I got an email over the holidays from an editor friend, who hoped that I was finding (or rather making) some quiet time “for writing criticism and fiction”.

I replied that I struggle to see my way to spending precious free time on the former, given that I have for some time felt quite detached from whatever critical conversation still remains around the sort of books I read; why bother working up scribbled notes into more polished work that no one’s going to publish, let alone read?

A week later, the Ancillary Review listed one of my Vector columns in their top ten external pieces of 2025.

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I mention this because I was giving serious consideration to renouncing my column this year. When I started writing reviews around two decades back, having a column in Vector would have seemed an almost unimaginable level of success—and in a sense I suppose it still is, in terms of having free rein to write pretty much whatever I like, and a masthead position at one of the more enduring and notable venues for Anglophone critical writing around genre fiction.

But the key phrase there is “more enduring”. As the ARB‘s annual round-up notes, there aren’t many venues left, and—much as with the short fiction scene, which has followed in the footsteps laid down long before by poetry publishing—I strongly suspect that their regular readership mostly comprises would-be contributors. Maybe I’m missing out on the critical chatter due to being a socnet refusenik, but I have literally zero sense that anyone other than my editors actually reads any of the stuff I send out.

But apparently they do? Which is just typical: just when you think you’ve pretty much kicked a bad habit, some enabler comes along and encourages you—perhaps unintentionally—to stick with it.

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The various arguments against still apply: asymptotic readership; few interesting releases to rouse myself to write about; still fewer venues in which to publish; physical review copies rarer than hen’s teeth (and prone to being taxed at the border by the grifters at Postnord); a sense of having grown away from much of what “the scene” now seems most to value. And time is a genuine issue: a piece like the one linked above can take me the best part of a full working week to do properly, albeit stretched out over a number of weeks or months, and that’s not even accounting for the time spent reading (and/or watching, playing etc.). Even if writing criticism did pay, it would be hard for it to pay a rate commensurate with the effort involved.

However, it seems that even a tiny readership is sufficient to activate whatever circuits of vanity underlie the original impulse. It’s not that I ever stopped having opinions and ideas about the things I read; it’s that I assumed no one gave a shit what I thought any more. Now it seems some people do—so maybe I should keep at it in some way?

That still leaves a bunch of the questions above wide open and unanswered. Write about what, exactly? Publish it where? Perhaps more importantly: is this a well-founded impulse to communicate ideas and participate in The Discourse, or is this rather the writerly equivalent of a fourth-tier band reforming after twenty years away and crawling out for one last embarrassing tour, no longer capable of discerning genuine audience interest from a sort of morbid fascination with an outdated sound?

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I’d been planning to stop doing criticism, but it was essentially a triage decision: drop the writing that seems to be achieving the least, you know. But frankly I’m not sure that any of the other stuff is achieving much more… and I have now been reminded that I enjoy it, and that I even have my moments of being pretty good at it, too.

Well, then. We’ll see what comes of it, I suppose.