Looking back on 2024: a quietly productive year

As 2024 comes to a close, I realize that, due to the unfortunate delays in completing the cover art for Aleyara’s Descent and Other Stories, my only professionally published work in 2024 has been the Star Trek Adventures campaign Synthetic Diplomacy, plus its associated essay (yes, I get paid for those). My only fiction publication on my Patreon, “High and Flighty,” doesn’t even count as a “real” publication, since it’s more by way of a “deleted scene,” an abandoned early draft of concepts I used differently in my professional fiction — and since my Patreon fiction audience is in the single digits (come on, folks, it’s only three bucks a month). Otherwise, my published output this year has consisted only of reviews. My Patreon review series this year have included the latter 3/5 of my comprehensive Alien Nation revisit (including every film, episode, comic, and novel); rewatches of two superhero comedy series, Stephen J. Cannell’s The Greatest American Hero and Javier Grillo-Marxuach’s The Middleman (covering both TV and comics for the latter); and my recently-started rewatch series of the classic British space adventure drama Blake’s 7. Also, here on Written Worlds, I did a comprehensive Shakespeare binge (if you can call something that takes 7 months a binge) including the entire BBC Television Shakespeare, finally achieving one of my lifetime goals.

So I’ve earned very little money from writing this year, mostly small amounts from Patreon, royalties, book sales from the Shore Leave convention, and the Aleyara’s Descent Kickstarter. I did no contracted writing this year, although I did write a pitch for a licensed project that I hope will be approved. I had pitched a couple of short story ideas to the Star Trek Explorer magazine before this year, but unfortunately the magazine was cancelled before my pitches could be approved. But it’s okay, because I’m still living comfortably on the surprisingly large inheritance I got from my late Uncle Clarence. So I’ve been free to extend my semi-voluntary sabbatical and continue focusing on my original writing. In addition to writing that licensed pitch and revising and compiling the stories in Aleyara’s Descent, I’ve completed the Troubleshooter novel I was working on last year, and have written two novellas, the first of which I’ve submitted and am hoping to get a response on soon. If it sells, it will be my first original novella-length sale.

Indeed, I now have two new Troubleshooter novels in manuscript. A couple of years ago, I wrote a spec script for an original Troubleshooter graphic novel, set after Only Superhuman and “Conventional Powers” but before “Legacy Hero” (my Patreon story about to be reprinted in Aleyara’s Descent). The comic script was adapted from an outline for a potential second prose novel, streamlined to fit the format. I submitted it to a colleague who works in comics, but there hasn’t been any progress on getting it published.

So in October, it struck me — why not turn it back into a novel? I liked the idea of doing a canonical comics-exclusive Troubleshooter book, but I realized I couldn’t guarantee it would be published as a comic, and that if it were, it wouldn’t hurt (and might even help sales) to have both prose and comics versions of the same story. Moreover, I’ve been thinking of pitching a novel to agents in hopes of finally landing representation, and I realized the graphic novel would probably work better than the other novel as a standalone tale introducing the universe and characters to new readers — or to agents. After all, I did intend it to be my comics debut, so it had to be accessible to a new audience. On the other hand, its story does connect to conceptual and character threads from elsewhere in my work, so it makes sense to incorporate it fully into the prose publishing sequence.

In addition, since this was mostly a process of reformatting the existing scenes and interpolating new scenes and narration, it allowed me to generate a new novel in less than two months, nearly half of which was spent thinking up new scenes and subplots to pad it to novel length. Having two complete, consecutive Troubleshooter novels to pitch to agents might improve my chances. (Although I’m way out of practice at querying agents, and it looks to me like there are some new online tools that have something to do with that, so I’ll have to look into that. If anyone reading this has tips about agent-hunting, I’d appreciate hearing them.)

I’m not giving up on getting the graphic novel published, though. I’ve tried to make sure that the novel remains entirely consistent with the comic, and vice-versa. They have their differences; the novel has substantially more content, while omitting some bits from the comic or replacing visual montages with dialogue conveying approximately the same information. Some scenes are longer in the novel, but sometimes it worked better to omit expository dialogue at the start of a comics scene and convey it through narration instead. My goal is to create two versions that are equally canonical and mutually consistent where they overlap, but differing in emphasis, so each will offer something new to those who’ve read the other.

The biggest changes I’ve had to make were to the flashback segments. In the original novel outline, these were intended as whole chapters from the perspective of various Troubleshooters, but in the comic script, I streamlined the flashbacks to present-day first-person narration illustrated by visual flashback images, occasionally cutting back to the present for some dialogue between storyteller and listener. There’s even one flashback that switches narrators midway through, giving the same story from two sides. But for the novel, I’ve expanded the flashbacks into (nearly) full chapters as originally intended, and I decided it was best to stick with third person. Although I do still have a couple of places where I cut back to the present in mid-story.

This is the reverse of a process I attempted a few decades back with my first stab at an Emerald Blair novel, entitled simply Troubleshooter. I had ambitions of doing an ongoing original comic series in parallel with the novels I hoped to do, and thus I adapted the spec novel into four double-length comic scripts, again attempting to keep the two versions exactly consistent with each other where they overlapped, while omitting some novel scenes and adding some new comic-exclusive material more suited to the format.

Of course, if both versions do get published, there’s no guarantee I could keep them completely consistent, since they’d both have editing processes that might change things, and some details might get lost in the shuffle. If they were in the works at roughly the same time, the odds of inconsistency would increase, since one version might be finalized before a change in the other could be incorporated. In the event of inconsistency, the prose novel would presumably take canonical precedence, although any comic elements not contradicted by the novel could be regarded as accurate. At the very least, I’d love to get the comic published so that I could establish visual designs for the characters, costumes, tech, and world.

Anyway, I’m just glad I realized this was a way to add another novel to my roster of spec manuscripts, and to do so quickly, getting it out of the way by the end of the year (well, nearly, since I still have to do a bit more editing and put together a pitch packet) and clearing the board for whatever projects come next year. Hopefully that will include the licensed novel I pitched, or some other contract work, since I can’t live off my inheritance forever. I also have a couple more original ideas — one novel, one novella — in tentative outline stages, though both need refinement before I can write them.

I’ve realized that, beyond those two remaining things, I don’t have much of anything specific planned out for the Arachne-Troubleshooter Universe, other than a few tentative story ideas. I’ve been checking things off my long-term to-do list, and once I get them done, I’ll finally be free to think about what comes next. But I only have vague ideas for that, since it’s taken me so long to get through the existing stuff. It’s both liberating and intimidating. Although I do have one big idea for a whole new universe, one where I have the worldbuilding worked out but have been stalled on specific plot ideas. Maybe I’ll finally get to apply myself to working that out at last.

–

Otherwise, this has been a quiet year for me, solitary but fairly comfortable, since I’ve bought a number of items to make my standard of living incrementally better, including a solar battery tender for my car, long-overdue new eyeglasses, a robot vacuum cleaner, and a smart TV. (I still have the slightly flawed desktop mini-PC, but I’ve learned I can mostly avoid its tendency to freeze when left idle too long by turning on the screen saver so it stays active.) Most recently, I finally found some blackout curtains for my odd-sized bedroom window (which is directly across the street from a very bright safety light that illuminates the front of my building). For two decades, I’ve just used an old blanket clipped to the curtain rod, reaching up to pull it down every night and stuff it back up behind the rod every morning. I got so used to the habit that it was only recently that I remembered my long-abandoned search for proper blackout curtains and searched for some online. I wasn’t sure what the right size was, but the ones I picked are just about the perfect size and work quite well.

I’ve also been planning to buy a new laptop, but I’ve been busy with writing and I don’t really need a laptop except on my Shore Leave trips. I’ll probably proceed with that soon, though.

So that’s about it for a year that’s been outwardly very quiet but inwardly pretty eventful. As for next year, Aleyara’s Descent and Other Stories will hopefully come out quite soon, and Arachne’s Legacy is still slated for publication in 2025 if things go as planned. I’ve got those couple of things I’m hoping to get contracts for soon, which would probably come out next year if they sell at all. And with any luck my agent search will bear fruit. I’ve enjoyed the chance to catch up on so much original writing, but I’d really like this to be the last year where I have so little published output. I need to build up my audience again.