The cards have been sent, the gifts are all wrapped, and this afternoon I go into Newcastle for my annual Christmas whiskey-drinking session with a local pal. In other words, this is the perfect moment to reflect on the past year.
From the outside, my 2019 had a lot to recommend it: my Noise & Sparks columns for Shoreline of Infinity won the British Fantasy Award (BFA) for Best Non-Fiction, and my work was shortlisted for two more – the British Science Fiction Association’s Best Non-Fiction and, for the second year in a row, the BFA for Best Shorter Fiction (for ‘Telling Stories’, The Dark). I also published some new columns for Shoreline of Infinity that I’m really proud of, including the two ‘Lost’ columns on my trip to Svalbard and creative direction; ‘The Elephant in the Ceremony Room’ on the meaning of awards; and ‘The Power of Story’, which explored genre adaptations as I work through my own practice in adapting Hamlet as part of my Creative Writing doctorate.
Talking of which, there were also some academic highlights: as previously mentioned, I finally visited Svalbard, where I drove a husky sled (they were all very good dogs) and saw the Northern Lights – and spoke about Star Wars and C.S. Lewis at the Island Dynamics conference. I went Dublin as part of this year’s Worldcon, taking part in a panel on musicals and presenting on Gaiman’s folkloric adaptations and griefing – though I didn’t see anywhere near as much of it as I’d have liked to. And I presented on the monstrous-feminine in Frances Hardinge’s Cuckoo Song to Fantastika‘s incredibly fertile seedbed of budding new genre academics. My favourite discovery of this year is just how much I love travelling for conferences, to discover new places and speak of the deep nerdlore with fellow scholars. I also published my first review with Fantastika journal. Organization-wise, I said goodbye to GIFCon after May’s event and, after a last-minute agreement in 2018, ended up managing the Guest of Honour helpers at Ytterbium, this year’s Eastercon. Ytterbium, Ludic Literature and my talk at the cross-industry Symposium on Fantasy and the Fantastic gave me the chance to indulge my passion for bringing academics closer to the industry, particularly through fandom. And Oliver Langmead and I gave more writing workshops to enthusiastic writers at CYMERA and Edinburgh Science Festival.
However, it’s also been a difficult year in terms of my personal life. Close members of my family have been badly ill at points, and my own health has taken a nosedive. Partly this was due to a misdiagnosed injury from last year affecting my mobility, which we’re still waiting for an official verdict on. Partly it’s down to issues with my mental health, specifically anxiety and depression. Looking back, this shouldn’t be much of a surprise: the political climate aside, the first two-thirds of the year were incredibly busy (five papers, one talk and one roundtable were presented across six events in the first 8 months alone), following a very intense Summer 2018 working on my Masters dissertation and no break before the following semester. However, it’s also the culmination of issues I’ve been learning how to manage for several years now combined with these circumstances, and crucially, the inability to deal with them right now through running. As a result, I took some time away from Twitter and Facebook this Autumn, which left me with a lot of conflicting thoughts about the role of social media in my life (social and otherwise), and its place alongside the more nuanced writing I’d like to do in the coming years. In the meantime, I’ll be taking some time out from my doctorate in the new year while I learn to manage my antidepressants alongside my anti-anxiety drugs, painkillers and other treatments.
Right now, it’s also the fashion to look back on the past decade. Ten years ago, I was at a crossroads. There was something I’d let consume my life that was no longer making me happy, and so I resolved to do some exploring, which eventually led me to writing fiction. It’s been a long decade, full of evening classes and Nanowrimos years before there were conventions and my Masters in Fantasy, let alone the BSFA Award in 2015 and my recent BFA win. It’s also taken years to discover which ways of working are best for me – indeed, I’m still discovering them with every new piece – as well as the best ways to manage the public and private aspects of being part of the writing community.
I know that sounds oversimplified and vague, and even quite unhelpful for those of you going through the same struggles right now. People tend to focus on the shiny bits of your life, not the parts that need a bit extra elbow grease, and eventually you just sort of forget the details of how you got through the latter, even though they’re the greater part of any writer’s life. If there’s any big secret to writing, it’s this: you work really hard for a long time, and then you keep working. As a result, I don’t feel much like I’m entering 2020 at the end or the beginning of something. Rather, I feel like I’m wading through its muddy middle, trying to keep the map from getting wet. And maybe that’s a better place to be than it sounds.
Having said that, there is dry land ahead. 2020 will be a little busier on the publication front: I’ve recently finished my first brand new story in a good while, and I’m currently working on another commissioned tale, so there should be new publications from me by the end of the year. And in terms of non-fiction, alongside new Shoreline of Infinity columns, there’ll be a new essay from me on mentorship in the Star Wars universe and God of War in the Galli Books anthology Speculative Masculinities.
So, in the words of Rival Schools, good things are coming our way. After this year, here’s hoping 2020 brings a lot more of them.