I’m not sure what to say about 2024. It was a year. It’s over now. It went by quickly but seemed endless at times. I flipped through a dozen photos of baby goats on our 2024 calendar. Many things were terrible but there were baby goats to count the days with as they passed.
It was a year of coordinated number book anniversaries: The Night Circus turned 13 on September 13th. The Starless Sea turned 5 on November 5th. I would have done something festive if I’d thought of what and had the energy or the time. Let’s pretend there were parties, somewhere, dressed in technicolor and dipped in gold.
(Also Adam & I had our 10th wedding anniversary and Vesper turned 6, she was not being helpful with all of the nicely-numbered anniversaries but it’s okay because she can’t do math.)
This year a bunny spent a great deal of time in our yard eating the clover. One day in the spring while we were sitting on the back porch the tiniest fawn I have ever seen wandered up and tucked itself into the tall weeds near the trees maybe fifteen feet away from us and stayed there near invisible all day for baby deer daycare, standing up occasionally to stretch its tiny legs. Now that the snow is back there are fox prints again, circling the house, silent unseen pacing in the cold.
This year brought the gorgeous Books Illustrated version of The Starless Sea, the Vintage Classics version of The Night Circus, FairyLoot‘s beautiful editions of both books and Folio Society‘s centennial edition of Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter which I wrote the introduction for.
(Next year has more pretty things in store, I will share them whenever I am able to.)
I had a slow writing year. I am a slow writer at the best of times and the last while has been decidedly not so best. I have bits and pieces and fragments and I don’t know how they fit together yet.
I spent more time figuring out what the new book isn’t but hopefully that will get me closer to figuring out what it is. I know the place, I know these people, I know the mood. I know who’s playing that piano down the hall and what’s skulking out in the shadows in the garden. I need to figure out the way to thread the story through it all.
I sometimes say I got to write The Night Circus in a bubble, because no one was waiting for it, and for The Starless Sea I had to try to create an imaginary bubble to write in. I think I need some imaginary bubble reconstruction for this one, a stronger space to seal myself away from everything so I can listen to the story better.
I had a slow reading year, too. Much of the to-read pile languished unread. I read bits of things and nonfiction on [redacted] topics and a fair amount of books but only fell in love with a few of them, slight volumes savored briefly in between research reading, a new adventure by a beloved author and a French classic from 1913.
Favorite books I read this year:
Linghun by Ai Jiang
The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed
The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) by Alain-Fournier
Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart by GennaRose Nethercott
Moonbound by Robin Sloan
The Melancholy of Untold History by Minsoo Kang
(Honorable mention to Jedediah Berry’s The Naming Song which I read last year but was published in September. I have not seen it on nearly enough best-of-2024 lists, it is wonderful.)
Favorite video games for 2024 (in two categories this year!)
Favorite video games I played in 2024 (appropriately, the year of the dragon):
Dragon’s Dogma 2 – I bounced off the first one fairly early but I loved everything about this, from the long perilous traveling around the map to the fact that my best armor didn’t involve pants.
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree – I wasn’t sure it would live up to the main game but it does and in some ways it’s even more glorious. (Except for the final boss which is hot nonsense.)
Dragon Age: The Veilguard – Dragon Age: Inquisition is the game of my heart so my expectations were high and this met them in a lot of ways. Emmrich is my new favorite BioWare romance. I wish the whole game was longer. I hope we don’t have to wait another 10 years for more.
Favorite video games I played with Adam this year (we play a lot of games together where we trade the controller back-and-forth or I just help with puzzles and yelp at jump scares):
We don’t play a ton of tabletop games but we’ve been playing a lot of Escape the Dark Castle this year with varying degrees of escape success but it’s always fun. It’s easy to learn, different every game, and delightfully creepy.
This year sounded like Fleet Foxes and Lofi Girl Halloween and Zelda on piano and Radiohead and Vitamin String Quartet. When trying to choose a single song that sounded like 2024 I kept going back to this one and this version of it in particular, from several solstices ago.
I will likely not be online terribly often in 2025, not that I am online that much anyway. (Currently I am most active on bluesky and tumblr and instagram, more or less in that order.) I am going to attempt to have a year that has fewer screens and more fountain pens and bunnies and clover, continuing to be a woodland hermit.
Around here we will be writing a book (mostly me) and taking naps in the pink sparkle unicorn house (mostly Vesper).
I hope your 2025 has some warmth and softness and magic in it.
