I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me.
Reflections on 2024 and some ideas for 2025
This year isn’t gonna kill me; that’s a reference to the fucking incredible song by The Mountain Goats, a song that has resonated with me often in my life when I’m going through tough times.
I’m not going through tough times right now particularly, but there is a certain malaise that sets in for me in late November as the weather starts heating up and the shops are replete with fake snow and false frost-tolerant trees. Seriously, Australia, do we have to do the Santa hats? It’s forty degrees!
To stop this feeling, I wanted to compile a list of the creative achievements I’ve made this year, because my word this year has been a big one.
What have I done?
I started my YouTube Channel!
Inspired by the works of channels like Folding Ideas, The Morbid Zoo, Munecat and numerous other lefty critiquey weirdos, I started making some videos and uploading them to YouTube. At the moment there are two video essays on there, one about Cyberpunk and Architecture and the other about men’s reading habits.
This is something I’ve wanted to do for years. I watch a lot of YouTube video essays and I quite enjoy the process of building an essay, so it’s very exciting to have finally done it! Subscribe here if you like. I’ve got a few more in the works and it would be great to see if I can build a bit of an audience.
I was invited to speak at Melbourne Design Week!
I don’t tend to talk about my day job a lot on here, mainly because I like to keep the discussion here casual and direct and to avoid the inevitable Linkedin-ification of language that always seems to happen when talking about work. However, in May I was invited to speak at Melbourne Design Week at a discussion on the interface of people in back-of-house spaces. It was a fun night, and incredibly kind of the organisers to invite me as both designer and author.
The Novelisation of Sunward Sky!
This is probably the biggest one in terms of sheer effort, and the product at the end is something I’m extremely proud of. Sunward Sky started as a podcast during lockdown and got over 180% funded on Kickstarter to release as a novel! I’m in the process of sending the special edition versions out but the book is officially available on February 15, 2025. You can add it to your TBR on Goodreads or you can preorder it on Amazon. It’ll be available elsewhere too, so keep your eyes out!
I got my first paid publishing credit!
My anti-AI crapsack world short story Life in the Dirt got published in Aurealis Magazine, and with that my ever-present imposter syndrome has been assuaged for at least a little while as I realise that a company was willing to part with its money to have my name and work in their magazine. I talked about the process of the story in a different post, but honestly, I am so excited to have been featured in Aurealis. It’s a real treat.
I started two new novels!
Well, started is a strong word. I have a mess of ideas in a notes app on my phone and three chapters of one novel, and a mental framework for another and some very vivid scenes that I’m extremely excited to write. One is the first explicitly post-apocalyptic work I’m going to write, and the other is a very personal story that will be less sci-fi than my other work. I’m not exactly sure which one I’m going to focus on first, but with any luck it’ll mean I can release a book a year until 2027 at least!
Speaking of:
What does 2025 have in store?
Here’s what I’m hoping to get done next year. Normally I make these lists and they change, but I achieve something pretty close to what I set out to do. So there’s a degree of flexibility associated with it. But as of right now, here’s the plan:
Write a(nother) book
As I said earlier, I have the beginnings of a couple of novels in the works, and I want to get at least one of them drafted in 2025. After finishing Sunward Sky a couple of months ago, I’m really starting to get the creative itch again and I can’t wait to get around it again next year. I’ve also realised that I don’t relish the process of writing short stories. I don’t read them particularly often, and I much prefer digging into a project that’s quite a bit longer, so I think for now my fiction will tend to the 70-100k word end of the scale.
Uplink
Between writing seasons one and two of Sunward Sky, I drafted a psychological cyberpunk horror story. It’s called Uplink and it is the reason I started writing stories in 2017. It’s been drafted four times and I have started and failed to write it about ten times between first coming up with the idea in 2011.
It’s now at a point where I’m querying agents and publishers and trying to get it picked up, but so far no luck. That’s the game though, and also… it’s a very, very bleak novel. I understand that it may not fit the list of many publishers. I’m going to continue to query it until midway through 2025, and if it isn’t picked up then I’ll run another Kickstarter to self-publish it. So keep an eye out for that!
One-a-month
One of the missing pieces in my current plan is that… I don’t really have a plan. I write a thing and upload it when I feel like it, and that’s about it. That’s fine and good but it’s much better if I could stick to at least some kind of schedule. I tried to write a 3500 word essay every week a few years back (when I was on Medium) but that didn’t work because I just burnt out really quickly, and I didn’t have time to work on the big projects that I wanted to. So I think I’ll try to release a thing every month. Either an essay on here, or a video, or a book or Kickstarter, every month. I can’t realistically commit to more than that while I’m still working full-time, so we’ll see how we go with that!
Get better at sharing stuff!
This is, in my opinion, one of my biggest weaknesses as a creative worker. This year was more difficult than usual, as twitter became more of a hellsite than it ever had been and finding a way to engage a new audience felt akin to chasing a flock of spooked starlings with a butterfly net. Mastodon, Bluesky, Substack Notes, Threads, and myriad other twitter clones appeared and disappeared from the zeitgeist and from my attention as people scrambled to find a replacement when one too many white supremacist memes started appearing on people’s timelines (more often than not from the Muskster himself, the cretin). But I can’t lay the blame for my own lack of spreading the word directly at the feet of twitter.
I write stuff that I think people will enjoy, but I’m garbage at actually telling people about it. I tend to push it out into the universe, where it languishes and then disappears. I want to make it a habit that when I release something, I share it on the platforms I’ve selected and I am actively promoting and advertising my work more often. Maybe I’ll have to get back on reddit or something, I dunno. If you’ve got any hot tips for self-promo, let me know!
Be in-person more
One of the ways I think I want to get involved with the writing community is to show up to more events. There are a heap of writing festivals in Victoria and I think, now that I’ve got a full-size book that I can sell, I can get a table and share and hopefully meet people there. That’ll be nice - means I don’t spend all my time on Discord (NB: I will still spend all my time on Discord).
Thank you
If you’re reading this, then presumably you subscribed because you thought what I have to say might be interesting or relevant to your life in some way. I’m coming up on a hundred subscribers to this little newsletter, and it’s nice to have a corner of the world where I get to ramble about stuff, and it seems like people actually read it. So thank you. I hope your 2024 has gone well, and I wish you all the best for the Christmas period, and for 2025. If you’re in the Northern hemisphere, put a Christmas hat on for me.
I’m not gonna do it, I’m sweaty just thinking about it.
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The rest of my work can be found at www.henryneilsen.com
