Hello and welcome to November’s Monthly Roundup post here on Track of Words. It’s been a busy month for me, in terms of both writing things to post this month and planning/commissioning/writing things for December. I’ll talk more about December later (how is it almost the end of the year?!), but for now let’s focus on November – eight posts this month (plus this one, which is a little earlier than usual) feels about right, and I’m happy with how everything’s turned out I think. As usual I’ll use the first part of this post to recap on all of the November articles, reviews and interviews, so you can check out anything you might have missed, and then I’ll use the second section to talk mostly about what you can look forward to next month on Track of Words.
November’s posts
My fluctuating productivity seems to have levelled out a bit this month, and given all the prep work I’ve been doing (sorry to keep going on about December) I’m pretty happy with how much I’ve got done. I hope everything has been fun to read!
Articles
Just the one article in November – well, two if you include the one you’re reading right now. Don’t worry though, I’ve got a whole host of articles lined up for December!
Monthly Roundup – October 2022 – as ever, I kicked the month off with my regular roundup, just like the one you’re reading right now. I had a reasonable amount to talk about, with a recap of the eight posts that I published in October (one article, one interview and six reviews) and the two posts that I updated, as well as the usual general overview which included some reflections on new review/interview series, and a quick update on my overall reading progress for 2022.
Reviews
This month my regular reviews covered a high-tech thriller, a Wild West sci-fi mashup, and a couple of intriguing short stories set in the Middle East and the darkness of a shadowed forest, while my ‘Short and Sweet’ reviews post was mostly sci-fi themed (with half of the featured titles being Black Library novels).
Short and Sweet – November 2022 – for my second instalment of this new series I picked out four books to briefly talk about. Those were: Network Effect by Martha Wells (book 5 in the incredible Murderbot Diaries series), Flesh and Steel by Guy Haley (the one remaining Warhammer Crime novel I’d been meaning to read for ages), Rogal Dorn: The Emperor’s Crusader by Gav Thorpe (the 16th Horus Heresy Primarchs novel, and a very good one at that), and No Time Like the Past by Jodi Taylor (the fifth Chronicles of St Mary’s novel). It’s still early days for this approach, but I’m quite enjoying it so far.
The Bahrain Underground Bazaar by Nadia Afifi – I read this dark but deceptively warm short story in The Best of World SF Volume 2 (edited by Lavie Tidhar) and absolutely loved it. Told through the eyes of the elderly Zahra, whose terminal diagnosis has driven her to come to terms with her impending death in some unexpected ways, it cleverly explores the conflict between tradition and modernity in the Arab world, using technology to inform a story about a woman struggling to understand how to hold onto her identity and her independence. It was the first thing I’d ever read by Nadia Afifi, but I’m confident it won’t be the last!
Lazarus by Sarah Cawkwell – combine wildly advanced and ethically unconstrained technology with the dusty grit of the Old West and you’ll get something like Wild West Exodus, a really enjoyable setting that Lazarus does a good job of exploring and bringing to life. This was my first introduction to the IP, and while the plot was pretty straightforward it was a lot of fun to read…and surprisingly dark in places.
Firewall by James Swallow – I love a good techno-thriller, and very few authors write them as well as Swallow does, so I wasn’t surprised by how much I enjoyed Firewall, but I still didn’t expect it to be quite so difficult to put down! I’ve never played a Splinter Cell game or read a Tom Clancy novel, but this gave me everything I needed to absolutely love it. It’s about to be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as a multi-part audio adaptation too, so definitely check that out!
Snow White, Green Mantle by Jude Reid – featured in issue 32 of Grimdark Magazine, this is a deceptively dark little story that’s a bit like a classic fairy tale but told with modern sensibilities. It’s a tale of two women in the depths of a forest – a travelling hunter, and a woman she’s been tasked with killing – and the lengths that each will go to survive, but it also offers a glimpse into a strange world that’s only ever hinted at, but is instantly intriguing. To me, this sort of powerful and character-driven story is exactly what ‘grimdark’ fiction should be.
Interviews
Two interviews in November, and two very different ones – one discussing a completed epic fantasy trilogy, and another looking at the life of an SFF blogger and reviewer.
Author Interview: Mike Brooks Talks The God-King Chronicles (and a Busy 2022) – I hadn’t done an author interview for a while, but I had fun in this one talking to Mike about his epic fantasy trilogy The God-King Chronicles, which has recently completed with the released of The Godbreaker. It’s always interesting to look back at a whole series/trilogy once it’s done, and Mike went into some fascinating detail about what he wanted to achieve with it, and how he went about planning the whole thing. It’s been a bit of a crazy year for Mike in terms of books coming out, so we also talked about the three Black Library novels he’s had published in 2022!
SFF Community Spotlight: Nick Borrelli from Out of This World SFF – I had a lot of fun chatting to Nick for the second in my new interview series, where we covered all sorts from how he got into blogging and reviewing to what he gets out of writing reviews and supporting authors and other bloggers online. If you’re interested in what it’s like being a reviewer, or just looking for some great recommendations, definitely check this out.
General update
I’ll talk a little bit about my reading progress at the end of this section, but I mostly want to use this part of the article to look ahead to December, and talk about what’s been occupying a lot of my time and energy this month – the 2022 Track of Words Advent Calendar. After several years where I posted a review or interview every day in December, last year I decided to do something a bit different and introduced the idea of an Advent Calendar. I did still write a few reviews and articles, and arrange some author interviews, but I also got a range of authors involved in writing guest posts and guest reviews (and even a piece of original fiction), and – if I do say so myself – it worked out really well. You can see all of the Advent posts from last year on this overview page.
I had a lot of fun putting that together, so I obviously want to do something similar this year. For much of this month I’ve been hard at work planning this year’s Advent Calendar, working out what I want to contribute myself, who to invite to contribute guest content, and the sort of guest content that it would be cool to see. With very few exceptions, everyone I’ve asked about getting involved has been incredibly positive, even when they haven’t been able to commit to writing anything, and it’s been really heartening to see so many people keen to join in. I’m genuinely quite excited to get everything posted and see what people think! Putting something like this together is a lot of work, and while it involves less actual writing than the whole review-a-day thing I used to do, it’s arguably more stressful as there are a lot more moving parts to it.
As I write this I’ve got more than half of the Advent posts about ready to go – a couple of my posts and a good number of author contributions – and all the rest pretty much agreed to and (hopefully) on their way. It’s a slightly nerve-wracking moment to be honest, as any problems now will mean I’ll need to scramble to find replacements, but I’m keeping positive! There’s loads of cool stuff to look forward to, including original fiction, lots of fascinating author interviews, and a whole host of really interesting guest posts. I’ve also been hard at work putting together some cool graphics for all of the different posts, with a lot of guidance from a very talented designer friend, so everything’s going to look great as well! Hopefully what you see in the Advent Calendar visuals will eventually roll over to the rest of the site too, so I hope you like the new look.
Here’s a teaser of some of those new visuals
Advent preparation aside, it’s been another month where I’ve slowly gathered momentum with my reading progress, starting off a bit slowly but building up speed. I ended up reading or listening to 13 books over the course of November, which has taken me to a total of 138 for the year to date – that’s six more than I read in the whole of 2021! As ever, I’m conscious that quantity is less important than quality, but once again I’ve had a lot of fun with this month’s reading. I’ve read four Black Library books (one anthology, one novella and two novels), which is quite a lot more than usual, but I’ve also managed some nice variations with a couple of crime books, and three wildly differing audiobooks. It’s fairly in keeping with my listening this year that I would enjoy an audiobook about birds (Jennifer Ackerman’s The Genius of Birds), but Samin Nosrat’s fascinating cookery book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and Patti Smith’s bizarre but compelling Year of the Monkey were spur of the moment choices that I thoroughly enjoyed.
Out of those 13 books I only read four of them with a view to reviewing – I’ve still got a couple of reviews to write, so watch out for those either during the Advent Calendar series or at the end of December. I’m not planning on writing too much in December (half the point of doing the Advent series is so that I can have a more relaxing month!) so I imagine I’ll be mostly choosing books to read purely for fun again, although I might pick up a few to review for January so that I’m ahead of the game a bit. We’ll see. I’m definitely hoping to read and listen to plenty in December, so it’ll be interesting to see if I reach 150 by the end of the year! Again though, as long as I enjoy what I read I’ll be happy.
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That’s it for this month’s roundup – if you’ve got this far, thanks for sticking with me. If there’s anything you’d like me to cover in these articles in future please do let me know – I’m thinking of stripping them down a bit next year, and maybe using some of the content I normally put in these in something like a fortnightly or monthly newsletter. If you’ve got any thoughts on that idea, do get in touch!
Anyway, I hope you had a good November, and read lots of great books. Let me know if you read anything that you particularly enjoyed. In the meantime, I hope you have a great December – and enjoy the Advent Calendar series here on Track of Words!
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