annual NYE post

goodbye 2023

2023 was mostly quiet when it wasn’t loud. For the latter half of the year our house was under construction and being painted so it was busy and hectic and now that it’s cold everything has calmed and quieted again.

This year brought Night Circus tea from Old Growth Alchemy and announcements of new editions of books and it still amazes me that these stories get to be contained in such beautiful packages and interpreted in such magical ways.

I wrote a lot this year. I wrote backstories and sidestories. I wrote an introduction to something that has not yet been announced and I dug deeper into this book that is not a book yet. I don’t know how much of what I’ve written this year will end up in whatever this book turns out to be but I’ve excavated more of it, I’m more familiar with this place and these people now and next year will be about getting to know it all better and hopefully figuring out more of its secrets. 

I realized earlier this year that each book I’ve written ends up having both a thematic piece of music (that I tend to listen to over and over and over while writing) and a motto that I keep, each on a silver ring.

The Night Circus theme is Delirium’s Aria and its motto is Esse Quam Videri.

The Starless Sea theme is borrowed from Dragon Age Inquisition and its silver-engraved motto is Know Thyself.

This year I found the piece of music that is the new book theme, and I am currently wearing a silver ring engraved with the phrase that has become its motto on my right hand. The book itself is still a mess of unfinished threads in need of weaving but it is beginning to find itself, out there in the dark.

I got back into writing with fountain pens this year which was entirely the fault of my friends Mallory O’Meara and Lauren Panepinto and their InkWitches stream on twitch. I’d had a few long-neglected pens and now I have… more and a rather obscene amount of ink in a rainbow of colors. I’ve been slowly filling notebooks with multicolored bits and pieces of the new book.

Current pens in heavy rotation are my Opus 88 Jazz, Nahvalur Horizon and Benu Talisman (all broad nibs) and I always have a couple of TWSBI Ecos kicking around. Some current favorite inks include Taccia Utamaro-Umemurasaki, Wearingeul Persephone and oh so many inks from The Birmingham Pen Company, particularly Eroded Bronze and Chrysanthemum. And for the holidays Adam gave me this gorgeous Edison Dragoness pen. 

The Books Illustrated edition of The Starless Sea will be arriving next year (you can keep up with its progress by signing up for their newsletter). It has been an absolute joy watching Anne Yvonne Gilbert‘s illustrations as they’ve evolved over the past few months. They are all gorgeous and surprising but here, for New Year’s Eve have this one, because somewhere in this liminal space between years it is snowing, and somewhere within that snow there is an inn and its lanterns are lit. 

I am no longer on twitter, I hadn’t been there much at all of late but earlier this year I deleted all my posts and closed up shop there after 15 years. I am of course still on instagram, I am slowly getting used to bluesky and I’m forever using tumblr as a mood board. 

Favorite Books 2023

The Sundial – Shirley Jackson
The King of Elfand’s Daughter – Lord Dunsany
The Keep – Jennifer Egan
Sleeping Giants – Rene Denfeld (March 2024)
No One Will Come Back For Us – Premee Mohamed
White Cat, Black Dog – Kelly Link
The Naming Song – Jedidiah Berry (October 2024)
The Saint of Bright Doors – Vajra Chandrasekera
Starling House – Alix E. Harrow
Black River Orchard – Chuck Wendig

Favorite Video Games 2023

Baldur’s Gate 3

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

The Last Campfire

(I haven’t finished Baldur’s Gate 3 yet, I’m in the middle of Act 3 and my PS5 chose this week to die so please send tiny prayers to the Sony cloud save gods for me.)

This year sounded like Sigur Rós and Danse Macabre and Fleetwood Mac and lots and lots of Vitamin String Quartet. This one is not the aforementioned new book theme, but it is the opening track on the constantly evolving new book playlist that I put on every time I sit down to write, so now these opening notes feel like opening a door.

Whatever you accomplished or didn’t this year please know that it was enough just to get here to this night when one year tumbles into the next. And I hope that whatever 2024 brings there is some softness in it, and some brightness, and some wonder.

By erin, ago

goodbye 2022

This year was filled with chickadees. They come and go but right now there are about a dozen who frequent the bird feeder. They follow us around when we go outside and sometimes land on the windows to peer into the house.

We had blue jays this year, too, a family of them that arrived when all the littlest ones were still small and fluffy.

And there was a bunny in the yard last week, the first we’ve seen here, hanging out around near the bird feeder and sitting quietly in the snow beneath the bushes.

2022 was quiet, filled with soft things and fluttering. Many things happened and long-awaited projects were released into the world but most if it felt as though it was happening around me, wings beating somewhere nearby. I was ill for a chunk of the fall (chronic things being more chronic than usual) so most of the latter half of the year turned in self-care directions. Warm beverages and blankets and softness and slowing down.

2022 was all these beautiful things that were created in part by me but so many other artists brought such life to stories new and old and I am so very grateful to have all of these objects out in the world.

The Phantomwise Tarot, available wherever tarot decks are sold from Clarkson Potter.

New UK paperback editions from Vintage of The Night Circus & The Starless Sea. The Waterstones editions have new exclusive content.

The astonishingly beautiful Books Illustrated editions of The Night Circus with illustrations by Anne Yvonne Gilbert.

I threw away more words than I wrote this year, but what remains in the aftermath is better and has both more personality and more mysteries. I shall be spending 2023 trying to learn them, if not solve them. It has secrets I have not discerned yet, rooms I haven’t figured out how to open.

It might have a title? I’m not sure yet, it is sitting here, misshapen and unfinished, trying a title on like a hat, to see if it suits. I will know better once it is more book-shaped.

2023 will probably be a quieter year for me. This year had several things and surprises, most of which are in the stack above. For next year I am hoping to spend more time alone getting to know this creature in its little hat better so that you all can meet it, someday.

I had an odd reading year. The last few years I’ve had difficulty reading for a number of reasons and I’ve been feeling like my reading gets overwhelmed by new things so I tried to read older things and more nonfiction. I am a slow reader at the best of times and I have somehow become even slower.

I have piles of books I wanted to read this year and never got to (related: I have barely gotten to anything in the blurb request pile in a timely manner lately, the last book I managed to blurb I had almost a full year before publication) but I’ll be tackling more of the to-read pile over the next while, particularly Chuck Wendig’s Wayward which I’ve had for ages & I am really looking forward to curling up with it for a good long time. (Vesper keeps sitting on it, so it seems a good book for curling up with).

Favorite Things I Read in 2022

Such Small Hands – Andrés Barba, translated by Lisa Dillman

A Haunted History of Invisible Women: True Stories of America’s Ghosts – Leanna Renee Hieber & Andrea Janes

House of Mist – Maria Luisa Bombal

Wading in Waist-High Water: The Lyrics of Fleet Foxes – Robin Pecknold

The Broken Tower – Kelly Braffet (sequel to The Unwilling, I love these books to bits)

The Golden Age, Book I & Book II – Roxanne Moreil and Cyril Pedrosa

I played a lot of Elden Ring this year. A lot. I am two alternate endings away from platinuming and I will probably manage it eventually. I have mentioned at various times in the past that I really like consuming stories in non-book formats, particularly while I’m writing, and the story in Elden Ring is so gloriously mysterious, discerned through environments and item descriptions and odd encounters. You sink into this world and its poison swamps and piece together its myths as you go, and all the while everything is trying to kill you and usually succeeding. It is beautiful and harsh and teeming with secrets. I cannot describe how much I love it. It is quite possibly my new favorite game of all time.

Favorite Video Games I played in 2022

Elden Ring, obviously.

Tunic, which I co-played with Adam. We passed the controller back & forth & took extensive handwritten notes to figure out that one particular door & the whole thing was a delight. I am impatiently waiting for the plush fox to be in stock at fangamer.

NieR:Automata. I’d played Replicant when version 1.22474487139 came out and liked it a lot but I loved Automata, the aesthetic and the music and more than anything the way the narrative is layered across multiple play throughs.

Honorable mentions to Mundaun, A Little to the Left & Cozy Grove, all of which are potentially excellent games for non-gamers, by the way, for very different moods. (Creepy, Organized & Cozy-with-Ghost-Bears, respectively.)

This year sounded like the NieR:Automata soundtrack on piano and Dance Fever and Midnights.

This year we started collecting video game soundtracks on vinyl, to listen to in the library with cocktails or mocktails and a flopsy kitten. The Hades soundtrack is always in heavy rotation, and Slime Rancher, too, but more than anything 2022 sounded like Zelda & Chill. Going to try to extend the chill into 2023.

Every New Year’s Eve I do a year ahead tarot spread, one card for each month clockwise in a wheel and a single card to sum up the general tone of the year. Traditionally I then forget to look at it for the rest of the year and only remember to check when New Year’s rolls around again. My summation card for 2022 was Justice. We’ll see what 2023 has to say for itself later.

May 2023 bring more soft, wondrous things, fluttering in the snow and peering in the windows.

By erin, ago

goodbye 2021

I spent this year in my house. In my yard and in my woods, getting to know the birds and finding leaks in the roof and measuring the year in blooming flowers and changing leaves and snowfalls.

It was a sleepy kitten year, spent in a singular space with a particularly sleepy kitten (well, sleepy when she was not chasing mice) but despite the sleepiness things still happened. We celebrated our seventh anniversary and Vesper’s third birthday and a decade of The Night Circus and two years of sailing The Starless Sea.

I wrote small things this year.

When 2021 began I thought it was going to be a year for continued big messy drafting of the new book but instead it was a writing year spent on several other projects entirely, all of them unexpected and precise. The scale shifted to zoomed-in and detail-oriented when I had expected wide-ranging impressionist swooshes. It was a year for precise sentences and carefully chosen words. I think it made me tired. I am tentatively hoping for more zoomed-out writing time in 2022.

Most of those 2021-composed small things are secrets for the moment. One may remain a secret but has already found its reader and the others will be revealed in time.

I will be attempting to spend as much of 2022 away from the internet as possible. Social media in particular made me extra tired this year even with frequent hiatuses so 2022 is going to be one great big hiatus.

I will not be vanishing entirely, it’s difficult to vanish entirely. I will be posting occasionally on Instagram (standard assortment of kittens and birds and books and snow) and newsworthy things will be posted here and on twitter as well.

Most of 2022 will be spent sorting through all of these bits and pieces and dark hallways and cherry blossoms so I can slowly coerce them into something resembling a book when I’m not playing Pony Souls, I mean Elden Ring.

Happy-Making Things 2021

Befriending the chickadees. Westman Atelier liquid lip balm in Garçonne. Season 3 of What We Do in the Shadows. Ecclesia stars and peonies. Lesser Evil Dark Chocolate Sea Salt Popcorn. New Jellycat Gryphon friend (his name is Gus). The Somnia Tarot. Philips Hue light bulbs. Ethan M. Aldridge’s Night Circus illustrations. BPAL’s The Grey Columns (a perfectly balanced blend of grey and white amber, touched by a hint of smoke). Treana 2018 Red Wine. Jon Carling’s Traveling Witch. Painting the guest room Benjamin Moore Gentleman’s Grey (which is blue). Season 2 of The Witcher. Books Illustrated’s upcoming version of The Night Circus illustrated by Anne Yvonne Gilbert. Darla Jackson bunnies. The Folio Society edition of Howl’s Moving Castle that Adam gave me for Yule.

And of course, Todd Doughty’s Little Pieces of Hope: Happy-Making Things in a Difficult World, which last year was happy-making lists on Instagram and this year is a whole book of wonderments with illustrations by Josie Portillo and it is one of my favorite books I read this year.

I had possibly my most low-volume reading year ever. I almost called it “worst” but it wasn’t that, it’s just that I only managed to read a tiny fraction of the books I wanted to read for a number of reasons. There are too many books and not enough time in good years, and this year my brain was not attentioning particularly well for reading. There are so many (so many!) books I am very much looking forward to still waiting in the to-read pile including The Letters of Shirley Jackson and Kelly Braffet’s upcoming sequel to The Unwilling, The Broken Tower (out January 25th!)

These are my favorite books that I did manage to read this year, though half of them don’t actually come out until next year.

The aforementioned Little Pieces of Hope: Happy-Making Things in a Difficult World by Todd Doughty
The Book of Accidents by Chuck Wendig, a big, brilliant horrorscape that’s drowningly immersive in that signature Wendig way.
Girly Drinks: A World History of Women and Alcohol by Mallory O’Meara, which is like having the perfect seat at the bar for a drink or five accompanied by buckets of utterly fascinating history.
The Paradox Hotel (February 22, 2022) by Rob Hart, a delicious locked room mystery in a hotel for time travelers that has everything the conceit implies and more, including dinosaurs.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (July 12, 2022) by Gabrielle Zevin, a sprawling modern epic of life and love and the creative process in general and video games in particular.

And my very favorite thing I read this year, which is of-the-moment in the best of ways and quite possibly a masterpiece, is Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel & it will be published on April 5, 2022.

I finished far more video games than books this year, which says something about attention and immersion and interactivity. Picking favorites was difficult. Top Five:

Demon’s Souls – I was not previously a Souls game person. When we got a PS5 (thanks be to the gaming gods) we picked up the Bluepoint Demon’s Souls remake and I thought I’d try it and I got utterly obsessed. The mood and the architecture and the atmosphere and the spaces, it’s all so much of what I love in an immersive environment.

Death’s Door – Adorable crow reaper! Puzzles! Secrets! Gorgeous score and beautiful animation! Zelda-esque in the best of ways.

Control – I have heard so many people rave about Control for so long and it took me ages to pick it up and I’m so glad I finally did. The Ashtray Maze is easily one of my all-time favorite gaming moments.

Deathloop – I did not think Deathloop was going to be my jam but it totally was? Stylish, quirky, puzzle-game-dressed-up-as-a-shooter with a fantastic soundtrack.

Slime Rancher – I’ve always wanted a game that brought back the feeling of walking around the world of Myst and weirdly, Slime Rancher was the game that brought it, with its ancient ruins and precious slimes.

Honorable mentions (I should have done a top ten) to Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Bowser’s Fury, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, Astro’s Playroom & in particular Radiohead’s Kid A Mnesia exhibit (is it a game? Is it a virtual museum? I don’t know, but it’s a wonder.)

This year sounded like distant train whistles and the crackling of virtual fireplaces and the Persona 5 Royal soundtrack and that perfect version of Everybody Wants to Rule the World from BioShock Infinite and so much Radiohead nostalgia.

But this soundtrack in general and this track in particular is what I put on more often than not, over and over again, to keep things moving even when everything felt stagnant, and somehow it always worked.

Happy New Year, darlings. Keep moving.

By erin, ago

goodbye 2020

I began this year on airplanes. In bookstores and in theatres, meeting hundreds and hundreds of lovely people and signing so very many copies of The Starless Sea. Drinking post-event Cabernet and trying to remember what day it was or what city I was in, pausing too briefly in hotel room after hotel room and the whole time I had a head cold and I joked that I didn’t want to leave my house for the spring and then I didn’t.

I didn’t leave my house in the spring or the summer or the fall and now the snow is falling again.

Things that were happy-making in a long dark year:

Jeni’s ice cream. The fire pit we got for the backyard. Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab perfume oils (particularly Candy Apple Smut, Baby’s First Ballista & Venus Genetrix). My new camera that takes very good photos of birds and kittens. Getting a towel from my perfect husband for my 42nd birthday (he also gave me a sword). This Ethan M. Aldridge illustration. S’mores made with turmeric cardamom black pepper caramelized coconut mylk chocolate. Taylor Swift’s folklore on vinyl. Chasing Vesper around the library while she chased a mouse. Blood Milk’s Sacred Heart of Hecate ring. Knitting with Malabrigo Rasta yarn. The Alex Eckman-Lawn paperback cover for The Starless Sea. Flailing about Dragon Age 4 teases with people on the internet. The El Goliath Tarot. Catching cherry blossoms in Animal Crossing. Becoming long-distance friends with the extraordinary Dani Carr. This cast iron roast chicken recipe. And Todd Doughty’s happy-making posts on Instagram.

I didn’t read much this year at all. I’m always a slow reader and I never get through as many books as I would like but this year was particularly bad for my attention span. I did procure a lot of books so I am well-stocked for 2021 and beyond.

Of the handful of things I did manage to read this year, these were my favorites:

We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry, the witchy 80’s Massachusetts field hockey novel I never knew I always wanted.
Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh, who is a genius. I laughed, I cried, I laughed until I cried, all while our power was out, reading by flashlight.
The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained by Colin Dickey. I adored Ghostland and this is just as fascinating. One of the things I love about Colin’s work is how much of it is about the stories that we tell.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. In many ways this book is to The Starless Sea what Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is to The Night Circus, which baffles and delights me. It is a treasure.
Flyaway by Kathleen Jennings, like Shirley Jackson and Angela Carter had an Australian baby. It is moody and dark and has sharp teeth like the best of fairy tales.
Beowulf translated by Maria Dahvana Headley is a luscious, lyrical gift of language that feels old and new at the same time.

This year I started writing a book that will very likely end up being the new book. It has been a file filled with notes for awhile but now there are pages of prose and characters who haven’t found their names yet and bits of impermanent imaginary architecture. It is a long way from being a book but it is more than it was at this time last year, a million years ago.

In the meantime The Starless Sea came out in paperback in August of this year which already seems like ages ago. You could purchase it or any number of other wonderful books (everything in the pile above is highly recommended!) from an independent bookstore near or far, might I suggest Print: A Bookstore or Gibson’s Concord or Odyssey Bookshop or Oblong Books & Music

I played a lot of games this year. No, more than that.

My game of the year is a fairly even tie between Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Hades. I bought pink rain boots because I liked my Animal Crossing ones so much. Hades made me realize I’m actually pretty good at the kind of game I sometimes find intimidating. (Current record clear time is 19:39.55)

Ghost of Tsushima was epic and stunning and the end of Act II made me cry more than any single moment in a video game ever.

I love a good visual puzzle game and Superliminal was just what I wanted, quirky and smart and beautiful.

I finished A Short Hike in one day and I still think about it, it is a perfect little story game. It is, as the name implies, very short. “a little exploration game about hiking up a mountain.”

I replayed a lot of things this year for purposes of comfort and familiarity including BioShock 2 (I had never done the Minerva’s Den DLC and it’s marvelous) and Horizon Zero Dawn and I am currently in the middle of my fourth replay of Dragon Age: Inquisition which is of course my most favorite game. I am taking my time with it but afterwards I am probably going to replay Origins & Dragon Age II as well, because it’s been that kind of year.

I’ve just started Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity and so far I like it a lot, it’s like smashy smashy Breath of the Wild.

Also recently acquired the Annapurna Interactive Deluxe Limited Edition collection, I’ve played and loved some of these games already (particularly What Remains of Edith Finch and Gorogoa) and I am very much looking forward to the rest of them.

In related gaming news I still don’t have a PS5 despite trying several times to get one (I blame our comparatively slow internet speed) and right now my main goal is to get one before Horizon Forbidden West comes out.

I barely watched any tv this year but I did rewatch all of Adventure Time including the final seasons which I’d never seen and I sobbed my way through the final episode which was bananapants and perfect. I might need “Will Happen Happening Happens” embroidered on something.

We’ve been getting into Critical Role this year, we’re 30-something episodes into the second campaign and I love it, my attention span for watching anything has been terrible but with Critical Role I can sit and knit or whatnot and still follow fascinating complex narratives and it has been soothing in a chaotic sort of way. And there is so very much of it! We are like two years and a bazillion hours behind! It’s kind of nice to have so much catching up to do especially since we don’t leave the house and it is helping me sort of understand Dungeons & Dragons finally. I’ve never played! Everyone always thinks I have! I haven’t! But I’m learning! (Once in awhile someone tags me on twitter about doing campaigns based on my books and whether or not I mind and of course I don’t mind I am flattered beyond belief please please have all the role-playing fun with them!)

This year sounded like the Hades soundtrack and Nothing But Thieves and The Amazing Devil and London Grammar’s Californian Soil and BMO singing about how time is an illusion but mostly it sounded like folklore (& evermore) on repeat and I am grateful to Taylor Swift for these sounds and these words that were in the background of this year like a blanket. I have other favorite tracks but when I told myself to pick a single one for this post as is New Year’s Post tradition, it had to be this one.

Happy New Year, darlings. We can be pirates.

By erin, ago

2019

This year was so many things. It was book finishing and book tour and head colds (so many head colds) and BookExpo and San Diego ComicCon and so much traveling and new friends and I am exhausted and happy and glad to be home for a little while, with the snow falling outside.

Adam and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary and his 40th birthday and my 41st birthday and Vesper’s 1st birthday and there was a book birthday in there, too. It was a very celebratory year. There was a great deal of sparkling wine. It felt like multiple years rolled into one, book tour alone was a bazillion years long and so many countries and cities and wonderful people. (Tour will continue a bit in January, too.)

This was the year of The Starless Sea in so many ways. It’s still hard for me to believe that it’s out in the world but it is and it is finding its readers and having a life of its own and for me it is strange and lovely and bittersweet. So much gratitude to InkWell and Doubleday and Harvill Secker for sending it out into the world in such tremendous style.

I didn’t read quite as much as I’d thought I would this year mostly due to exhaustion and head colds but when I went to make my favorites list it was actually quite hard, I really enjoyed most of what I read this year so these are the ultimate favorites among a great deal of competition. (Note: these are all personal favorites. I have developed an aversion to calling such lists “Bests” because these are just my opinions and I cannot deem bestness because I cannot read All the Books.)

Favorite Books That I Read in 2019

Steel Crow Saga by Paul Krueger. I met Paul serendipitously at San Diego ComicCon and after cocktail-drenched California adventures we’re friends now, he has to deal with that. So I was nervous starting this book because I really wanted to at least like it but oh, I loved it, so much. It’s bright and bold and has so much heart and it made me cry in that oh-no-the-book-is-over way, where you miss being in it as soon as the last page is turned.

Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb. I’d been meaning to read Robin Hobb for ages but I think the fact that this year was the 25th anniversary of Assassin’s Apprentice bumped it up on my list. This was my tour book that lived in my carry-on and I read bits in different states and countries and it was like having a familiar place to return to. I am so, so delighted that are many more volumes in this series and I found editions in the UK that I loved so much I ordered them when I got home.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow At some point in the last few years Alix and I apparently shared a brain because this book is a perfect complement to The Starless Sea and vice versa. It is Doors and Keys and Books and Vermont and star-crossed everything and so, so beautiful. I will be in conversation with Alix at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Lexington, Kentucky on Saturday, January 11th and I am excited about it.

Miracle Creek by Angie Kim. This book got me out of a reading slump where I was picking up things and putting them down after a few pages because nothing was really doing it for me but this one sucked me right in. A gorgeous, compelling suburban courtroom drama that is the very definition of a page-turner.

Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep. At the American Bookseller Association Winter Institute in January I asked booksellers what I should pick up from the advance copies table and this was their instant recommendation. They were right, of course. Like true crime and literary history had a book baby.

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. I was lucky enough to read this book early because Colson is a fellow Doubleday author and a reminder of the extraordinary author company I’m in there. In retrospect Nickel Boys feels more like something that really happened that I remember someone telling me about in great detail than a book that I read and somehow that feels appropriate.

Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid which comes out TODAY, go get it! Go! It is a testament to the fact that all of those “Best books of [YEAR]” lists should be posted in January of the following year because it should be on the lists. It is real and raw and sharp and funny. Please tell everyone to just pretend it came out in 2020 and put it on all of the lists, thank you.

And possibly my very favorite thing I read this year that I am OBSESSED with comes out on February 11th 2020: The Unwilling by Kelly Braffet. It is a big, delicious fantasy to sink into and it is divine. Much like Steel Crow Saga I missed the world and the characters as soon as it was over and I’m going to re-read it soon. Also I have been keeping my post-tour February-May calendar as empty as possible but I am making a single exception for Kelly: we will be discussing The Unwilling with Oblong Books on Tuesday, February 18th.

Bonus honorable mention to Wanderers by Chuck Wendig which I read last year but it came out this year on an auspicious date! It is brilliant and epic.

Favorite Games I Played in 2019

I spent a good part of the year working my way through Assassin’s Creed Odyssey which I enjoyed immensely but there was also a lot of it. Though now I find myself wishing I could Sparta kick people off cliffs in other games.

Untitled Goose Game is, of course, an unbridled delight. (HONK.)

Gris is one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever played. Vesper liked it, too.

I have only just started Baba is You but it is genius. I’ve also only played a bit of Link’s Awakening but I’m looking forward to playing it more.

I spent lots of travel time replaying Skyrim on my Switch. And at home I started my third replay of Dragon Age: Inquisition mostly for anxiety soothing purposes. Playing a rogue this time and it is very satisfying to be able to unlock things myself.

(I also spent a good amount of head cold time watching Adam play Jedi: Fallen Order which was excellent and BD-1 is now my most favorite droid.)

Seeing out the decade with a sidecar, no sugar, waiting to see what adventures and cocktails the ’20s will bring. I started the decade unhappy and not knowing what I wanted and I’m ending it with two published novels, sitting in a house that I own with the best husband and the best cat, surrounded by snow-covered woods.

I always pick a song for the year and though I’ve had Toss a Coin to Your Witcher stuck in my head for over a week (it’s still there) and by the way I love the show SO MUCH (tv favorites this year are basically just The Witcher and honorable mention to Baby Yoda) I wanted to pick something that felt like The Starless Sea because this year was all Starless Sea, all the time. Awhile back I mentioned on twitter that in a perfect world the Starless Sea playlist would include a Ramin Djawadi Westworld-style cover of the Legend of Zelda theme, but for now it does include this, which is also appropriate.

Happy New Year, darlings. Keep your hearts safe.

By erin, ago

2018

This year felt like it was a million years long. This was the year I finally finished The Starless Sea, or very nearly finished since I’m about to hand in reviewed copyedits (note to publishers: January 2nd due dates are mean) and I’ll have one more final pass sometime after that and then it will be gone and grown-up and book-shaped and wrapped up pretty for November. Which is still a million years away if 2019 ends up anywhere near as long-feeling as 2018.

This year we had foxes who lived in our yard and I spent my 40th birthday in a decommissioned helicopter and did I mention that I finished the new book? Because I finished the new book and I’m still not quite certain I believe it.

And then there is the kitten. We’ve only had Vesper since September but she is the most wonderful kitten and she fits right in. (Though there was one week when she decided that the ceiling fan was terrifying so I took her into the guest room to get away from the scary fan and there was a flock of wild turkeys outside the window. She hid behind my legs for awhile. Poor thing.)

I normally do media review but truthfully this year was a blur of mostly writing so this is a short version.

My favorite books that I actually got around to were Susan Orlean’s The Library Book, Jane Mount’s Bibliophile and also Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers which will be out in July of 2019. Honorable mentions to The Ink House by Rory Dobner because it is a gorgeous delight and The Aviary Cocktail Book that my dear Kim Liggett gave me for the holidays which is a work of art.

I’m hoping I’ll have more time for the ever-expanding to-read pile next year, I feel like I’ve fallen behind on books and media and the world and so much more trying to finish writing this particular book in this particular time.

Adam gave me a Nintendo Switch and a kitten for my birthday so he clearly both knows and loves me deeply and also never wants me to get anything done ever again. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is just as amazing and wonderful as everyone said it was. I’m nearing the end but I still need to catch more fish to upgrade my stealth pants which is not a sentence I ever thought I would type. (After I properly finish the book I get to replay Dragon Age: Inquisition because that has been my book-finishing reward to self for literal years.)

I always do a song for the year but there wasn’t a single song for this year, there were a lot of songs and I’m looking forward to finalizing the Starless Sea official playlist but for this year I’ll leave you with the sounds that filled my office most of the time. It’s long, which seems appropriate.

Here we go, into 2019. It should be an adventure.



By erin, ago