I didn’t post much last year. This is not me apologizing, it’s just a fact. I was busy writing, just not blogging, but since this blog is a perfect place to drop historical markers, here is something from last year.

In 2024 I wrote:

Two Novels. Mind the Slice Book 1 and Speaker For the Dead. *

Nine stories from scratch, including one that weighs in at slightly over 20k words

Three incomplete stories from years past got dusted off, and finished.

In total, that’s well over 200k words, and probably closer to 250k. All writing a few hours every weekday morning.

Also in 2024 I earned 22 rejections for my short stories. I’m not trying to suggest this number is meaningful, except that is it evidence I am still swinging.

And that’s it. It was by far my most productive year. I expect to get even more productive as I go. We’ll see.

* Technically, Mind the Slice Book 1 is a revision of a much longer novel that was broken into three novels, and Speaker For the Dead is a novel I started and stepped away from in 2014. In both cases, much of the writing was new material, with occasional older chapters folded back in. For instance, the original Speaker had a mid 20s male as the protagonist, and he was boring as fuck. I’m sure that was why the novel originally stalled. Last year I was looking over the parts, and the chapters I had written for a side character (Lissa, a 47 year old black woman) just leapt off the page. I did a quick outline with her as the protagonist, dumping most of the original boring material, and three months later the book was finished.