Well, 2024 sure was … something, wasn't it?
I don’t think I’ll look back on the state of the world in this year with any fondness, but when it came to my writing, it’s been a year of milestones, changes, and a lot of learning.
This will be my last newsletter until Jan. 3 (I'll go on hiatus over the holidays), so it seems like a good moment to take a look back on this year in the life of one very tired writer.
In my writing career, this has been a year of interesting firsts. I'm about 10 years in to my publishing career now, if you count from when I started to make regular short fiction sales and signed with an agent. This year, I received my first grant (from the City of Ottawa, to write Mercutio), and had my first writer-in-residence position (at the University of Ottawa) and was invited to be a guest of honour for the first time (for next year's Can*Con). I started the year as a featured guest for an amazing book club run by All in A Day, a program on our local CBC radio station. It's been a year of my local community sending me signals that it values my work, which gives me a feeling I can't quite put into words.
I finished a big revision on The Tapestry of Time, working with my editor, Jane Johnson. I also wrote most of the first draft and all of the second draft of Mercutio, and I am just finishing up the first draft of another novel we'll announce soon. In all three cases, the writing stretched me, in different ways, and I definitely put myself through my paces. All year I've felt like I'm not doing enough, like I'm behind, but I'm a much more experienced writer than I was a year ago.
And of course, this year we published The Tapestry of Time, my eighth book, and my fourth novel with HarperVoyager UK. The paperback of The Valkyrie came out this year too, so there's been a batch of new readers for that book recently.
My agent and I signed a deal for Mercutio and another novel yet to be named with HarperVoyager UK. We also signed the first translation deal for any of my books (other than my Assassin's Creed books.) The Italian edition of The Tapestry of Time is coming soon.
I published one short story this year: "The Investigation Is Sealed", in Pulp Literature. I also wrote and sold another short story, which I hope to tell you about soon.
I was a panelist at the Toronto International Festival of Authors, the Ottawa International Writers Festival, the Salon du livre de Montreal, Can*Con here in Ottawa and the World Fantasy Convention in Niagara Falls.
I mentored two writers this year for a period of a few months each, one of them with an honorarium funded by the Writers Union of Canada mentorship microgrant, and the other through SFWA's volunteer mentorship program, which I usually participate in every year. Both were wonderful experiences.
I gave some talks and workshops that brought me a lot of joy – I won't list them all, but I was particularly happy with an online workshop on poetry and prose I taught with my friend Amanda Earl, a talk I gave to the Oxford University Speculative Fiction Group on archetypes, and the workshop on ideas and imagination I gave as part of my writer-in-residence position. Oh, and I was invited to talk about my book to local booksellers in the spring, which was a very cool experience and gave me a better picture of how bookstores work.
Shoutout to everyone at HarperCollins who's worked on my books this year and helped make many of these things happen.
In August, I won my third Aurora Award for Best Novel, for The Valkyrie, which I still can't quite believe. And I had my first Scribe Award nomination, for Assassin's Creed: The Resurrection Plot.
I listened to a lot of Italo Calvino audiobooks. Pretty much constantly.
And I worked hard on my part-time contract position writing non-fiction, including a trip to Mexico City for research. My other day-job work that helps pay the bills is teaching my arts and culture reporting class, which I did in the first half of the year; it's very rewarding and more so every year, as I get better at it.
One joy this year has been attending swordplay class when I can, which has helped with physical and mental health a bit.
Overall, it feels like a year of striving for renewal and improvement, a year of uphill struggle and hard thinking and frustration. I put a lot of energy into painting the house and a few other long-neglected projects, but never seemed to get ahead – it was a year of the household elves sending expensive trouble our way. Our car literally fell apart thanks to one too many salty Ottawa winters. Our basement (packed with stuff that belonged to my late mother-in-law and the detritus of years of parenthood) had a massive flood because both our sump pump and our battery-operated backup sump pump failed simultaneously for different reasons. Our washing machine required three repair visits before they diagnosed the problem. My laptop is on the fritz and the repair shop still can't figure out why. Entropy was not my friend this year.
Still, I have many, many things to be grateful for, and the books I produced this year come to you courtesy of a little black cat curled up next to my hip, an extraordinary teenager talking through my plot problems with me, and a partner who loyally declares my latest book his favourite. And courtesy of a group of local writer friends who are the absolute best.
I hope 2025 brings resistance to authoritarianism, war and genocide; resistance to book bans and union busting and corporate abuse of dehumanizing technology. I hope it brings land back for Indigenous peoples. I hope it brings us closer to a day on which we are all prosperous and free. I hope we face it together, whatever it brings, and I know that at least some of what it brings will be beautiful.