From 2023 to 2024

Every year I do an annual review post in which I look back on what I did professionally and look forward to what I hope to do in the year to come, and I tag them annual review on my blog. This means if you’re interested you can go back to see my annual reviews since the early 2010s.

I just re-read my annual review for 2022, in which I wrote: "I know that I won’t be able to finish a whole new book in 2023, but I do plan to get a good start on it.”

At the end of 2022, I was burned out and exhausted, and I hear some of that in that sentence. I didn’t want to aim too high because I felt so low. A year later, I’m grateful that I aimed low because I can honestly report that I did get “a good start” on my new novel. In early fall, I spent six weeks writing a new kind of outline for the book (code-named TG), and that absolutely qualifies as a good start.

That’s not all the work I did on TG in 2023. I also did a lot of preliminary research, and I wrote a bunch of scenes that may or may not make it into the final book, but were all necessary parts of the process.

I haven’t done more because of that thing I mentioned: Life. I’ve been dealing with a serious health situation in my family that has taken up a lot of my time. As a full-time writer, I’m fortunate to have a flexible schedule that allows me to step up when needed to care for people, but that flexibility is a double-edged sword. While I’m caring for others, I’m not writing, and the longer I don’t write, the further I drift from the story I’m creating.

Writing is not like a regular job for me, even though sometimes I’ve tried to think of it that way. Over the years, as I’ve gotten older and the books I write have become more complicated, I’ve learned that I need more time to write, not less. More of that time is devoted to immersing myself in the world of the book, not writing actual sentences. More of that time involves thinking and feeling my way into the characters’ lives. When I’m forced to stop working on the book regularly, I feel cut off from it in an almost physical way. I feel a kind of withdrawal that’s like yearning crossed with anger.

Additionally, every time I stop working on TG for any reason (travel, events, and also that darn Life), I’m quickly gripped by fear that I won’t be a good enough writer to write it. Part of this fear is the normal fear I feel when writing anything (the blank page can still feel like such a threat), but I think this fear is also due to the success I had with Last Night at the Telegraph Club. I mean, I won the National Book Award. Is that the height of my career? Is it all downhill from here? This fear feels like a storm hovering on the horizon and always threatening to roll right in.

This is a new fear that I haven’t had much time to deal with yet. Even though A Scatter of Light was published after Telegraph Club, I started working on it years before Telegraph Club was even an idea in my mind, so I didn’t have this fear when I was working on Scatter. Working on TG is the first time I’ve had to face this fear while writing something new.

The one thing that vanquishes this fear is working on TG itself: research, planning, writing random scenes. I’ll say it again: working on TG is the cure for the fear. However, since Thanksgiving, Life has had different ideas, resulting in that feeling of withdrawal combined with the rapid reformation of those storm clouds of fear. As you may guess, the last six weeks or so have not been the happiest of times.

However, I think that Life is stabilizing—or at least, I’m getting used to it. Yesterday morning I worked on TG for one hour. All I did was reread some notes and make a few more notes on what to do next, but even that tiny amount of work pushed back the fear a little bit. I’m planning to make time for TG in my life, despite whatever Life throws at me, in the coming year—even if it’s one hour a week. That probably mean that this book will take longer than I hoped, but that’s actually the same with every book. I always want to write books faster, but they come at the speed they want to come at.

So that’s my major professional goal for this year: make time for TG, as much time as I can. I don’t know how much of it I will write this year, but I know more of it will exist at the end of 2024 than exists now.

THINGS I DID IN 2023

I traveled to five states (Florida, New York, Colorado, Michigan, and Rhode Island) and two countries (Germany and Norway).
I did 10 author events, including five virtual ones and five in-person ones. One of those in-person events was a weeklong tour of Germany in which I spoke to thousands of students as part of the White Ravens Festival—a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
I flew an airplane!
I was a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Iowa’s book banning law SF 496. In a preliminary victory, on Dec. 29, 2023, U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Locher temporarily blocked enforcement of SF 496, writing that “the Legislature has imposed a puritanical ‘pall of orthodoxy’ over school libraries.” This means the law cannot be enforced while the case makes its way through the courts. Iowa has not yet stated whether it will appeal the decision.

WORKS PUBLISHED IN 2023

Last Night at the Telegraph Club

February 2023 — Spain/Spanish (Crossbooks/Planeta)
April 2023 — Greece/Greek (Dioptra)
April 2023 — Germany/German (dtv)
July 2023 — The Netherlands/both Dutch and English editions (Oceaan/Nieuw-Amsterdam)
Fall 2023 — Spain/Catalan (Sembra Llibres)

A Scatter of Light