Somehow another month has gone past and it’s already the end of January, which means it’s time for my first Monthly Roundup post of 2022. After the craziness of December when I kept myself incredibly busy with my Advent Calendar series, I deliberately toned things down a bit for January to give myself a bit of a rest, and while I’ve still put together ten articles and two new site pages, it’s been good to slow down a little. While I may not have written as much as I have done in previous months, it’s been a really busy month on the reading front, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time looking ahead and planning posts that I’m hoping to deliver later in the year.
If you haven’t had a chance to read some or all of January’s posts then don’t worry, because I’ve included all of the relevant links below. As usual I’ve also spent a bit of time writing up a general update for the month, focusing on how well I’m doing with meeting the goals I set for myself this year.
Reviews (ok…review)
I wrote in my Plans and Goals article (more on this later) that I want to spend less time this year writing reviews and focus more on interviews, articles and so on. I perhaps didn’t mean only writing one review per month, which is all I’ve managed in January, but that’s how it’s worked out. I do have two or three reviews that I’d still like to write, covering books I’ve read in January and indeed back in December, so hopefully I can catch up on those in February.
Volpone Glory – Nick Kyme – for my first (and so far only) review of the year I’m talking about this excellent Imperial Guard novel, which works very well as a standalone story but does in fact share continuity with the broader Sabbat Worlds series created by Dan Abnett. It’s a smashing book, I really enjoyed it – very dark, very powerful, very 40k-appropriate.
Interviews
I may only have written one review in January but I worked on four author interviews – one for a Black Library book (reviving my Rapid Fire series) and three for books now (or very soon to be) available from Aconyte Books, Titan Books and Angry Robot. I’ve really enjoyed putting these together, and if you haven’t checked them all out I would definitely recommend them, as each of the authors has contributed some fascinating answers!
AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Evan Dicken Talks To Chart the Clouds – for my first author interview of 2022, I chatted to Evan Dicken about his new Legend of the Five Rings novel To Chart the Clouds, which is out soon from Aconyte Books. I’ve loved all of the L5R books I’ve read so far, and this one sounds excellent too.
RAPID FIRE: Justin D. Hill Talks The Bookkeeper’s Skull – the latest Warhammer Horror novel is out now from Black Library, and I spoke to Justin to find out more about it! Check this interview out to get the lowdown on this great-sounding new book: the horror of the mundane on a quiet agri-world, the links between this and one of Justin’s previous books, and the “slow-burn nightmare” of the writing process.
AUTHOR INTERVIEW: T.R. Napper Talks 36 Streets – I don’t read a lot of cyberpunk, but I’m a big fan of T.R. Napper’s writing, so I was very happy to be able to chat to him for this interview about his new novel from Titan Books, which is set in the same world as his anthology Neon Leviathan. A gritty, punchy SF noir novel with a fantastic protagonist and a considerable emotional heft, this is an excellent book and Napper’s answers are, as always, utterly fascinating.
AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Ron Walters Talks Deep Dive – a brand new novel out now from Angry Robot, Ron’s debut sounds really interesting, and he’s given some brilliant answers in this interview. If you’re on the lookout for a good SF thriller, this tale of virtual reality, video game development and the difficulties of juggling parental responsibilities is definitely one to look out for.
Blog articles
Interestingly, it’s been blog articles that I’ve published the most of in January, and I must say I’m very pleased about that. I hope the three posts that I wrote are all interesting – one is retrospective, one looking ahead to 2022, and the other discussing reading goals – but if I’m honest I think the other two are the most interesting. I’m delighted to have SF author Michael Mammay on the site to talk about SF debuts coming in 2022, while my article about Reign of the Devourer is sort of a mixture of guest post, interview and article from me.
Yearly Roundup: 2021 Numbers and Goals – each year I do at least one retrospective post looking back at how the previous year went, and this time I’ve combined a look at some of the site stats for 2021 with some thoughts on how well (or otherwise) I did hitting my goals for 2021.
Science Fiction Debuts in 2022 – Michael Mammay Guest Post – if you’re on the lookout for some sci-fi recommendations then look no further than this excellent guest post from author Michael Mammay, looking ahead to some of the SF debuts hitting shelves in 2022! I’m adding a lot of these to my own TBR list, for sure.
Track of Words in 2022: Plans and Goals – I’ve spent a fair amount of time planning for the rest of the year, and set myself a range of goals for 2022 – for both my own reading and what I’m hoping to be doing on Track of Words. Most of my goals are more behavioural than anything quantitative, but I do like being able to look back regularly and ask myself how I’m getting on.
Preparing For Reign of the Devourer by David Annandale – the latest Marvel novel from Aconyte Books (and the second featuring Doctor Doom) is available to order now as an ebook, and what better way to get ready for it than to check out the books, comics and movies that influenced its writing?! I asked David for a few key influences, and he came back with some brilliant recommendations from Stephen King to…um…Howard the Duck!
Why Reading Goals Are Great – inspired by a piece I read on the Tor.com site, I’ve put together an article talking about why (in my opinion) it’s useful to set reading goals, and the benefits they provide. The Tor piece is interesting, but takes a slightly strange (in my opinion) tack on the subject, so my own article is an attempt to discuss the same subject but from a contrasting perspective. I hope it’s interesting!
Site pages
While neither of these pages are likely to see particularly heavy traffic, they’re both pages that I’ve been meaning to put together for a long time, and I think it’s worth at least mentioning that they exist. If you happen to be an author, or someone who works in SFF publishing, then please do check these out and get in touch if you’re interested in either requesting a review or contributing an interview or guest post! If not, then do feel free to have a look but I won’t be offended if you skip these!
Review Policy – I should have done this a long time ago, but I’ve finally added this page to the site so that anyone who’s interested in asking me to review their book (or short story) has some guidelines to work from. It’s not something I’m expecting many visitors to use, but will hopefully come in handy now and then.
Interview and Guest Post Policy – following on from the Review Policy page, I’ve also now added a page explaining what I’m looking for in author interviews and guest content, and how to get in touch to request and/or pitch ideas. I love running both of these types of articles, so I’m hoping this page will be useful when working with authors or other publishing folks in the future.
General Update
So we’re now a month into 2022 and January has been…alright, actually. Outside of the usual work and general life stuff I feel like I’ve kept myself reasonably busy, and spent my time on things that I really enjoy. I’ve done loads of reading, a reasonable amount of writing and working on the site, and even managed to spend a fair amount of time painting – I finally finished off a Warhammer Underworlds project and moved onto my first Warcry project. It’s felt a bit like an exercise in keeping busy while concentrating on the things I enjoy the most, and accepting that I can’t do absolutely everything I might want to do.
For this roundup, rather than rambling about the month as a whole I’m going to try breaking this section down using the goals and behaviours that I set out in my 2022 Plans and Goals article. First of all, let’s take a look at the three broad site-specific goals that I set for the year.
Frequency/number of posts
I can’t quite decide on the best heading for this goal, but the gist is that I’m aiming for somewhere in the region of 3-4 posts per week across the year (which is about what I did in 2021). As far as January goes, if you include site pages then I hit this target with 10 posts and two new site pages. While this might be the first goal on the list though, it’s probably the one I’m least worried about meeting – I’m trying really hard to be kind to myself this year and not worry too much about how many articles I get written.
Focus less on reviews
I’ve already mentioned this so won’t go into too much detail here, but suffice to say I definitely focused more on interviews and articles in January than I did reviews. To be fair, I have at least three books that I still want to review so the balance might have been a bit different if I’d got any of those written, but nevertheless I’m pretty happy with how it’s turned out. If you’re interested, those three books I’m hoping to review are You Sexy Thing by Cat Rambo, 36 Streets by T.R. Napper and The Last Adventure of Constance Verity by A. Lee Martinez – three wildly different books, but all well worth checking out.
Broad coverage
I want Track of Words to cover a wide range of SFF, to reflect my own tastes and interests. With interviews covering books from Aconyte, Angry Robot, Black Library and Titan, along with Michael Mammay’s excellent guest post discussing upcoming debut novels from all manner of publishers, I think it’s safe to say I hit this goal! I’m delighted about this, and hopefully I can continue the trend throughout 2022.
Next up it’s my reading goals for the year…
Reading challenge
I honestly thought that I’d find January difficult to get my head around, and would struggle to find time for reading…but it turned out I was very (and happily) wrong about that! I set my usual reading challenge of 52 books (less about the number, more just for a way of tracking progress) and somehow I’ve already read 15 – that’s 29% of the way to my total already! There’s no way I’m going to read that many each month, but as long as I’m enjoying reading I’m happy to keep blazing through books and having a blast with them!
Audiobooks
Part of the reason I read so many books in January was that audiobooks accounted for a third of the total! I’ve really thrown myself into audiobooks during January, and while three of them were pretty short at only 4-5 hours long, the other two were maybe 10-12 hours each, so clearly I’ve spent quite a lot of time listening! I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all of the audiobooks too, which of course is the most important thing, and if I’m honest I think the shorter format is actually rather satisfying. I’m not a big fan of really long audiobooks, so I could in fact see myself choosing shorter ones more often.
Read for fun and to review
This is another goal I’m very happy to have met in January – in fact I couldn’t be happier with how it’s worked out. Of the 15 books I read, I chose three of them as books to review and happily blitzed through the remaining 12 purely for my own enjoyment. To be honest that ratio has perhaps moved a little too far in favour of the ‘just for fun’ books, and hopefully I’ll read slightly more ‘to review’ books in February, but all told I think it’s worked out reasonably well. I can usually get a good sense of my overall mood and mindset from looking back at the books I chose to read, and it seems clear to me that I was keen to just kick back and enjoy my reading…which is never really a bad thing.
Variety and diversity
This is an interesting one, not least because I deliberately set this as quite a loose, general goal. I’m keen to make sure I’m not just reading the same sorts of books all the time, and from that perspective I’m pretty happy with how I got on. Obviously SFF was a pretty common genre in my January reads, but I also read several crime novels and a classic gothic horror novel; in addition, while I chose plenty of books by authors I know and love, four of them were from authors I hadn’t read before. Obviously I could still read more widely, but I’m comfortable with that level of variety.
From a diversity-specific perspective, it’s a bit up and down. On the positive side, 9 of my 15 reads (so 60%) were written by female authors, and I’m delighted with that – I even read a rare all-female BL book (Covens of Blood, which features novellas by Anna Stephens, Liane Merciel and Jamie Crisalli)! On the other hand, those 15 books were all (I think) written by white authors, which isn’t quite what I was hoping for. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t begrudge reading any of them – but I’d like to find some different perspectives in my February reading, and look beyond my own point of view.
Catch up
The last goal is all about catching up on books from last year’s TBR list which I didn’t get around to reading. On the reviewing front I didn’t succeed whatsoever – I still have a ton of review copies waiting for me to read them. I did however catch up on several Black Library books that I’d been meaning to read purely for fun – Chris Wraight’s Warhawk, David Guymer’s novella Bonereapers, and the aforementioned Covens of Blood. Hopefully in February I can pick up a couple of those review copies, but I also have plenty of non-review books waiting to be read, so I’m sure I’ll find time for one or two of those too!
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Anyway, I’ve written quite a bit in this article already, so I’ll call it a day there. I hope you’ve had as good a January as I have, and you’ve enjoyed whichever book or books you’ve picked up over the last few weeks! Here’s to a great February for all of us.
I’m always keen to hear about what you’ve enjoyed reading or listening to recently, and I hope you’ve enjoyed however many Track of Words posts you’ve read this month. Do let me know if you’ve got any comments or questions about what I’ve been covering or whether there’s anything you’d like to see (in these roundup articles or on the site in general) – you can drop me a line in the comments below, or get in touch on Twitter.
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