2024 sure was a year.
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
Last year I had the hubris to tell you all that the year had gone well for me, even if it didn’t for most people. This year, regardless of personal and career progress, I felt the larger stresses of the world more keenly. Transphobia, fascism, genocide, and vulture capitalist “consultants” chewing up my day job in particular, whee! Definitely not the best year.
But I’ve been resting and thinking a lot now that the holiday break is on us, and the solstice in particular, and I think I really want to end this year on a note of gratutide. To note what did go well, because there are always little things that did go well, and I think we don’t do ourselves any favors when we let those things get lost, even in the face of something big and bad.
In case you don’t want to read a lot of navel-gazing, I’ll first skip to the part where I list what I published this year:
The Silent Sea (Baffling)
Music, Not Words (The Neurodiversiverse: Alien Encounters)
That’s it. Mostly, I worked on book-length fiction, and I got a lot done that I’m proud of, but just nothing I can publicly announce yet. Watch this space in 2025, because there will be something to announce then, even if I have to self-publish it. There’s stuff I’ve been super-excited about literally all year and just sitting on my hands about, because publishing, now more than ever, is really slow. But it will get to you, one way or another.
A couple other notable things happened:
Research.
In the spring this year, at my day job, I ran a survey about fiction writers’ experiences of, and attitudes to, generative AI. My co-authors and I have now published some preliminary results from this survey, which you can find here:
This is a preprint; we’re in the process of getting a version of it submitted to a good conference. More later. This study has been emotionally draining in some ways, which is why I haven’t been the fastest working on it, but I feel it’s also very worthwhile, and I’m encouraged by the initial response by my colleagues. I honestly think there are lots of people in computer science who do care how technological change is affecting creative humans, and who would like to make it better. They’re just not the people who are getting billions of dollars in VC funding. Either way, more later.
Pride.
One of the biggest things I’ve been working on this year is connecting to community, especially queer community, face-to-face and on my own terms. This has been really helpful for me to work on, in even more ways than I thought it would. (I marched in the Pride parade this year with a group of queer folx from work, and now I’m on the organizing committee for that group, and it’s actually really cool? Like, these-are-the-people-who-get-me level cool?)
In the process - and in the process of one of my book-length fiction projects also, which was just an embarrassingly large number of words about a trans character and his cool backstory - I’ve realized how important gender really is to me.
Like, I already told you I’m genderfluid. I told you my pronouns are they/them. I’ve known this about myself for a while, but it’s been more theoretical. Like, I have this gender gauge in my head that goes back and forth but it’s largely an internal thing, you know? And 2024 was the year that I sat down with myself and said, no, wait, I don’t want this to be only an internal thing. I don’t want to be a person who looks like a cis woman, acts like a cis woman, and just has an asterisk saying technically they’re also other things. (No offense meant if that’s your gender - it’s a perfectly valid gender, it’s just not mine.) I am genderfluid and that means I am actually transmasculine, a significant portion of the time. So I want to do something about that. I haven’t figured out quite what, apart from messing around with different ways to do my clothes and hair. But this is a thing and it will keep on being one.
Why, yes, this is a scary thing to figure out about oneself in this particular year of world history, thanks for asking! But I’ve got folks I can talk to about it, locally, all I want, because a lot of us are in the same boat. And at least I got to do some cool writing about it. It used to be hard for me to write trans characters, apart from fanciful shapeshifting types like Akavi; I wasn’t quite ready to face those feelings head on. I think I am now, and when I look at what I wrote this year and last year compared to those early works, I can really see the difference.
Anyway.
See you in whatever the hell happens next year. I’ll still be here, and I hope you will, too.