘Axiom’s End’ and ‘Truth of the Divine’ next and I shall attempt to tackle some of Ted Huges’ writing while I wait for it. I recognise this is a statement of enormous privilege but - what a wonderful thing to be alive and to be able to look forward to reading so many books.