Looking back on 2023
Well, 2023 has been a slow year for me in some ways, a big year in others. I’m still in a drought where tie-ins and other contract work are concerned. As it happens, the owners of the company that owns GraphicAudio (my Tangent Knights publishers) sold that company so they could buy Simon & Schuster (my Star Trek prose publishers), and that apparently led to a lot of waiting-and-seeing that slowed down acquiring new projects until it was all done, or at least that’s the vague impression I’ve gotten.
On the other hand, my inheritance from my late Uncle Clarence has proven unexpectedly sizeable, enough that I’ve been able to live off it all year and still have plenty to spare. So I’ve spent most of this year on a sabbatical from contract work (only partly by choice), giving me time to refocus on original novels. Aside from writing one Star Trek Adventures campaign (which took longer than I hoped it would), I’ve devoted pretty much the whole year to my original work — mostly Arachne’s Legacy, the sequel to Arachne’s Crime and Arachne’s Exile, which also took far longer to write than I expected. Looking back on past blog posts, I’m reminded that of the two parallel plotlines (which I wrote one after the other since they barely intersect), the first one I tackled went very quickly, starting in early January and already near the climax by late February, but the second one (which I began after writing the STA campaign) took a lot longer to figure out, so that I didn’t feel the manuscript was ready to submit until mid-October.
Since then, I’ve been working on a second Troubleshooter novel, the B-plot of which I wrote last year in the form of my Patreon serial Guardian Angel, so I’ve only had the other half to write this year. I ended up reworking and streamlining the plot quite a bit from my years-old outline, and I’ve been discovering new ideas along the way. I was hoping to finish by the end of the year, but I’ve still got a couple of chapters left. Still, that’s a much better pace than I managed with my other projects this year. Somehow Troubleshooter stories are usually easier and faster for me to write than other things, perhaps because I enjoy the milieu and characters so much, or know them so well.
My “Projects 2023” to-do list had one more item I’d hoped to get to, but it’ll have to wait until next year. Still, I got nearly 3/4 of the list done, which is better than I’ve done in some past years.
My published output this year has been relatively light. My only licensed publications have been three Star Trek Adventures contributions: the Mission Briefs: Ancient Civilizations pack of ten brief adventure summaries (which GMs can use as seeds for more fleshed-out campaigns), the Lower Decks-style standalone campaign Lurkers, and the pre-Picard Season 1 standalone campaign Children of the Wolf. However, I had two stories published in major science fiction magazines just weeks apart: my first flash-fiction sale, “Though Worlds Divide Us,” available for free on Amazing Stories online, and “Aleyara’s Descent” in the May/June 2023 Analog, which is my longest ever Analog story and my first to get a cover painting, and which I’m very happy to have finally gotten into print after 25 years. Ironic that my shortest and longest original short-fiction sales came out in the same month (with STA: Lurkers debuting in between them). I believe they also represent, respectively, my shortest and longest intervals between writing and publication. And Lurkers was the first Lower Decks standalone campaign published, so April 2023 was a string of firsts and records for me.
All my other publications this year were self-published on my Patreon page, and they consist exclusively of Troubleshooter tales: the novelette “Legacy Hero,” a sequel of sorts to my Analog story “Conventional Powers,” and the Guardian Angel serial. In 2023, my weekly Patreon review page has covered season 2 and season 3 of The Orville and the short-lived 1995 steampunk Western Legend starring Richard Dean Anderson and John DeLancie, and currently, biweekly on Tuesdays and Fridays, I’m doing a comprehensive revisit of the classic Alien Nation science fiction franchise, which will cover every movie, TV episode, novel, and comic. I’ve reduced the prices on my Patreon page considerably in hopes of attracting more readers, but so far I’ve had little success at doing so.
Looking ahead to 2024, I’m still awaiting publication of the Star Trek Adventures campaign I wrote this year, and I’m waiting for approval on a pitch for a small tie-in project. The manuscript for Arachne’s Legacy is with my publisher at eSpec Books, along with the contents for a second short fiction collection, including “Aleyara’s Descent” and a number of my Patreon-exclusive stories, as well as one unpublished story, probably. Anything beyond that remains to be seen.
As for the future of my Patreon, I’m starting to think that if I can’t attract more than the handful of subscribers I currently have, it may not be worth the effort to continue. The small amount of money I made from it was helpful when I was broke and every little bit counted, but now I don’t need the money as much and I have even fewer patrons now than I did when prices were higher. I’ve also pretty much run out of fiction content to post, and I’m not sure it’s worth the effort to write more Patreon-exclusive content — or even to serialize the other half of the Troubleshooter novel — if I only have a handful of readers. I’ll leave up the page, but unless I get a significant influx of new subscribers soon, I may stop updating it. Maybe I’ll keep doing reviews, but I haven’t decided yet. If I do stop updating, I’ll probably repost old reviews here on my free blog, since at this point I just want them to be read.
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Reviewing my old blog posts reminds me that this has been an active year for me in a material sense. My inheritance allowed me to pay for some necessary new items — a proper protective case for my smartphone, some very essential and very expensive car repairs, and a tiny, fast new desktop computer (and comparatively huge power strip with battery backup). I came close to deciding to sell my 2001 Saturn for parts and get a newer used car, but I came to the conclusion that I don’t drive enough to justify the expense, and two mechanics agreed that the repaired car was in good enough shape to last me for a good while yet.
As for the computer, readers should remember the problems I’ve had with its unexpected freeze-ups when left running too long, or occasionally when I hibernated it. I almost resolved to take it into a local repair shop, but I ended up putting that off, and I basically just managed the problem through avoidance — always shutting down at night instead of hibernating (it goes on and off so quickly that there’s barely any difference in convenience) and not letting the computer sit idle too long except when I go out, which isn’t often. I set it to go into sleep mode after 40 minutes (below the minimum observed freeze time, with one exception) and hibernate after an hour, but the one time I was out for more than an hour (for my COVID booster appointment), I came back to find it still in sleep mode. Does “after an hour” mean an hour after it goes to sleep, then, as opposed to an hour of idleness? I really should let the computer sit long enough to find out, but my risk-averse psychology makes me reluctant to try.
Still, I haven’t had a freeze-up in a couple of months, so my fears that the problem was worsening seem unfounded (knock on wood). There was one instance where I couldn’t revive it from sleep mode with keyboard activity, but pushing the power button on the PC worked. The freezes may simply be a minor annoyance rather than a symptom of a larger problem. And otherwise, the computer is working just fine.
A more minor recent purchase is a set of replacement stickers for the letters on the lower row of my ergonomic desktop keyboard, which had partly or completely eroded away. Only Z, X, B, and the question mark-slash key were intact. I figure the others wore out faster because I used them more (particularly from using Ctrl-C and -V for copy and paste), but I couldn’t figure out why those were eroded but the heavily used letters like E, T, A, etc. were perfectly intact, until I applied a bit of physics thinking: I hit the bottom row with the tips of my fingers, so the surface area is lower, concentrating the force and exerting more pressure.
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I recently went for a walk on the University of Cincinnati campus and was saddened to discover that the nonstop reconstruction and remodeling that’s been going on for most of the 37 years since I first attended college there (it’s a perennial joke that “UC” stands for “Under Construction”) has finally claimed my favorite place on campus. It was a small courtyard or enclosed porch between the lower-level northeast exit of the Old Chemistry building on the north side of the quad and the adjacent Zimmer Hall, accessible from a stairway descending from the quad. Judging from its architecture, it was originally the symmetrical mate of a porch on the opposite, west side of the building, but when Zimmer was built around it, the porch became a small walled-in courtyard, though I always called it “the Alcove” since I couldn’t think of a more architecturally accurate term for it until long after I graduated. Despite my best efforts to retrain myself to call it “the courtyard,” it’s still the Alcove to me. Or… it was.
The Alcove was a favorite place for me to hang out and talk with friends, or just to sit/pace around by myself and think, relatively insulated from the chatter of campus activity. I did a lot of writing there over the past three and a half decades, both plotting things out in my head and writing them down on my laptop. Although they removed its wooden benches quite a few years ago, leaving only bare stone ledges to sit on, and I haven’t been there as often in the past two decades. But I’d actually started going back a bit more often over the past couple of years, until they closed it off for construction work. Still, it’s been a while since I went that way, long enough for it to be a surprise to discover that the whole northern/rear half of the Old Chemistry building was torn down in the interim, the Alcove along with it. The original part of the building completed in 1917 is still there, and the signs say they’re preparing to build a more modern-looking glass-walled extension onto it, “New Old Chemistry.” Apparently this is because the rear extension built in the 1930s was somehow in worse condition than the original building and the two parts were settling at different rates, so they had to get rid of the newer part for the sake of the older part. But the Alcove — “my place” on campus, my favorite thinking spot since I was 18 — is gone forever, and I had no idea it was going to happen. A slightly sad note on which to end the year, though it doesn’t really affect my life in any meaningful way.
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So that’s where I stand as 2023 comes to an end. It’s been refreshing, after five years of struggling to stay afloat financially, to be able to stop worrying about money and take a year off just to write and read and watch and generally exist, and to be able to make some needed improvements in my standard of living (even if some haven’t worked as perfectly as I’d hoped). It’s been a quiet year, but I needed that.
Still, hopefully next year will bring new opportunities for writing work beyond my spec writing, and let me get my name out there on more published works, original and contracted alike. I may be free of money worries right now, but I still need to build more savings for the future. And maybe I need to get back out into the world a bit more, though the enduring presence of COVID and Americans’ general abandonment of precautions against it make that tricky. But we’ll have to see how that goes.
Of course, 2024 will be a crucial year for American democracy, and there will be plenty to worry about as we draw closer to the election. So when I say I wish for a happy new year for my readers, it carries a lot more weight than usual. And it’s up to all of us to make sure we pay attention, stay registered, and cast our votes on or before Election Day, if we’re to have any hope of a happy 2025 and after. This is the big one, folks.
