2025 is well under way already, and it’s perhaps a bit late to start looking back at the previous year and how I fared. But, well… it’s been a stressful January, and it’s only really now that I’ve had both the time and energy to reflect on 2024.
The obvious place to start is probably with my own writing, specifically my publications.
With five stories published throughout the year, I don’t think I can call 2024 anything but successful. Previously, I never had more than one story published in any given year.
Sure, four of those five stories were published in the same magazin, but Stupefying Stories is a good, established magazine. Besides, the competition in the Pete Wood Challenge where those four stories placed, has been fierce.
Perhaps the only thing I wish I could change is that most of my published stories are flash/drabble pieces. Again, that’s not different from any other year since I started writing, but I do hope 2025 will finally be the year where I can get a longer piece into an English language market.
Looking at my writing, I produced just short of 49.000 words for stories in 2024. That’s about 4.000 words a month. That’s… not a lot. I have been working on being more productive and more consistent in the last couple of years. That has helped, but I still think I need to become even more productive.
However, those numbers also come with the caveat that 2024 definitely was a year where I focused more on quality than on quantity. I spent about as many days focusing on editing as I did on writing new material. And going back to the number of stories that got accepted for publication, that seems like the right decision.
Overall, 2024 was a very good writing year for me.
Of course, I also did a lot of reading in 2024. I’m not aiming to change that in the following year. Though, I do hope to tackle reading a bit differently.
Until now, most of my reading has been a bit directionless. I’ve been reading for the fun of it, only occassionally sitting down with a book or short story to learn something specific from it. And while there still needs to be room for reading-for-fun, I hope to be more deliberate about my reading and treat it as a learning experience.
I also want to read more broadly. I want to read more non-fiction to have materials for new, more original stories, and I want to read more outside the genres of science fiction and fantasy to see what can be learned from that. Maybe there’ll be another post about my reading plans for the year to come later on.
This is probably also the place to mention memorable stories I read throughout the year. And aside from the Discworld books, which I keep returning to when I’m really in need of something that has to be entertaining, there were two novel that stuck with me.
Sadly, one of those was not because I found it especially entertaining. I think I must accept that one of the big SF&F authors currently writing just doesn’t work for me. Perdido Street Station was my third foray into the writings of China Mieville, and with no more success than my previous attempts.
I can admire his descriptions and especially the originality and details of his settings, but none of his stories have so far really kept me interested in the plots and characters all the way through.
On the other hand, Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Gray turned out to be an absolute blast.
The first couple of chapters were a bit tough to get through, being somewhat heavy on exposition. But once the plot got started, it never stopped. The novel had the same kind of original speculative element and same kind of absurd and detailed settings as Mieville’s writing. But on top of that, there were plenty of interesting mysteries and quirky characters that had me struggling to put the book down.
This was one of, if the not the best book I read last year.
That was it for now.
Toby Backman 