So it’s a new year. We’ll call it 2024, although there are other calendars with different years and different start dates.

This will be a long post, because I’m going to give a recap of last year.  Apologies for repetition, because some of this has been covered in other posts.

2023 Recap

In late 2021, my parents moved from where they were living to a nearby town. I still don’t understand all the reasons. Part of it was to be closer to my brother, who lives there. They had been living on some property my grandparents had bought in the late 60s when they retired. It’s between nine and ten acres in size.

My wife immediately began asking me if we could buy the property. After nearly a year, I finally gave in and said yes. I didn’t want the property to pass out of the family, and it’s the one piece of geography that has been in my life for the entire life.

There were also job reasons coming into play.  The university was building a new scieince building, and I was getting to watch the sausage being made, as the saying goes. There were some decisions made, one in particular, that would make my life much more unpleasant once the building was complete. Add to that the fact that the quality of the student body was declining, and it was time to get out. (I can’t tell those stories.)

My wife got a job at the prison here in the spring. I tendered my resignation effective the last day of August. Most of the move has been completed. There are still a few items of furniture, odds and ends, and boxes of books that need to be moved.

I have a job as postmaster relief at a small rural post office in the mornings and work as needed at a funeral home in the afternoons. To put it another way, I deliver mail in the morning and bodies in the afternoon.

Things have been so hectic that I haven’t gotten much reading done, especially in the last few months. Most of the reading I’ve managed to do has been in the mystery and thriller genres. I have been taking some online writing classes. A large portion of the reading has been assignments for those classes.

I’ve completed several short stories which are either under consideration at some markets or I’ve got some finished that need to be submitted.

2024 Plans

I’m contiinuing to take the writing classes. IThey are of varying length. Some are three weeks long and have a story assignment. Others are six or nine weeks long. One that I started last year and is continuing into this year has to do with business practices for writers. Things are changing in the publishing world in some exciting ways. I’m making some plans that are too prelimnary to be discussed yet, but I’ll you let you know when they are implemented.

One of the writing projects I’ve undertaken is to write an average of 2,024 words per day in 2024. That’s consumable words. Fiction, nonfiction, introductions to books or stories, blog posts. Anything that is for other people to read. Comments on blogs/Facebook/social media won’t count, and neither will emails.

What that means is I expect to do a lot more blogging this year than in the past year or so, since what I’m writing now applies towards today’s word count.

What am I going to write about?

I don’t know yet.

I’m going to cut back on reviewing books by writers who are currently active. If I’m going to ramp up my fiction production, then there’s the possiblity of a conflict of interest. There was a recent situation where an author with her first novel got caught setting up sock puppet accounts on Goodreads and trashing books by other writers she saw as being competition for hers. Her book wasn’t even scheduled to be  published until sometime in May of this year, I think it was.  And some of the books she was trashing were by other debut authors at the same publisher.

I’d just as soon stay away from the possibility of being in a situation that even looks like that. Not that I have any desire to be traditionally published.

What I’ll probably do is ramp up the birthday posts and focus more on older works by writers who have passed on or are no longer writing. C. L. Moore and Robert E. Howard both have birthdays later this month, so I’ll be working on those. I still have that tribute to David Drake to write.

I’ll also provide commentary on anything of significance in the sf/fantasy/horror/mystery fields that catches my eye.

I’ve got enough short stories that I could publish another couple of collections from my inventory. That is a project I’ll be working on this month. The funeral home job is on an as needed basis, so my afternoon schedule is uncertain. That’s when I would be working on writing. Once my wife gets home, she tends to want me to spend  some time with her. And I’m fine with that.

So, that’s the general outlook for 2024 as far as writing goes.

As for other projects, I will be setting up shelves and unpackiing books over the next few weeks. I might provide some pictures. I should be able to put in a garden this spring. It’s dark enough where I live, even with our security lights and the neighbors lights that I can see plenty of stars, so I might take up observational astronomy. I was in charge of a small observatory for a  year while I was in graduate school, and I kind of miss being able to see dark skies. Now I can.

All of this, of course is subject to change if something else catches my interest as well as acts of Murphy.