I should be writing a yearly wrap-up post. What books did I read this year, which were the best, what did I write, and so on.

Unfortunately it hasn’t been a great year for reading, not books anyway. I read exactly four books. I wrote tons, but again, very little of it was books; it was all fanfiction.

There are a lot of reasons I’ve taken refuge in fanfic this year. First of all, I published two books this year, Bisection and The Sea of Clouds, and I am finding publishing is a whole other brand of pressure that makes it hard to also write. Wrapping up book 3, Under False Colors, while watching The Sea of Clouds hit the market to echoing silence was incredibly difficult. It was hard to feel that there was a point to it. I don’t write just to write, or I’d leave it all on my hard drive. I write because I’m having a conversation with the reader. Because The Sea of Clouds is traditionally published, I don’t have access to my sales data until much later, which means having no idea how it’s doing. So it’s a unique kind of frustration, plugging my book and not knowing if I’m annoying everyone, or if they’re buying and liking it.

I did finally finish Under False Colors, though, despite the challenge. It had been languishing on my hard drive in a slightly pulled-apart second draft for about a year. Re-immersing myself in that world was difficult after all that time: it’s very built-out by this time, with hundreds of characters, places, and details I have to keep in active memory while I’m writing. 

I’m beginning to understand Tamsyn Muir and GRRM a lot more: when you write a complicated series, each subsequent book is harder to write than the last, because there’s just so much you have to juggle! And if you put it off a while, you start to forget details and it becomes even harder to get back into it.

But I focused on the core of the book: rebuilding from destruction, building a just society when you’re still broken from the old one, and Lucy and Moira’s relationship. I feel like I said what I wanted to and gave the trilogy a satisfying ending.

I also read these four books:

Navvy Dreams: I love its unreliable narrator and mystery. It’s a world where pilots have an AI embedded in their brain and one hand, there are living ships, and somebody’s been blowing up stars for some reason.

Spock’s World: I have decided that Diane Duane understands Vulcans better than anybody at Paramount has in at least 30 years. So Spock’s World is canon to me. It’s a lot of back-and-forth between the present and the millennia of Vulcan history leading up to Surak.

Ancient as the Stars: Time travel and parallel realities as a vehicle for understanding the self. Isn’t that what sci-fi is all about?

The Star-Crossed Empire: An ace person gets loved unconditionally. There’s a plot about galactic intrigue and so on, but the part that really gets me is always when an ace person is accepted as they are. It comps to the Vorkosigan Saga; you can definitely see hints of Cordelia and Aral’s relationship in there.

I’d recommend all of them. I mean really. If I managed to focus on them with how my brain has been lately, they must be good, right?

Everything else was fanfiction. Fanfiction has a lot going for it that speaks to my weak points with books lately. It’s easy to get into; it can be any length; it’s usually more about the relationships than the complicated plot details; and people read it. 

Finding novels to read and readers for your novels is incredibly difficult; there are millions of books out there and no real way to make yours stand out. Fanfiction has two traits to solve that problem: first, the pool of total stories is cut down to stories in a specific fandom. This means that instead of trying to stand out among millions, you’re searching through a more manageable set. Second, on AO3, there’s a robust search-and-tag system and no algorithm. It’s much easier for readers to find your work, and for you as a reader to find the stories you want. Of course it also helps that the readers don’t have to pay. They can test out your work risk-free and see if they like it. But from what I hear, Kindle Unlimited has the same deal and yet writers I know on it aren’t getting found much easier.

I wrote and published about 535,000 words of fanfiction this year. What drove me to a level of productivity that’s at least five times what I’ve ever done in a year of writing novels? More than anything else, I think it’s that I know people are reading it. They like and comment on it, and that makes me want to write more. It’s more like a conversation, and less like shouting into the void. I’ve had fewer than ten reviews on my books this year, and over a thousand comments on my fanfic. That’s bound to have an effect. I also like that I can reply to the comments, that I am actually in conversation with the readers in the way you can’t really do with books (for a lot of good reasons).

The second reason is really just autistic hyperfocus. I wish I could take the incredible energy of my brain right now and apply it to whatever I want. But that’s the curse of this thing. I can have infinite creativity and focus, but I don’t get to choose what to spend it on. Right now it is Star Trek. At some point that is going to run out, or else something else will catch my attention, and I’ll spend more attention on other projects. Until then I find it works better to ride the wave than to try to fight it and force myself to work on other things.

My hopes for next year

Making New Year’s resolutions always serves to remind me how little control I have over how my year is going to go. In 2020 I resolved to go out more. Ha, ha, ha.

But I do have, let’s say, New Year’s hopes.

Most of all, I want to continue self publishing. Lack of time and money have really held me back. I have two completed books I am ready to publish. But money is tight this year, which means I’ve had to take on an exhausting job, so I have less time to spend on formatting them and still no money to spend on editing and cover design. Both my editor and cover designer are friends, but they still deserve to eat, so I really want to pay them a fair wage. I had hoped Bisection would sell well enough to fund the next project, but it hasn’t (though it just barely paid for itself).

I also want to finish my robot book, which has been back-burnered since last November (i.e.: I wrote 50,000 words and stopped). I was talking to it about a friend last week and got excited about it all over again. What does sentience mean, how self-determined are you on an average day, is self-awareness something we can grow into? That kind of thing. The existence of large language models is going to change robot books forever, but the fact that I don’t think LLMs could ever develop sentience doesn’t mean robots aren’t still an amazing metaphor for the human condition and especially the autistic condition.

I want to go to Balticon, which is the convention near me which hits the sweet spot the most: large enough to have good programming, small enough I’m not completely lost in the crowd. I would love to get on the program myself and I might rent a table to sell books. But even if I don’t, I am hoping to see some faces I remember from the last two years.

Taken all in all, I’m fairly satisfied with the year I’ve had. I’ve grown a lot as a writer, met a lot of people through my work, and improved my mental health, which always suffers when I don’t create. I haven’t made a net profit on writing—lots of little expenses involved in setting up a website and newsletter ate up everything I made. But I have received so many intangible things from writing that I hope to keep it up forever.

Happy 2025!