Random Modulation

2023 to 2024: Old Year, New Year

Looking back on 2023 and ahead to 2024 in my reading, my writing, and my publishing.

Looking back on 2023 and ahead to 2024 in my reading, my writing, and my publishing.

This blog entry is part of the 32-Bit Cafe 2023 Holiday Event.

Reading: Looking Back

Here's my 2023 year in reading according to StoryGraph:

• Goal: 60 books.
• Read: 63 books. I'd break it down by category, but StoryGraph's quirky about that. It classifies Gertrude Stein's Everybody's Autobiography as poetry, for instance.
• I read a total of 14,774 pages. (More or less, based on reported page count of each book. I don't always read end notes, but I often read introductory material that might not be included in the page count.)
• My average reading speed was about 40 pages/day, overall.

The figures above don't count non-book reading, such as magazines and newsletters.

Standouts

I'm not doing a "best of" here, but these are some of the books that particularly held my interest and perhaps changed me in 2023.

• Poetry:
  • In the Mecca, by Gwendolyn Brooks.
    (The Mecca is an apartment building.)
    I knew from the start this book was going to be an experience. The opening pages made me feel, in Emily Dickinson’s words, “as if the top of my head were taken off.” All the poems in this collection are intellectually and/or emotionally challenging and satisfying.
  • The Receipt, by Trish Reeves.
    A delightful collection from this poet. Of interest to speculative literature fans are the fantasy bars in the third section of the book: Chicken Tavern, Having Found You Said Too Much Tavern, Meerkat’s Elbow, and others. But the more down-to-earth poems are also intelligent and engrossing.
• Fiction:
  • And What Can We Offer You Tonight, by Premee Mohamed.
    To be honest, I wasn’t wild about the first Mohamed book I read, Beneath the Rising. But she’s so damned entertaining on Bluesky, I decided to give this novella a shot. I’m glad I did. I always enjoy a good revenge tale, especially if class warfare is involved. A smart and moving work.
  • Negative Space, by B.R. Yeager.
    Negative Space pulls the reader sentence by sentence into a weirder, darker world, the ground shifting underfoot at every step. I’m not sure where I ended up when I closed this book (which I got as part of a spooky season gift exchange).
• Nonfiction:
  • It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror, edited by Joe Vallese.
    Each essay focuses on one movie (or in two cases, two movies). Sometimes the author’s life experiences illuminate the movie, sometimes it’s the other way around. I like best the essays that do both, but they are all moving, thought-provoking, occasionally funny, and well written.
• Graphic literature:
  • Poe: Stories and Poems, by Edgar Allan Poe and Gareth Hinds.
    Hinds's art style (and IIRC his medium) varies with each work adapted, but every page is worth your attention. Poe fan though I am, I confess that I had never closely read "The Bells" before Hinds illuminated the poem for me.

Reading: Looking Ahead

I don't have a goal for number of books to read in 2024. I plan to tackle some long books, some dense books, and some that are both. Probably my reading will include a lot of horror, maybe more classics than in the past couple of years, and such specific authors/works as Kenneth Patchen, Virginia Woolf, Stephen Graham Jones, Comte de Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror, Kazuo Umezz's Orochi, and Emily Wilson's translation of Homer's Iliad.

Writing: Looking Back

As usual, I (and my heteronyms) produced a poem a day for NaPoWriMo.

As usual, I started, then abandoned, a novel manuscript.

I had a poem published in Issue 29 of Thorny Locust.

I had a poem published in the Fall 2023 issue of Ribbons, the journal of the Tanka Society of America.

I had a flash fiction accepted by Bright Flash Literary Review (published January 4th 2024).

Writing: Looking Ahead

I have the start of a new horror novel, and am scheming to make myself accountable for finishing it, however badly. Working title: Lazzy Come Home.

One of my heteronyms, Basil Cartryte, has started work on a short collection of poetry.

I'm working on a full-length poetry collection of my own.

I've volunteered to help edit a charity poetry anthology.

I've resolved to send out some sort of submission at least once a month.

Perhaps I overestimate my reserves of energy and the number of hours in a day.

Publishing: Looking Back

For my free tiny frights zine:

• The Walpurgis and Halloween issues came out on time and chock-full of delicious spookiness.
• Anne Calvert and I started the weekly tiny frights podcast with content from the zine.
• I discontinued use of Substack to distribute the zine. Instead I self-host phpList to manage email subscriptions, which is more work but it gives me more control. You can subscribe to the zine and/or podcast mailing lists here.

Publishing: Looking Ahead

Still talking about tiny frights:

• Submissions are open through March 31st for the Walpurgis 2024 issue.
• Some of the old content is still on Substack. (I think only subscribers can see it.) I'll be migrating that away, piece by piece.
• We'll continue producing the podcast. (Each episode is only a couple of minutes long. You should give it a listen!)

Happy New Year!