Once More Around the Sun
2023 Recap and Goal Setting for 2024
I like writing the last article of the year because it barely requires any work, which is fortunate, because I just took a (medically indicated) Xanax and spelled “requires” as “rrwuiqres.” Spellcheck is great because it saves us from so very many mistakes but think how many hilarious typos we’ve missed out on because of it, for instance rrwuiqres. The hilarious typos from which spellcheck saves you are exceeded only from the hilarious typos from which spellcheck does not save you. I beg of you, if you are writing or editing a book on underserved populations, please be so, so, so careful because spellcheck is a stone cold jerkface and will not warn you if you type undeserved.
Welcome to a Xanax-fueled and probably typo-filled year-end edition of Shelf Life. Please write me to let me know when you see a typo so I can fire my editor.
In this same post last year I talked about how, when setting goals, it’s a good practice to set some challenging goals that you might not achieve. There’s nothing wrong with not achieving all your goals. It’s more like there’s something wrong with achieving all your goals. If you achieve all your goals all the time, that’s a sign you’re pulling your goal-setting punches. You’re setting goals that won’t challenge you beyond what you’re confident you can achieve. If you achieve most but not all of your goals, this can indicate that you were ambitious in your goal setting.
Goals can also be modified, deferred, or sunset at any time. We’re talking about one’s personal goals here. Let’s say I set a goal in January 2024 that I want to do X Thing, but in February my life changes such that X Thing is no longer that important and a new thing, Y Thing, has arisen and is much more important. Continuing to chip away at achieving X Thing in favor of Y Thing would frankly be a bad strategy. It doesn’t matter that in January I happened to say “I’ll do X Thing in 2024.” I can sunset X Thing, or defer it for a future year, in favor of making bandwidth for Y Thing.
In 2022 I planned to read 24 books and fell short by a few, coming in at 19. For 2023, in spite of not achieving my goal in the prior year, I increased by goal to read 30 books. According to Goodreads I’ve read 18 of those 30, but it’s failed to count at least one reread so 19 is more accurate. I increased my goal but ended up delivering the same results as 2022. That’s fine. Of the books I read in 2023, eight were parts of two (unrelated) series (four in one series and four in another series). Pretty much all the others were also parts of an ongoing or planned series, some of which series I hope I’ll continue to read in 2024. I read one nonfiction book, which is a big win for me because nonfiction challenges me to finish. My favorite reads of 2023 were:
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (thanks for the rec Failkun)
The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman (also a Failkun rec, I think)
When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo (I wanted to read more novellas and this is one).
In 2024 I hope to read the sequel to A Memory Called Empire (already in my library), the prequel to The Blacktongue Thief (expected 2024), and the next two to three books in Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills Cycle. Obviously I will also drop everything to read Alecto the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir when it comes out; if it had come out in 2024 I would have already read it. I’m dialing the 2024 goal back to 24 books again and maybe this year I’ll actually do it. I will note that I have five titles started (during various points of 2023) but never finished; I might be able to knock out a few of those in the next few days.
For writing goals in 2023, I hoped to write six short stories and publish one, and to write one longform work. I didn’t write as much fiction as I would have liked in 2023 but I did write and revise one complete short story that I’m pleased to say has been sold to an anthology due out in March 2024 (more info on that coming soon). I made a few other submissions but nothing came of them. I didn’t really finish enough new short fiction in 2023 to make a major submission push. I also laid down some words in a longform work but didn’t finish it, but that’s fine. I had other stuff going on.
For 2024 I’ve made a note that I would like to complete three short stories and a longform work in progress, and to publish something. I’m going to be honest and say I’ll probably be back here in one year counting the March 2024 publication as a 2024 achievement even though I’ve recorded it here as a 2023 achievement because that’s when I sold it. That’s fine. Only dog can judge me.
If I find some mental bandwidth and time during 2024, I might release some themed Shelf Life compilations. I will certainly share information about those should they become available. I also have been working on and off on a Shelf Life–branded writer’s workbook/journal, so if it gets to be December of next year and I’m in dire straits having not published anything, I can always push that workbook or a Shelf Life compilation out the door I guess. It’s nice to be sitting on a million-word backlog.
Speaking of which, in 2023 I wrote 103 Shelf Lifes (the same number as in 2022) totaling around 203,000 words (versus around 215,000 words in 2022), including today’s article. This puts Shelf Life at a grand total of 349 lifetime essays and around 740,000 lifetime words. Shelf Life is no longer than The Lord of the Rings trilogy put together with the Hobbit; longer than Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series put together; and longer than the Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis. That said, I beg you to read any of those other things instead of this. They are much better.
Usually this is the place where I give you a brief list of my favorite articles of the year, or the readers’ favorites, but this year since there were an unusual number of writing- and publishing-industry news stories and scandals, I’ll provide a list of those in case you want to read up on all the juicy publishing gossip you missed this year.
All Fun and Games about the writer who faked her death and crowdfunded her funeral.
Writing Hacks for Writing . . . Hacks, about the guy who tried to sue the Tolkien Estate.
Derivatives, about the time the British Museum stole Yilin Wang’s translations for an exhibit.
AI of the Storm, about Prosecraft.io’s mass theft of copyrighted work.
Book Fair Apartheid, about the Scholastic Book Fair quietly segregating “diverse” books.
Winners Never Bully, about the author who review-bombed their peers.
Five Things You Can’t Copyright, in honor of the writer who tried to copyright the sun.
Where are they now? Briefly, there hasn’t been a peep about Susan Meachen, the death-faker, since she rose from the dead in January 2023 and I wrote about her. She’s (wisely, in my opinion) keeping a low profile.
Demetrious Polychron, who sued the Tolkien Estate and Jeff Bezos for ripping off Polychron’s Middle Earth fanfiction with their show, The Rings of Power, lost his infringement case in court (shocking no one) and was ordered to pay the Tolkien Estate and jeff Bezos $134,000 in legal fees for their trouble. The judge also granted an injunction barring Polychron from continuing to sell his fanfiction.
The British Museum reached a settlement with Yilin Wang for their theft of Wang’s translations. Wang has used (part or all of, I’m not sure) the settlement to fund two Modern Poetry in Translation Labs taught by and for BIPOC/racialized translators, set to take place in 2024.
Prosecraft.io was ultimately shut down following the backlash that arose over their theft of more than 25,000 copyrighted works to train their linguistic LLM.
Scholastic has stayed out of the news since late October, when I and many others wrote about their optional “diverse books package.” The last word on the subject I’m aware of was Scholastic’s late-October apology press release rolling back their Very Bad Plan™ to segregate “diverse books” into a separate package from the rest of the Scholastic Book Fair offerings and than make that segregated package “opt in” for schools.
Nothing new about Cait Corrain themself, who review-bombed their fellow 2024 debut authors on Goodreads, got caught, blamed it on an imaginary friend, finally admitted their wrongdoing, and lost all their book deals. However, Goodreads (according to NPR) is asking users for help combatting review bombing in the future. Shelf Life reminds you that Goodreads is a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon and therefore, perhaps, the parent company could supply the resources to handle this without asking for free labor from the userbase.
AuthorLMDavis on X deletes and reinstates her account day by day, going on long and incoherent rants about her persecution whenever the account is active. She still believes JustMarveWrites has infringed her copyright on characters who “wield the power of the sun” and, further, that there is a vast liberal conspiracy afoot to demolish her writing career and tank her copyright infringement claim, because she supports Israel over Palestine and supports Trump for president. I sincerely hope this person will get some professional help in the new year (not for her political leanings but for the paranoid conspiracy delusion).
I’m looking forward to a 2024 with lots of reading, writing fiction, sleeping, practicing my apocalypse skill—which, by the way, I practiced a lot in 2023! But which I don’t talk much about here because it’s not word-related—cuddling my partner and furry friends, and writing a lot of Shelf Life. Happy New Year and, as ever, thanks so much to everyone who reads. Whether you read every week or once in a while or once a year, you make this endeavor worthwhile.
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