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So. Hey. I guess 2020 is over now.
Well, that was certainly… a year. It was a hard year. It was hard for everyone.
A lot of people are saying, right around now, that when we look back on the year and what we accomplished, surviving is accomplishment enough. I’m not sure I agree with that. It even feels a bit mean, to claim that surviving is enough, although I understand the impulse behind it.
I think we all know that survival as an accomplishment is in itself a false premise, one that requires internalizing the message that we don’t deserve more than breathing. That’s not a message that comes from people who care about each other, who worry about each other, who understand and support each other. It’s not a self-care message, even when it is packaged in self-care terms, in pretty Instagram graphics and inspirational poetry. It’s a message of conciliation. It’s “there, there, little lady, calm yourself before you get upset--you’re still alive, aren’t you?” It’s “you didn’t starve or die gasping for breath in a hospital corridor so let’s declare victory.” It’s a message that comes from forces larger than individuals--from the systems that have failed us so utterly and so completely, while still demanding that we measure our worth in countable accomplishments--and I think it’s perfectly fine to tell those systems and their messages to fuck right off.
I don’t mean to say that those who take comfort in the sentiment are wrong. Take comfort wherever you can, however you can, because it’s not easy to find these days.
What I do want to say is that we deserve more than that. Everybody deserves more than that. And I think we know it. We know that those who didn’t survive were not failures. We know that they aren’t gone because they simply didn’t have the drive to achieve what we achieved, because they didn’t think to check off the right accomplishment box when it came time to take stock of the year. We didn’t only do the bare minimum this year, not by any measure that truly matters. We spent the year struggling and adapting and fighting and working and supporting and changing and reaching out and reaching in and planning and teaching and learning and mourning and raging and despairing and hoping and evolving--all of which is so much more than survival.
You deserve more in the new year. We all do.
It was a hard year for everyone, including writers and other creative types, who very often have little to no safety net when shit goes down. I know I’m not the only one who found it next to impossible to focus on writing much of anything for large chunks of the year; I know that’s where our desire to count out measurable accomplishments come from. We’ve all felt like we were running on a creaky hamster wheel all year, never getting a break and never getting anywhere. I have that urge to itemize achievements myself, because I want some tangible proof that I did something besides angrily read the news and drink too much and glare at people not wearing masks. And, yes, survive.
I did manage to keep working, more or less, after a fashion. I spent a big chunk of the year revising my upcoming novel Dead Space, which goes on sale on March 2, 2021. It was a struggle to revise, for a lot of reasons, but I think the end result is a pretty good book. I wrote another novel, one that has been sold but not announced yet, and managed to do that during election season, when I was also writing hundreds of letters and texting thousands of voters, which I think means I deserve some kind of prize, like maybe an entire cask of whiskey. I sold a few short stories, two of which were published in 2020 and one that will come out in early 2021, and also wrote and published a handful of essays on various topics that interested me. (All those are linked below.) I’ve recently started a new novel, one I’ve been thinking about writing for a long time, that will take me into yet another new genre. It’s slow going, but I’m giving myself gentle daily goals while I get back into the habit.
About the only good thing about living through a garbage year in a country that is letting hundreds of thousands of people die is that it is sharply, bracingly clarifying about what’s important. I miss travel. I miss my friends and family. I want those things back, but for now, I can adapt. I think a lot about how glad I am that I’m able to do what I do for a living. I’m glad I can sit at home and write about strange and impossible things. I also think a lot about how to keep doing it, and how I need to change to make that happen. I don’t have any wisdom or advice, alas, just an ongoing conversation with myself, the sort of conversation I think a lot of people are having with themselves right now.
For me, I didn’t come out of this year thinking I needed to drastically change my career and my art and my ambitions; I came out of it thinking that I really want to fight to keep them while changing the rest of the world.
I’m not much for resolutions, but I am the kind of person who keeps a revolving set of goals for myself in the back of my mind, and sometimes those coincide with the beginning of the year. The one on my mind right now is about reading, because reading is one of the things I lost for big chunks of time this year (and not just because my roommate finally convinced me to watch anime with her) (but maybe a little bit because of that). I know I’m not the only one who had trouble getting into books. When all of our mental and emotional capacity is taken up with existing in the world, it becomes that much harder to exist in fictional worlds as well.
But I miss books. If I have anything resembling a resolution at all, it’s that I want to get back into reading more. I’m going to borrow an idea from author Linnea Hartsuyker (whose novels are amazing, you should read them), who wrote in her own newsletter about developing a reading challenge that focuses on what she wants to read. I’m adapting her format and some of her ideas to my own goals, and this is what I’ve come up with:
Read 1 fiction book I already own each month
Read 1 nonfiction book each month
Read 1 book by a nonwhite author and/or in translation each month
Read 1 short story each week
Read 2 long-form pieces of journalism each month
Some overlap possible. That’s where I’m going to start.
My writing goals for 2021 are pretty much to keep writing more books and stories, but one thing I realized during 2020 was how much fun I had writing essays about the media I’ve enjoyed. I’m not a natural or trained critic by any means; rigorous literary and media criticism seems very exhausting. I am a natural fangirl, however, and I like to talk about things I love so I can dive brain-first into analyzing why they get under my skin. I love digging into the details of all kinds of storytelling, from books to games to podcasts to documentaries.
And if there is one other lesson I feel like I can take from this shitfire year of 2020, it’s that life is too short to dismiss or devalue or diminish the things that brings us joy.
So I want to do more of that kind of writing for various markets when I can, but also in this newsletter. I could never be bothered to write a newsletter when it was only about my own work, because that is a mind-numbingly boring topic to write about. (Self-promotion is so dull and joyless that I don’t know how anybody manages it!) Instead I am going to write about other people’s creative work. About the things I love and what fascinates me about them in terms of craft, storytelling, and impact. About the joy I find in teasing about the mysteries and tricks and heart of the stories and media that captivates me. About why stories and storytelling are so very important. That’s what you can expect from this newsletter going forward.
I wish you all a happy and hopeful New Year. Whoever you are, wherever you are, however you live, you did more than merely survive in 2020, and you deserve so much more than survival in 2021.
Preorder links for Dead Space:
MYSTERIOUS GALAXY | INDIEBOUND | BARNES & NOBLE | AMAZON
My short stories from 2020:
Her Cage of Root and Bone in Beneath Ceaseless Skies (April 2020)
The Salt Warrior in Lightspeed Magazine (December 2020)
My essays from 2020:
Comfort, Connection, and Community in Martha Wells’ Books of the Raksura on Tor.com (March 2020)
The Reality of Writing in Uncertain Times on SFWA Blog (April 2020)
Anxiety, Empathy, and Making Sense of the Senseless Through Storytelling on Tor.com (June 2020)
Inside the Cult of Fear: Finding Humanity in Horror Fiction on Tor.com (August 2020)
All of what I published last year is collected in a single post here.
Just...thank you. I just realised I needed this. And by the way, your books are gorgeous (I was fortunate enough to score an eARC of Dead Space, and will buy a physical copy when it comes out!), and I LOVE how you don't stick to just one genre or age range. Have a safe, and dare I say, happy? new year!
Roberta (Italy)