It’s January again, and time to watch those well-intentioned New Years resolutions starting already to crumble. If you’re reading this thinking, What? My New Years resolutions never crumble! well, congratulations on your being a part of 0.1% of the population. The rest of us make these promises to… who, actually? As I was just typing that I wasn’t sure if I should end the sentence with “ourselves” or some specific person or group of people, or God, or GoodReads, or… who? What?
Whoever or whatever we make these promises to, what happens when (and I stand by “if” still in that 0.1% range) they’re abandoned after they prove somehow impossible, or I’m sure much more likely, unpleasant?
If you have some sort of life-saving measure amongst your resolutions/goals, let’s take that out of the mix. If your doctor told you you have to stop eating sugar or you’ll end the month of January a diabetic, listen to your doctor. Changing your diet, in that circumstance, isn’t a resolution or a goal, it’s an essential step to better health, falling into essentially the same category as “in 2024, I will breathe air, drink water, and eat food.” Let’s leave survival as a given, not a goal. Obviously, what I’m talking about here are writing goals, and secondarily, reading goals.
Let’s start with the latter, because that’s the easiest to dismiss.
On June 21, 2022, I posted here a goal/resolution , which then became my 2023 GoodReads Challenge. That goal, which seemed perfectly logical at the time, was to abandon my usual 52-book GoodReads Challenge in favor of a year of longreads. I even made a separate shelf of a bunch of really long books I already own and have been “meaning to read,” in some cases for decades since buying them. I don’t tend to be a fan of super long books (except for a bunch of super long books that I have read and loved) so they do tend to get passed over for something less gigantic. But these are all books I legitimately want to read. This wasn’t a curriculum forced on me by any outside agency. Anyway, here’s that photo again:
Look at how diligent and organized I was! I put them in order and everything, with (pretty much) every other book a science fiction, fantasy, or horror title. And of course if you’re going to do this, you have to start with the granddaddy of all long books, Leo Tolstoy’s mega-epic War & Peace. So, yeah. Read War & Peace in January, 2023, then The Essential Ellison in February, Don Quixote in March, The Lord of the Rings in April, Infinite Jest in May, The Science Fiction Century in June, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick in July, The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft in August, Crime and Punishment in September (happy birthday to me), The Terror in October, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare in November, and finish up with 1000 Books to Read Before You Die in December.
Okay, it’s the second week of January, 2024. How did I do?
I completed the first book! I actually read every torturous word of the absurdly terrible War & Peace . The end of January 2023 came along and I had to admit I had not finished War & Peace . But undaunted, determined to stick to my lofty goal, I started in on The Essential Ellison on February first, and largely because I love Harlan Ellison so much I did actually finish that in more or less due course.
If by “due course” you mean May 16th.
January’s War & Peace ? Still a work (and I do mean work ) in progress until, let’s see… oh yeah: November 14th.
The plan? Read War & Peace over the course of one month.
Reality? Trudge hopelessly yet diligently through War & Peace for ten and a half months.
Yeah, it was somewhere in mid-February that the twelve longreads challenge fell entirely asunder. Instead, I completed the self-flagellation of reading War & Peace as penance and went back to my normal reading habits, which is to read whatever I want to. I ended 2023 having read not twelve long books but two long books and forty-three other books of various lengths. And I continue to await punishment, at least a disparaging dressing down from…
Who?
The GoodReads Challenge Enforcement Division?
The ghost of Fyodor Dostoyevsky angered at once again being on someone’s to read list after Tolstoy only to see ol’ Leo instill in his hapless victims a seething hatred of classic Russian literature?
Y’all?
Myself?
I don’t know, bring all them bastards on. This was a dumb idea—for me—and I was right to abandon it, even if I was wrong to continue all the way through the dismal experience of War & Peace . Believe me, I have DNFed shorter books. Why did I finish the have-I-told-you-yet-how-much-I-hated-it War & Peace ? I honestly have no idea. Maybe that was the last vestiges of the challenge. Maybe it was the ever-popular sunk cost fallacy. Maybe I have some deep-seated literary masochistic thing I was trying to work through. Stranger things have happened.
So then the new year rolls around and I signed up for another GoodReads Challenge. Back to my usual 52 books, which I’ve done before with some success. But having utterly failed at the twelve longread challenge, I’m reminded that any of these online challenges are, ultimately, inconsequential. No one cares if at the end of the year I read twelve long books or forty-five books of varying length. No one cares if I get to fifty-two by the end of 2024. Is it just kinda fun to track? Sure—and you’ll see me tweeting my progress along the way—but that’s all it is, y’all. Kind of a fun exercise in reminding yourself to read, which is perfectly fine.
So, advice to authors? Read, read, then read some more. Read as much as you can, across multiple categories and genres. Don’t make or allow reading to become a chore or a source of pressure or embarrassment. Let it be and stay a joy. Read because you love to, not because it’s some kind of side hustle, as though everything has to somehow be “useful,” (though for authors, I guarantee reading for pleasure will be!) or entrepreneurial or otherwise a grind or anything other than an end in itself.
And now, as for writing goals. Go back and change every instance of “read” to “write,” every instance of “reading” to “writing,” and, as the author of this month’s Fantasy Author’s Handbook GoodReads Group group read, Jane Yolen, says, Take Joy in the written word.
Happy New Year.
—Philip Athans
Fantasy Author’s Handbook is now on YouTube !
Did this post make you want to Buy Me A Coffee …
Follow me on Twitter @PhilAthans …
Link up with me on LinkedIn …
Join our group on GoodReads …
And our group on Facebook …
Find me at PublishersMarketplace …
Check out my eBay store …
Or contact me for editing, coaching, ghostwriting, and more at Athans & Associates Creative Consulting ?
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model.
Editor and author Philip Athans offers hands on advice for authors of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and fiction in general in this collection of 58 revised and expanded essays from the first five years of his long-running weekly blog, Fantasy Author’s Handbook.
All Rights Reserved Book Blog