Apex Book Company recently ran a microfiction contest to celebrate Marie Vibbert's Multitude. And my story won! You can read it here.

Subscribe now

In the spirit of my 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 resolutions:

Resolution

I have a singular quest this year: Get a literary agent for me and my novel.

This is famously hard and largely out of my control, which makes for an exciting goal. My quests are often execution-based: Success has often been entirely in my control and just requires that I put in a lot of work. This one requires creativity to find out what really is within my control.

I put some effort into this in 2025. This year, I want to give it my all. That’s fun! It will require lots of luck, and I’ll forgive myself if I fail, but I plan to be relentless about this. This includes:

• Querying oodles of agents

• Attending conferences

• Applying for workshops

• Getting more stories published

• Whatever it takes!

If you happen to be a literary agent reading this, email me and make my life!

Other plans for the year

• Get fit with my wife.

• Keep releasing killer music with Peter Sanfilippo.

• Write better and better stories. A second novel is churning in my head.

You

I hope you have a year of adventure. I hope you end this year a happier, kinder, and stronger person than you are today. I hope you make wonderful memories. If we cross paths in the world, I hope you say hi.

Subscribe now

This was a mixed year! In the spirit of my 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 reflections:

Joys

This summer, I married the love of my life. I don’t know how I could be so lucky. We had a lovely wedding and a lovely honeymoon, but most of all, we’re having a lovely marriage. Is it just the same as living together before marriage? No, not exactly. I can’t put it into words, but it’s better. My wife is sleeping next to me and the sun is rising as I write this. What could be nicer than that?

Other joys this year:

• I wrote my best stories. It’s clear to me that I’m advancing as a writer.

• Peter Sanfilippo and I released not one but two albums. Like the above, I think we’re clearly advancing as producers.

• I played lots of Smash and got fifth at our annual Atlantic regional. People behind me in Nova Scotia are still not able to beat me, but I am now able to beat some of the people in front of me.

Sorrows

This was a more distracted and uncertain year for me (wedding aside!). I lacked the drive of previous years that I’ve come to identify with, and was more tired and ruminative than usual. I aim to fix this.

Resolutions

I had three resolutions this year: Become conversational at Spanish, work out ten times per month, and have twelve AI stories written and in submissions.

I failed all three. The wedding proved to be very disruptive, and in general, I was less on top of things this year. I made progress on all of them, but not even enough to bend the definition. This calls for a changed 2026!

It’s a Wrap

I hope the world did not beat you down this year, and I hope you got some wins. If life has been rocky for you, I hope it steadies, and if it’s been swell, I hope it stays swell. Happy New Year to you and yours!

For fans of David Lynch, ambient Aphex Twin, Kelly Lee Owens, and the Field. Listen while oceans rise and glaciers melt.

A Blue Arctic is my and Peter Sanfilippo’s third album, and it’s our best yet. I’m very happy with our growth as musicians. I think our tracks are more interesting, varied, and fun. They’re also more listenable. I think our ears have just gotten better at catching things! I’m much better now at not mixing kicks too loudly, and in general we’re much brighter (if anything, I mixed some hats too loudly!).

Writing with Peter is delightfully easy. It’s also very fun. Most of these tracks originated in a challenge to share bare-minimum ideas without holding back. We now have a huge trove to draw from.

• Song I’m most proud of: There Will Come Soft Rains, due to Peter’s inspired sampling

• Moment I’m most proud of: The arpeggios and toms building together in There Is No Land Any Longer.

• Mix I’m most proud of: The Glamour of Evil. I adore the kick.

I hope you enjoy the album. We put a lot of heart into it alongside our anxiety, hope, and melancholy.

Though Elias Canetti is best known for his book Crowds and Power, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his genre-spanning works—including a novel, plays, and memoirs—he considered his intended masterwork, The Book Against Death, “the only book that I was born to write”. He was never able to begin it. Instead, he accumulated notes for the unwritten book until he died in 1994. These notes were gathered and posthumously published as The Book Against Death in German in 2014, and a few months ago in English, translated by Peter Filkins.

As somebody having recently written a book about death, I ordered it immediately upon learning of it. The notes, organised chronologically and grouped by year, are aphorisms, fragments, quotations, stories of individual deaths, stories of cultural rituals around death, diary entries, and more. They are full of a vigorous hatred of death, and my own words cannot do justice to his fervour.

The notes become more cynical over time, more exhausted — his frustration at not having written his book is painful to read. The final years of his life are marked by how much world history events troubled him and how his hatred of death did not diminish.

I am left pitying that he seems to have never encountered transhumanist writing. Though he saw death as inevitable, and had concerns around genetic manipulation, I like to think that he would have found profound joy in knowing his hatred of death did not make him an orphan of European continental thought but rather a cousin in a family of technologists.

Canetti does not merely hate the death of old age, but death in all its forms (and it’s notable how little he writes of his own aging and his own anxiety at the end of his life). Above all is his hatred of war, mass death, and those who maintain their power through killing others.

While I've been reading the book, I've also been reading John Green's Everything Is Tuberculosis and have found the pairing quite powerful. I can't read Green’s book without crying ,and whenever the sorrow of that book overwhelms me, Canetti’s note from 1944 comes to mind: “Dear God, let them all live!”

The book benefits from Canetti’s literary depth. I quite enjoyed his literary references from central Europe (he lived in Zürich, Frankfurt, and Vienna). It also benefits from the fact that his long life bridged the old and new world of Europe. I was startled while reading his final notes. A little after he ruminates on Saddam Hussein he visits the cemetery where his tombstone shall be and reflects on the curiosity that James Joyce’s tombstone is very nearby. The startling thing is Canetti's brief aside that Joyce attended a reading of his in the 1930s and did not like Canetti.

Why read this book? For all of us who want to eliminate suffering, I think it is good to read the work of somebody who hated death, who comes from his own intellectual tradition, as an example of someone who refused the temptation to treat resignation as wisdom.

Most of all, to paraphrase Canetti, I also think that we become inured to death. This book can help to shake us out of this inurement. This is an unpleasant shaking, but it helps to remember that confronting death can be easier for us than it was for him — it is not impossible that in the decades to come we will defeat disease, achieve biological immortality, and find a way to put away the sword of mass death hanging over us. There is a little hope and much work to be done. I hope that readers of this book are invigorated to do that work, and I strongly recommend its reading.

I want to share a few of the notes I marked. These are not representative but are the notes that struck me most — which tended to err away from lengthier notes and his diary entries and erred toward his exhortations to himself and his thoughts on animals.

Highlights

1942

• Five years ago today my mother died. Since then my world has turned inside out. To me it is as if it happened just yesterday. Have I really lived five years, and she knows nothing of it? I want to undo each screw of her coffin's lid with my lips and haul her out. I know that she is dead. I know that she has rotted away. But I can never accept it as true. I want to bring her to life again. Where do I find parts of her? Mostly in my brothers and me. But that is not enough. I need to find every person whom she knew. I need to retrieve every word she ever said. I need to walk in her steps and smell the flowers she smelled, the great-grandchild of every blossom that she held up to her powerful nostrils. I need to piece back together the mirrors that once reflected her image. I want to know every syllable she could have possibly said in any language. Where is her shadow? Where is her fury? I will loan her my breath. She should walk on my own two legs.

1943

• The most audacious thing about life is that it hates death, and the religions that obliterate this hate are contemptible and desperate.

• And what is the original sin of the animals? Why do animals suffer death?

• O, the animals, beloved, savage, dying animals; flailing about, gobbled up, digested and consumed; digested and rotting in their own blood; fleeing, conjoined, lonely, spotted, hounded, shattered; uncreated, robbed by God, abandoned to an illusory life like foundlings!

1944

• Dear God, let them all live! Let all who are already dead return! Let us all joyfully see those whom we have never yet known!

1947

• If the entire ocean were poisoned, as well as all other bodies of water, and humans were to avoid any contact with water, as it would be deadly to do so, then, and only then, would we be able to fully grasp what it means to live in this world today.

• Adam strangles God; Eve looks on.

1951

• You are always asked what you mean when you berate death. They only want cheap hopes doled out by religions ad nauseam. But I know nothing. I have nothing to say about it. My character, my pride stems from the fact that I have never flattered death. Like anyone I have sometimes, very rarely, wished for it, but there is no one who has ever heard me offer a single word of praise for death, nor can anyone say that I have bowed to it, or that I have ever accepted or validated it. It seems to me as useless and wicked as ever, the fundamental curse at the heart of existence, the unresolved and incomprehensible, the knot in which everything has always been tied up and captured, and which no one has ever dared slice through.

• We would have to conceive of a world in which murder never existed. In such a world what would all other crimes look like?

1954

• How clever was the Buddha's father! And how shameful is the legend of the Buddha's first encounter with aging, illness, and death! Would it all have been different if his father had introduced him to someone who was aging, ill, and dying when he was a boy, such as playmates or pets, such as dancers, women, and musicians?

1955

• Tell stories, tell stories, until no one else dies. A thousand and one nights, a million and one nights.

1956

• Each year should be one day longer than the previous: a new day on which nothing has ever happened before, a day on which no one has died.

1962

• [..] I am too old. I hate hardly anything. I have reached the point where one likes everything simply because it is there. I am beginning to grasp for the first time that there are philosophers who say that all that exists is good. It's true, the disciples of death still fill me with disgust. Yet I have found no solution. I am consumed with the same doubt as always. I know that death is horrible. What I do not know is what can replace it.

1964

• A society in which people suddenly disappear, but no one knows that they are dead, as there is no death, there is not even a word for it, which pleases them.

1967

• The greatest struggle in life is to not become inured to death.

• And what if God had withdrawn from Creation out of shame for having created death?

1977

• "You go to sleep," he says to the child, "but you don't wake up again." "But I always wake up!" the child says joyfully.

1978

• The last book that he reads: unimaginable.

• There is no such thing as a dignified death. For others there are only deaths that can be forgotten. These, too, are undignified.

• "How do the immortals measure time?" written in a notebook, January 1932

• "The first blessings of extended life we will most likely extend to animals. We will gaze at ancient mice and guinea pigs like we do petrified snails today." written in a notebook, June 1932

1980

• For me it is not about abolishing it, which is not possible. It's about condemning it.

• The greatest secret of any person is the date he will die. It is no less so just because I've written something about it.

• That animals eat each other is not horrendous, for what do they know of death! Rather it's that humans, who know what death is, continue to kill, that is what is horrendous.

• [...] But we would not detest anyone if we knew they would soon die. [...]

1982

• Any opposition to death can appear to be only about your own death. That would be too little. That would be nothing at all. How can I make it obvious enough and beyond any doubt that what I am really opposed to is death, and less so the brvity of life, as opposed to the consequence of death--which poisons every thought. Death is our cancer, it infects everything, it cuts into every life, it is everywhere and always possible. You reckon with it, even when you least expect to. What's astonishing is that we live as if we had nothing to do with death. This duality: that we encounter it everywhere and nevertheless behave as if we can avoid it, that everyone recognizes its worthiness and yet some deny it (since we build houses, make plans, give assurances)--this duality is a kind of fundamental falseness at the heart of existence.

1983

• A race between medicine and nuclear physics. Neither has reached the finish line.

1985

• There, each is haunted by the ghosts of animals they have eaten, until he breaks down and confesses.

1988

• No death ever ends.

1990

• The "childish" thing about you is that seventy-eight years after the death of your father, when you were seven, you still have not accepted it. This childishness, precisely this kind of childishness, is what the world really needs.

• In sparing animals, a person grows younger. It's the hunt that makes him old.

• A machine gun capable of firing as many shots as there are people who are still alive.

1991

• All who missed out on life. All who were never loved. All who could not love. All who could not watch over a child. All who never traveled to other countries. All who never knew the many different kinds of animals. All who never heard a foreign language. All who were never astonished by faith. All who did not wrestle with death. All who were not overcome by the need to know. All who were not allowed to forget how much they knew. All who never swayed. All who never said no. All whose stomach never made them feel ashamed. All who did not dream of the end of murder. All who let their memories be stolen. All who never succumbed to their pride. All not ashamed of the honors conferred. All who did not shrink away, who could not disappear. All who could not lie unless it was for a good cause. All who did not tremble before the lightning bolt of truth. All who did not hunger for dead gods. All who were not comfortable with those whose talk they could not understand a word of. All who did not free any slaves. All who did not drown in compassion, who were ashamed that they had never killed anyone. All who did not allow themselves to be located out of gratitude. All who refused to vacate the Earth. All who could never forget what an enemy is. All who could never be freed from their honest ways. All who never gave too little. All who never let themselves be deceived, and all who let themselves forget how badly they were deceived. All who were not beheaded by their own hubris, all who did not smile knowingly. All who did not laugh magnanimously. All the lives missed out on.

1994

• It is time for me to sort matters out again within myself. Without writing I come undone. I sense how my life dissolves into dead, dull speculation when I no longer write down what is on my mind. I will try to change that.

Subscribe now

In the spirit of my 2022, 2023, and 2024 resolutions:

Resolutions

This last year, I had a singular goal: Finish my novel. This year I have more goals, but cumulatively they're much easier. They have to be, because I'm getting married this summer!

1. Become conversational in Spanish

My fiancée's family speaks Spanish, and I want to be able to talk to them easily. I've worked on this before and have a smattering, but I really want to push on this before we're married! Some things I'm going to do:

• Return to my dear friend, Duolingo.

• Read books I'm familiar with, in Spanish (Harry Potter, Borges's stories).

• Choose to talk in Spanish over English whenever reasonably possible.

• Put Spanish subtitles on movies.

• More?

2. Work out regularly

I did this in 2023 and it was very good for me. Then, I had a goal of hitting 135 pounds. This time, my goal is merely to work out ten times a month (3 times a week with some monthly leniency).

3. Write AI stories

I wouldn't be surprised if we hit transformative AI (TAI) in a year and I wouldn't be surprised if we hit it in 40 years. This means (that I’m a coward of a forecaster) that it would be sensible for me to prepare for different futures. Outside of work, I'm currently basically living as though I have long timelines: I wrote a novel, am seeking an agent, and my investments are conventional. Niel Bowerman gave me the idea that one needs to also balance the possibility that TAI is coming within the next few years.

All of which is to say: I think that if TAI comes that soon, writing short speculative fiction on AI in the meantime can be relatively impactful, by helping us think through just how weird the future could be. There are some huge and neglected questions, including:

• What the world would be like if we think AI agents have a kind of sentience and moral worth.

• What the world would be like if we aren't sure if AI agents have sentience and moral worth!

• What the world would be like with a million AI agents for every human.

• What the world would be like with technological progress many times faster than our current rate.

• How to deal with the nature of humanity changing rapidly.

I think there's a space for speculative fiction to help here, but novels take a very long time to write and to publish. Thus: my creative project this year is to have 12 weird short stories about AI written and submitted to publishers this year. "Have" instead of "write" because two are already written.

Other plans for the year

• Marry the love of my life.

• Keep releasing music with Peter Sanfilippo (album soon!)

• Don't get bird flu!

You

I hope that you have some resolutions that are achievable and fun. I hope you dream big and surprise yourself this year. I hope you stay sane in this crazy world. And lastly, if you see me in person, I hope you say hi!

Conor

Subscribe now

In the spirit of my 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 reflections:

Joys

This year was tough, but I still feel profoundly lucky. I spent the year with lovely people, traveling, working on interesting projects, having an impact through my work. What more could I want?

Some highlights of the year:

• I proposed to my wonderful girlfriend, and she became my wonderful fiancée.

• I wrote a book about death. This was actually some comfort to me considering the sorrows of the year.

• I made music with my friend, Peter Sanfilippo. We finished an album and, wouldn't you know it, we released a song a week ago!

• I saw the most tremendous thing I’ve ever seen: the April total eclipse!

• I became the manager of the 80,000 Hours job board ('product engineer', to be precise). I feel blessed with luck, heady with responsibility, and challenged every day. Big shout-outs are due to Kushal Kansagra, for setting me up to succeed, and whose accomplishments I hope to live up to.

• I played much more Melee, thanks to weekly tournaments at Gus’s Pub. I was ranked 5th in Nova Scotia for the first half of the year, and will probably be ranked 6th for the second half. These are some of the friendliest people around, a hidden gem of community.

• I read some amazing books. The Peregrine is my book of the year, and The Fifth Head of Cerberus is my novel of the year. Shout-outs are due to my friends who put up with my frequent Peregrine Paragraph Pauses one summer day.

• We got a cat. My uncle passed away, leaving behind his beautiful cat. My fiancee and I brought him back to Halifax. He is the sweetest animal in the world. Meet George!

  

Sorrows

This was a year of death. My aunt and uncle passed away, as did my family's two dogs. I've been thinking about death a lot over the last few years, but this year made it visceral. I wish they all could have lived forever.

It was also an oddly bad year for my health (though, to be fair, I'm usually blessed with oddly good health). I was sick throughout March, and ever since then, I feel like my mind has worked just a little bit worse, especially my already-poor memory.

Resolutions

I accomplished my resolution for 2024!: I finished editing my science fiction novel and am ready to submit it to agents!

At one point, all of the above synced up in a very strange way: I learned about my uncle’s death and his cat’s need for a new owner in the middle of writing a vignette for the novel about the death of a cat. Isn't that odd?

I'm very happy that this continues my streak of achieving my major resolution every year.

As to my minor resolutions:

• I read some great books, but I didn’t read as much as I wanted.

• I managed to play zero online chess with strangers — I batted away temptation even in the depths of sickness!

Conclusion

Happy New Year to everyone! I hope your year had joys and happy surprises. I hope you had peace and excitement and laughter and awe. I hope you can look back and say this year was good for you.

Conor

Subscribe now

I've finished my novel.

At the beginning of the year, it was four nested and connected stories about death. The largest was 51,000 words long. Now the novel is just this largest story, given much more space to breathe. Counting an appendix, it's 137,000 words, longer than The Return of the King but shorter than The Two Towers. Bits of the other three stories found their way in. My estimate is that alongside major editing, I wrote 70k or so new words this year. A better writer would not have taken such a circuitous route -- but now I'm a better writer.

I have never put in as much effort into a project as I have into this. It's been in my head for five years. For the last two years, writing and editing it have been my constant focus -- I'd shower and get ideas, I'd wash dishes and get ideas, I'd fall asleep working on mnemonics for ideas to recall in the morning, I’d write and edit near-daily. I researched ecosystems, rituals, myths, unconventional weapons, and an unreasonable amount of etymology. I've poured my heart into it, and it's going to be weird next year to not have the characters and images crowding my mind.

My New Year’s resolution was to submit it by the end of the year -- but the agent I intend to submit it to first (unless you, dear reader, are a literary agent!) doesn't have their window open until later in January. So, with my email to them drafted, I count the year as complete. I've achieved my goal for 2024!

Thanks are owed to many friends who’ve reviewed sections. Incredible thanks go out to my wonderful fiancée, who's put up with my obsession over the last two years and reviewed the entire novel in November. She highlighted some big issues with it around clarity, dropped threads, and the protagonist's competence. I owe her forever.

I worked furiously in December to fix these issues, using vacation time I've saved up this year at work. Now I have a story that I'm happy to submit. I'm proud of myself for deciding that though there were big issues, they could have simple solutions (sometimes clarity just needs a sentence!).

I'll have another post on 2024 in the coming days. For now, I'm so happy, and I can't wait to see what comes of it next year!

Subscribe now

My goal for this year has been to get the novel I'm writing to be good enough to submit to agents at the end of the year. My plan has been:

• January - August: Edit

• September: Partner reads and critiques

• October - November: Apply new edits based on critiques

• December: Submit to agents

And I'm very happy to announce that the first rewrite is done! I've cut about 50k words and written about 45k -- so the novel is slightly shorter than it was at the beginning of the year, 116k words (the same length as Twilight, I'm told). Fortunately, it is also much better than it was at the beginning of the year, when it was little more than a skeleton. Now there's much more of a body to it. Maybe even signs of life! I gave the first version a 2/10 upon reread. I'd give this version a 7/10!

I'm very excited, because what remains is relatively straightforward. The lingering issues with it are clear to me, as are the solutions, though it'll still be lots of work in the fall — though even more work if my partner's critiques don’t line up with mine. Regardless, I'm also excited to have September to think about other things (music!).

Big thank-yous to everybody who's encouraged me this year, or pommed with me, or critiqued sections. Also thank-yous to everybody who's offered to be test-readers, you'll be getting the first chapter soon!

Subscribe now

It’s been three months since my last novel update so it’s time for another!

I spent January planning the edit, and from February to now I’ve been steadily editing it. My best guess is that I'm 2/3rds of the way through.

My goal for the next two months is to finish this round of edits, then have my partner review it in September. That way I'll have time to apply her edits and submit it to agents by the end of the year. This will require me going faster this summer compared to before, so I might need to say no to things until I get through it.

The novel has become more focused and more rich, and thankfully not less weird (visions get beamed into a detective's head and messages are hidden in an ancient travel guide!). I am trying hard to make it beautiful. It is difficult for me to hold all its threads in my head and I wish I could just add more RAM to my brain. It’s looking like it will be about 100,000 words long. Ideally by the end of it the reader will want to storm the heavens. I have the feeling that I should be discussing it more publicly, but I am not sure how.

I hope your own adventures are going well!

Subscribe now

I don't have much to report, but editing the novel goes pretty well!

I'm not quite as far as I'd like to be. I'm done 4 out of 15 chapters, with 23k words down. For reference, the original length of this section was ~15k words. I expect the rest of it to similarly bulk up -- the first draft was just really skeletal!

I find editing much harder than writing a first draft. It's kind of easy to just write words when you have an outline, because you can leave continuity and rhythm and annoying bits and apostrophes and quality to later. Unfortunately, now it's later. But it's still fun and I still think it's en route to being rad.

The first draft was an increasingly laggy google doc, this draft is in Scrivener. I quite like it for organising things, and I’m slowly figuring out how to make the most use out of it.

I hope your own projects for the year are going well!

Subscribe now

I've been weighing a big decision with my novel over the last few months and I have now decided.

At the moment, the novel is four connected stories. I think there's something rich about having four very different stories with their own meditations on death. However, that's pretty complicated, and probably easy to fail to pull off. What's worse, one story, which we can call "Story A", dominates the others:

• When people ask for my pitch for the book, I give the pitch for Story A.

• Story A's wordcount is the same as the other three combined.

• I've been thinking about Story A for four years, and the others for a year or two.

• I've jotted more notes for Story A than for the other three combined (almost double!).

So my problem has been: Should I kill my darlings and just make Story A rich and full and as good as can be? I've talked to my wonderful partner1 about it, talked to writer friends, delayed editing, wrote two practice query letters to see which I preferred, and above all, agonized over how to still incorporate the other stories into Story A in a smaller way.

You can probably guess where this is headed -- I've made my decision. Story A is now the entirety of the story!

I intend to throw myself at making it the best it can be, still with plenty of internal stories (humans like telling stories!). I reserve the right to find that this doesn't work, it does need the grandiosity of nesting -- but not until I try to make it so strong it doesn't. It's a little terrifying, because it's the most dramatic cutting I've ever done. 60,000 words are off to purgatory, and I’m off to really, truly start editing!

Subscribe now

Last year I wrote the rough draft of a novel. This year I’m editing it to make it good! I’m documenting the process here.

Part One: The Reread

Last week I started the editing journey. Specifically, I reread my rough draft!

It was two months since I'd finished it. While I was mostly able to not peek at it, I was not able to stop thinking about it. On average, I made a note a day.

I printed it all out (gratitude to the trees) and tried to, as closely as possible, read it the way I would any other novel. Though look at this beast! It’s 400 pages at 1.5 line spacing, 11 point font, Times New Roman.

So how’d it go? Well, even though my imagination tried to fill it in, I was still struck by how little of my imagination had gotten onto the page! It lacked drive. It lacked breath. It lacked setting. I've been joking with people that it's 3/10, but I think it needs a downgrade to 2/10!

But I still know I can get it to 10/10. I’m not discouraged, though I think it’s going to be a busy year of crafting. The vision in my head is bursting with life and colour and I know I can get it onto the page. There were glimmers of goodness, single pages -- including the first page! If I can make every page beautiful, I'll succeed.

In preparation I'm currently reading some books on editing. I'll update more soon!

Subscribe now

In the spirit of my 2022 and 2023 resolutions:

Every year I like taking on a few big plans for the year. These work pretty well and I accomplish at least one big thing each year (became a programmer, wrote my novella, wrote 100 stories, wrote my novel draft). This year, I have a singular goal:

Finish my novel!!

In 2023 I wrote the first draft. I am going to spend 2024 editing it. By the end of the year, I want it to be finished and excellent. "1. Skeletal first draft; 2. Lots of revisions" is how I wrote a novella two years ago, and it went great, so I have faith that this will work!

Once it's the best it can be, I’ll start submitting it to publishers.

To do this successfully, I have some sub-goals.

i. Read a lot

I think to be a great writer, you need to read excessively -- but I only read a few novels in 2023! I should have done this before writing the first draft, but better late than never. I'm going to make the time for reading, which will require putting up barriers to social media, and most importantly:

ii. No online chess

Chess is a time-suck, frustrating when I lose, and is dangerously easy to start playing. I've cut back on how much I play, but I know I need to cut it out entirely if I want reading to become my "default" action in leisure. 

There are some exceptions: I'll play games with friends if they request it, and if I'm somewhere with a chess board, it's fine for me to sit and play. That's fun and social! But no mindless online chess.

Other Plans For The Year

• I'm going to be a bit more sincere about important things. A friend told me a few months ago that she has trouble parsing when I'm joking or serious. I think this is not ideal! I do believe some things sincerely and strongly, and it's probably bad if that gets muddied in the service of making friends laugh (usually a very important venture). No more! 

• I’ll be posting fewer stories here. I’ll make up for it a little by doing reviews of the books I read! And if you want more stories besides the ones here, I have a collection of links on my old blog.

• I’m going to release more music with Peter Sanfilippo. We have a lot of fun making music, and I’m so stoked about how we’re levelling up as musicians. 

You

I hope that you have resolutions that excite you, that you find the way to make them happen, and that you have a year of happy surprises. If you have resolutions, let me know about them, and if you bump into me this year, tell me how they’re going!

Subscribe now

In the spirit of my 2020, 2021, and 2022 reflections:

Joys

I feel profoundly lucky for the year I've had.

I have the most supporting and loving girlfriend. A job I love. A year spent meeting the most wonderful people. A year of making weird music with my best friend. A novel draft done. So much lovely feedback from readers of my short stories. As always, readers enjoying my stories makes me unreasonably happy, so thank you all!

Some highlights of the year:

• Peter Sanfilippo and I released an album and a single.

• I took on more and more responsibilities at my work, running our job board.

• My girlfriend and I had lots of fun adventures across Nova Scotia.

• I met so many talented, driven, inspiring people through EA, and I became friends with so many of them! I eternally wish to be able to teleport to see them.

• My dad visited us in Nova Scotia and we got to show him all around Halifax.

• I became much less nervous on planes. At the beginning of the year I had to resist panic attacks, by now I just have some nerves on take-off.

• Oppenheimer instantly became one of my favourite movies.

• Hacker News blew up one of my stories and had some very interesting feedback. I note, somewhat bemused, that it is possible for narrators to misperceive themselves and the world!

Sorrows

Simultaneously, I’m still pretty anxious about things, especially loss. I see my girlfriend make her house beautiful and I fear the fire that would destroy it. I’m surrounded by friends at a conference and imagine some social calamity to make it all vanish. I see the beauty of Halifax and I can see the explosion that would reduce it to ashes. With this last one at least, working indirectly on existential risk via my work has been quite helpful.

Resolutions

I had two resolutions for 2023 and I achieved one of them.

Novel

I wrote the first draft of my novel1! I finished it in October and “hid it in a drawer”. As I said in the announcement post, it’s 121,000 words, it isn’t yet good, next year I will make it very good. I’m going to read it with fresh eyes in January, but until then I can't stop thinking about it.

I can't stop getting ideas for it! Images won't leave me alone! I drift off and see red-pink fungus spread across steppes, a sky city on fire leaking nuclear waste, clogs bouncing across boardwalks in an autumn flood.

But this is a pleasant thing to be plagued by. I’m incredibly excited to make it the best story it can be next year.

Weight

I wanted to gain 10 lean pounds and hit 135 pounds. I failed. I hit 133.

Part of the problem is that I stopped going to the gym in November. My schedule changed, the world got dark again, and I lost it. That’s my bad. I plan on getting back into it in the new year, because I’m enjoying the benefits of being stronger.

2024

I’ll post my 2024 plans next week. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everybody! I hope you had a lovely 2023 with as many joys and as few sorrows as possible.

Subscribe now

• Year One

• Year Two

• Year Three

• Year Four

//

In a corner of the empty ninth village, you find an infinitely long tunnel. You can hear voices. To complete your journey you must crawl.

//

This is the antithesis of your home planet, where there is no darkness, not even a word for it, where all surfaces illuminate each other.

//

They are programmed to self-destruct when their true name is invoked.

//

The people in the tunnels believe the apocalypse is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.

//

They have a way to trigger memories of past lives, but participants instantly become solemn and joyless. They suggest doing it will complete your exploration.

//

Are there still birds outside the tunnels?

Are there still vampires?

//

On your home planet when you were young you crashed on an island with your schoolmates. When you made a rescue signal they put it out. “Accept the world as it is.” 

//

In their religion the apocalypse is synonymous with the extinguishing of the sun, nothing more and nothing less.

//

To enter the deep tunnels, you must take a lover from among them. Your new lover says one can fall deeper and deeper in love every day. When you return with tea, she is gone. 

//

You can't remember any of your dreams. But you must be doing terrible things in them and deliberately forgetting. Why else would you feel so guilty when you wake up?

//

An emperor’s spiders.

//

They say you don’t look like you’re from the tunnels but you say you look just like them. They laugh and say you’ve confirmed it.

//

The dust has consciousness. The tremor in a voice has consciousness. The fall of a hammer has consciousness.

//

This mask will protect you from memetic contagion. It isn’t perfect. If you see others taking theirs off, run and hide. Beliefs change faster than cells and most are malignant.

//

On their computers are digital cults that believe there is a hidden way to ascend to the physical plane.

//

They can look at a location and tell you what will happen there. The most powerful men in the world pay them to search for their deaths.

//

Sleepers always left undisturbed in case they dream the waker.

//

They believe the world is perfect. The purpose of life is to participate more completely in its perfection.

//

Less than dust.

//

It was such a good dream. You’ll write it down. On the page it looks different. Meaningless. You try again. Even worse. You suspect it wasn’t a good dream anyway.

Subscribe now

• Year One

• Year Two

• Year Three

• Year Four

//

The people at the edge of the world aren’t any different from you and me. They do not know what happens when they die. They do not know why they believe what they believe. They believe things used to be better.

//

It was once a city. There isn’t yet a word for what it is now.

//

The people of the first village say because their houses are entirely made of mirrors, they are never lonely. You ask them how that can make up for intimacy, companionship, otherness. They say you sound like their tenth reflection, who bothers all the others.

//

The people of the second village have music playing in their homes without cease. They believe as a matter of fact that if it were to be turned off, they would go deaf. 

//

Everybody says the river will punish you. Halfway through its icy waters an undercurrent grabs you. You are dragged down, bashed against impossibly shaped rocks. When you escape all the stars are different and the love notes you keep by your heart are destroyed.

//

Everybody in the third village has the same nightmare, night after night. It’s too unpleasant to discuss. But still, when people move into the village and don’t share the nightmare, they are shunned.

// 

Every night the mayor of the fourth village lucid dreams to relive his day. He fixes his mistakes. He’s gentler to the weak. He’s wittier at parties. When he wakes up he forgets the day and remembers the dream instead. He is the happiest man in the world.

//

The people of the fifth village believe that because all things have beginnings and endings, all things have desires.

//

On the mountain passes between the villages, above the haze, you can make out your home star in the south sky, its light turned blue by the dyson sphere imprisoning it. You do not know if you will ever fly around it again. 

//

The people of the sixth village think the apocalypse will come in bits and pieces. Your neighbour’s bees will leave but yours won’t. The sun will still rise but it won’t always be on. The rivers will start turning red but it will only be a soft, pastel, summer pink.

//

The people of the seventh village think the sun is very fragile, a sin or a mistake will put it out. When this doesn’t happen, it is a sign of the sun’s infinite mercy.

//

When you lie in the flowers of the eighth village you forget important things. What you live for. What you promised. What you must become.

There are others in the flowers much further along than you. They have forgotten to warn you you’ll soon forget how to stand.

Subscribe now

• Year One

• Year Two

• Year Three

• Year Four

//

You have learned all you can from the birds. You must cross the land to the red villages.

//

The cave-dark night over the echoless prairie.

//

Monsters roaming the barren earth, the last treasure and the last princess lost long ago.

//

It isn’t clear how many people inhabit the steppe. Every few days you stumble upon another home, hidden in the earth. When you speak of other homes that have sheltered you, they do not believe you. You stop telling them.

//

“The sun has never complained.”

//

Wives that wait for the remaining islands of the ozone layer to float overhead before they peek out of their covered wagons.

//

The old songs they like refer to physically impossible beings.

//

He receives the sash of a master storyteller when he has a tale for every star in the sky.

//

Lightning in any direction.

//

A hammer hanging above the door, azure bloodstain uncleaned.

//

You think there is a mountain in the distance but then it stretches and starts to run, faster than should be possible. You make sure not to look at its eyes.

//

Stars that know every name they have been given but do not care.

//

Everything about the culture of the steppe indicates historical predation by something more cruel. The annual shuffling of children. The renamings. The preference for fog and nocturnality. Their old weapons are unsuited to any creature that currently walks this planet.

//

On your planet how much land do humans still have?

//

The sun stops setting. Everything is tinted lavender. You can keep walking and reach the day, or you can stay here for a while and watch everybody fleeing the night.

//

A fire on the horizon. Then another.

//

The flowers move quickly when they think no one is watching and surrender to the wind when they notice your gaze. 

//

You can’t recall if your lover’s birthmark is below her left eye or her right. This is a strange thing to forget. You do not tell the people of the flower tribe, who kill infants with birthmarks, believing them to already be poisoned. 

//

A saying you don’t understand: “When the wasp lands upon the orchid it understands humans and machines.”

//

You keep walking. You can feel something watching you again. You pretend you don’t know it wants you to leave.

//

Wild horses in the distance. Mundane beauty. You pretend they are not tearing at the flesh of a man nor stomping him to death.

//

They believe there are thousands of levels of hell and this is one of the early ones.

//

Little machines wandering through the dusty fields, looking for humans to please.

//

The heavy dark air that hunts skin.

//

A lake shaped incorrectly at the end of the steppe. You drink its water but immediately feel a fool, having forgotten the warnings of all of your hosts over the plains. When you wake up, your shadow is gone. 

Subscribe now

• Year One

• Year Two

• Year Three

• Year Four

//

Message from dispatch. Request photograph of damaged ship. Pick-up en route. If they get lucky with the winds between the stars, you’ll be home in five years. Until then, proceed with exploration.

//

Please don’t uplift our predators. Please don’t uplift our prey.

//

The birds are sure they once ruled this planet. They don’t understand how they lost it but know there was a betrayal.

//

“The moon was born inside the ocean. It wants to return but it can’t. It is circling the earth looking for a way, looking for a sign.”

//

They don't believe in anything they don't want to. They don't believe this causes them problems.

//

The octopus queen is one of the only ones not confused by you. Birds rule the sky. Machines rule the land. She rules the sea. And in her wisdom it is easy for her to infer that humans rule the stars.

//

They believe that personality is explained by past lives. He must have been an owl, he’s so wise. He must have been a machine, he’s so shy. He must have been a human, he’s so proud.

//

All creatures have beliefs about what hides inside the moon.

//

The butterflies have many servants of many species.

//

The king of the birds and the king of the butterflies meet every year in the cave where both feel strong.

//

The people who live inside the clouds do not believe in anything outside their clouds. No birds, no land-people, no stars. They are all illusions caused by fatigue or hunger.

//

The birds have a machine for killing crabs humanely instead of dropping them from the sky.

//

With the bending of time, your lover will be older than you when you return. You put this out of your mind. You take a photo of the strange-shaped buildings you can make out in the water.

//

Dozens of bee poems about what a good death entails.

//

The birds get the wrong ideas from the films you show them. They think humans have lives full of drama. They think humans start unhappy and become happy. They think humans start weak and become strong.

//

The birds have no word for suffering. When you explain the concept to them, they pretend to understand it but they can't. "All we've ever wanted is to fly and all we ever do is fly."

//

Like most seed planets, they have no nuclear weapons. Per protocol you are not allowed to mention them. You are allowed to show them a map of your own planet but you must say all the circles are from meteors.

//

The birds think that heaven is infinitely tall, that one can dive for a thousand years.

//

The birds show you their domesticated wolves. They are something far from dogs.

//

“Do you know if there are still machines on the other continents?”

//

“Do you know if there are still birds on the other continents?”

Subscribe now

In a distant world some species has managed to build one and it has found a way to surpass the speed of light. Isn’t it obvious? Why else would stars be disappearing every year?

I do not allow it to affect my psychology. There will come a day when it finds our star and swallows us. But I was already to die forgotten in an old-age home soon enough. What matter if I am devoured by such a beast, the same way my ancestors were devoured by bears, wolves, tigers? Every predator encounters one greater.

There are people in government and laboratory, hurrying to build our own, in hopes that it can protect us. I have been asked to contribute my expertise to the mission, but I do not care to. If they succeed, in our moment of triumph our creation will doubtless devour us as well. 

I much prefer my daily walks. Just last night I set out along the river. When I found an acceptable bench, I sat and looked up. I had to laugh. Ursa Major had disappeared. Is it not as I said? Every predator encounters one greater.

The above story is based on a prompt by Gavin Leech (CC license).

This ends my streak of weird stories. I hope you enjoyed them! The remainder for the year will be romances.

Subscribe now