Looking Back on 2019 and the 2010s (Patreon)

Today's the last day of 2019 and the last day of the 2010s. So it's natural to do some reflecting on my career and writing life over the past year and decade. First, the year in specific.

Year of Rebuilding

2019 was and wasn't a big year for me. I didn't release a new book in 2019, after seven years of at least one book release per year:

2012 - Geekomancy
2013 - Celebromancy
2014 - Attack the Geek, Shield & Crocus, The Younger Gods
2015 - Genrenauts: The Shootout Solution
2016 - Genrenauts: The Absconded Ambassador, Genrenauts: The Cupid Reconciliation, Genrenauts: The Substitute Sleuth, Genrenauts: The Failed Fellowship, and the Genrenauts Season One Collection.
2017 - Genrenauts: The Data Disruption
2018 - Born to the Blade Season One

This year? I had a short story reprint (There Will Always Be a Max, in the Origins Library Mythic anthology) and that was it.

Also? That's a lot of book releases over the course of eight years. Even though many of those are novellas or novelettes instead of novels.

This year I *did* sell a new novel (Annihilation Aria), revise that novel more and better than any other novel I'd sold (as in revised more after sale), announce that novel, and write a whole bunch of fiction and non-fiction.

Thanks to you lovely patrons, I wrote around 20k words of non-fiction in essays about the craft and business of writing as well as experiences with and how to do better with tabletop rpgs.  Getting back in the swing of writing non-fiction helped me express myself and work through a variety of topics and refine my thoughts.

2019 was also a year of false starts (or to be more positive, maybe I call them exploratory writing). I set aside two novels-in-progress this year. The first was a Big Thinky SF novel where I put some excruciating effort into writing a partial MSS to share with my agent and ended up setting it aside. The second was a more by-the-book superhero novel with some specific timely elements and some meaty thematic stakes. I started that book originally with the thought of taking it to the indie space, where supers fiction seems to actually have a decent readership, unlike in the traditional world where it's very very hard to sell a creator-owned supers novel.

About 8k words into the superhero novel, I took the idea back to zero and re-imagined it into something else, which is now a 72k word draft-in-progress on a novel that's nearly as ambitious as the Big Thinky SF in some ways, but immensely more manageable in terms of "can I write this thing". It's still a Swing-for-the-Fences kind of book and one that I think could be a Big Deal for my career. I'm just into the third of four projected acts for the novel, and it's going to be a very messy first draft that will take a lot of work in 2020 to turn into something that's in shape for submission. It's been hard because the book is still definitely a stretch for me, creatively, and because I've been rebuilding my discipline since the trauma associated with the 2016 election as well as the life realignment that followed my Angry Robot job going poof early in 2018.

Disconnection & Defiance

Related to that 2018 change, I attended fewer cons this year, which contributed to a sense of feeling less connected to the field. And since I was less active on social media in 2019 as well, especially not posting on Twitter as much, that sense of disconnection increased. 

I didn't read many of the Big Buzzy Books of 2019. Some I actively did not want to read, because people talked about how they would Destroy Your Soul and why the hell would I want that in my life right now when the world is already on fire? That type of gutting experience is never high on my aesthetic to-do-list, though I have nothing against those works and am glad people get a lot out of them. I've enjoyed a few myself. I get that they can offer the kind of experience that goes with the saying "If you find yourself driving through hell, the only way out is through", but most of the time, what I wanted instead was comfort like contemporary romances or fast-paced adventure.

And defiance. Lots of defiance. 

After 2016, I've been even more firmly in the "Burn Brighter in the Darkness" and the "Kick at the Darkness 'Til It Bleeds Daylight" mode of bloodied heroism aka hopepunk aka post-cynical optimism. You can see my expression of that aesthetic most clearly (so far) in Born to the Blade, a series about a group of people in compromised circumstances trying to find the best possible outcome.

What connection I have has come from a deeper investment in community - this Patreon,  private Slack groups, rekindling old friendships - and quality time with Meg. I'm spending much less time walking through the maelstrom of social media (especially Twitter) and more in tighter-knit private spaces, much like I did in the last era of forums and LiveJournal.

A Decade in Writing

My first fiction sold at professional rates appeared in 2010 - the short story "Kachikachi Yama". It was a stretch for me at the time, but now I've grown as a writer in many other ways. I was already attending cons by 2010, and spent much of that year trying to sell Shield & Crocus, before starting to write Geekomancy, which would become my actual debut novel sale.

In the decade since, I've written a bunch of different projects, usually starting with a premise - "What if fandom was a magic system?" "What if genre knowledge was the Special Skill you needed in a story?" "How can I write something that inspires the same kind of joy I felt watching Guardians of the Galaxy?"

And over the past few years, especially since 2016, I have tried to dig deeper - writing stories that aren't just energetic and inventive, they're also trying to Say Something in a bigger, sociological sense. I've tried to lean less on my facility with writing fight scenes and focus more on worldbuilding, characterization, and theme. I'm in a place where I can write what I want to without feeling like I need to retreat to my strengths and my proven record. Really, what I need more is to show that I've leveled up, that I can bring more to the table in an era of SF/F where writers are blowing the roof off of what is seen as possible in the genre and widening the field in an exciting way.

Looking Forward

2020 is going to be hard. Like, "Organize to defeat massive dark money influence, voter suppression, and rampant disinformation in order to electorally depose the authoritarian white supremacist swamp-monster GOP" hard. But other things will be hard, too. Promoting a small-press novel will be hard. Writing and revising this novel will be hard. Trying to sell this novel will be hard, because it's pretty much always hard to sell a novel unless you're already A Big Deal.

I didn't become a writer because I thought it would be easy. I did it because it's the best way I know to build a better future. So let's get to it, and here's to making 2020 the best possible year it can be.