Happy New Year everyone!

I haven’t posted much lately, as I have been relaxing over the holiday. So here now is a brief end-of-year wrap up and a few new goals for 2024.

First, if you’ve been with me for a while, you may remember this post about collecting rejections. I set a goal to receive 25 rejections in the year of 2023. I humbly report that I crushed this goal by attaining 31 rejections (maybe 32 if I miscounted.)

To balance that, I had a piece accepted by Arts & Letters, which will be coming out soon, and I also had a short humor piece accepted by the Haven, a humor site on Medium. Check it out here:

View at Medium.com

I think signing with my agent, Will Roberts, also counts as an acceptance. So I’m looking at roughly one-tenth as many acceptances as rejections. I’d say that’s typical—it’s a ratio I can live with.

I read 44 books this year, and I’m pleased with that. I had hoped to read more, maybe more like 60, but I’m happy to know that I kept up any kind of reading habit at all. I also know that there are reasons why my count wasn’t higher, and anyway, 44 books is fine.

I also kept a reading and writing journal for the entire year of 2023. I feel like I read and write more when I document it, and it’s fun for me to return to old records once in a while. It’s a great way to keep perspective about where I’ve been in my journey as a writer. Sometimes, too, I get so caught up in plans for the future, I forget that the life I’m living now is something I dreamed about six years ago.

There are things I want to accomplish in the future: sell a book, buy a huge rainbow Chevy truck. But the life I’m already living is great: taking classes in an MFA, teaching creative writing, working with an agent. Not to mention I have a beautiful, supportive, and extremely talented partner, Jamie Walters.

But as far as the career stuff goes, it’s very easy to forget how bad you wanted something after you get it. The journals help me remember, no, I did want this, I’m doing something special now, I’m living the writing life, and I’m improving.

That brings me to my goals for next year. Read fifty books. Get rejected fifty times. Fifty blog posts. (I was going to shoot for 52 posts, one every Tuesday… but I like this 50-50-50 thing!)

And at last, a special goal: no buying books in 2024 unless I read every book in my home library.

This goal—from here on, I call it a challenge—has two aims. One, I need to spend less money, and I spend a lot of money trawling used book stores for sweet copies. Two, we all know that reading books and buying books are two different hobbies.

Just for one year, I will pause my book-buying hobby and instead focus on reading the books I’m saddled with. The ones I don’t like, I’ll stick in one of the little free libraries around Richmond. I guess there’s a third aim, then: to declutter my bookshelves of anything I don’t enjoy and therefore make space for the new titles I’ll buy in 2025.