I feel I want to mark the end of the year here, particularly given I have left the blog fallow for a bunch of months, but I feel oddly resistant to doing a traditional end-of-year round-up of any sort.
This first manifested as a resistance to doing a year-in-reading post, which I initially suspected was due to it having been a pretty slow year on that front. A friend asked by email for recommendations of recent sf a few days back*, and I was confronted by the realisation that I really haven’t read much sf this year, and much of what I have read has been re-reads. Shifting from the qualitative to quantitative, I’ve read maybe half as many books as I did in 2022—so perhaps, I thought, I’m just ashamed at having fallen short of some self-imposed measure of achievement?
On further reflection, however, I realised (or perhaps just decided) that I just don’t want to perform my reading in that way at this time; I couldn’t quite explain my motives for having done so before, and I find myself suddenly cautious about doing things for reasons that are unclear to me. On some level, I was publicly cataloguing my reading for the approval of an imagined audience—and if there’s been a theme to 2023, it’s been one of realising that I don’t need to do things for the approval of imagined audiences, and indeed that trying to do so is not healthy for me.
Doing things for the edification of real audiences, however, is a different matter entirely—and I suspect it’s the flurry of opportunities to do exactly that through the latter half of the year that has thrown a less favourable light on the imagined audience paradigm.
This time last year, I made the difficult and painful decision to accept that the academic route was not going to work out for me; giving up on a quest that you’ve sunk a decade into is not an easy thing, it turns out. But it was the right choice, even if the consequential choice to commit to going freelance and starting my own firm was less a choice than an acceptance of the most viable option remaining.
So far, my acceptance has been better rewarded than I expected: in short, I’ve picked up a decent amount of work, doing what I’m best at and what I believe in, and already have a reasonably full slate of properly paid gigs out to the end of April. I also have plans to make the best of my new independence by building a paying practice that will feature all of the things I always wanted from an academic job—reading, thinking and writing, and perhaps sometimes teaching and speaking—without any of the bureaucratic cruft or petty meritocracy.
By which I mean, of course, the subscription site that I mentioned in passing a few weeks back, for which a more substantial announcement is still pending. I had planned to advance that project considerably over the last seven days, but the pedal-to-the-metal nature of the preceding two months have ensured that I’ve actually spent most of Null Week doodling, scribbling lists, messing around with dataview queries in Obsidian, and playing CRPGs. Holidays have a way of forcing themselves upon you when they’re badly needed; thanks for bearing with me, &c &c.
Given that various projects for real audiences are going to need a lot of my time and focus in the months ahead, I would be unwise to even so much as suggest that I’ll be writing here at VCTB much more regularly than I have been of late—but I will say that I want to, and that I suspect there may (counterintuitively) be more motivation to do so once those projects are in motion: to uncork the metanarrative, if you like, which should probably be kept separate from the work itself (though not hidden). We’ll see how it goes, I guess?
What I won’t be doing here, though, is performing. What do I mean by that? I’m not sure I can fully articulate it, to be honest, but here’s an example: I think I would prefer to write half a dozen little reviews or essays about books I found interesting through the year than to publicly list every book I read.
I’ll still be keeping a record of my reading, mind you—but that’s for my benefit, and no one else’s. If there’s a point to blogging about books, then it’s surely somewhere between the more formal purpose of a review for a more formal publication, and the thinking-it-through of the notebook. Some thoughts can only be completed by putting them out into the world—and, somewhat paradoxically, a thought must be completed before it can truly be revisited.
So, yeah: one more time around the sun. Thanks for reading along, and my best wishes to you and yours for the next spin of the old wheel.
[ * — In the end, I recommended Nina Allan’s Conquest, with the caveat that, while it’s clearly some sort of sf—at least by my own yardstick—it’s perhaps not what most people have in mind when they think “sf”. That sense of a disconnect with the current shape of the genre may also be playing into my reduced reading pace; there simply doesn’t seem to be a lot of sf I particularly want to read right now. But as I remarked to the friend who asked for recommendations, I suspect that this is also a function of having let my own fiction writing lie fallow for too long: I’m struggling to read the books that authors have written, rather than reading in search of the books I want them to have written, or that I believe I would have written in their place. This is not a healthy attitude to art, symptomatic of jealousy and blockage. Time to work on my own shit, in both senses of that phrase. ]
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