At the beginning of every year, it is traditional to document a number of promises you will prove incapable of keeping throughout the following twelve months. But at least you mean well, or you wouldn’t be making such promises. They are, after all, meant to be improving. This is not a bad word, as some seem to think. We should improve ourselves. All the time. And New Year Resolutions (I apologise for the caps) are a good tool for doing so. But. They work better when they’re achievable, when they’re in your own gift, so to speak. It’s true, “I will sell a novel in 2017” could happen, but it’s someone else who makes the purchasing decision, no matter how much you network or self-promote…

And it’s precisely those sorts of personal target I’ve decided to set for my own resolutions in 2017:

1. I will write more fiction. 2016 was not a productive year for me, thanks to the dayjob. That situation hasn’t changed – if anything, it’s likely to be worse. But I still want to make more time to write fiction. And finish off the third book of my space opera trilogy. I have plenty of ideas for stories, I just need to start putting pen to paper…
2. I will watch more non-Anglophone movies than English-language ones. This one is relatively easy to implement – I’ve already changed my Amazon rental list so I get sent two world cinema films for every one Hollywood film. I just need to stick to it. I will, of course, continue to write about the films I’ve seen on my blog.
3. I will read more widely in terms of geography. A few years ago I tried a “world fiction” reading challenge, and read a novel from a different country each month. I managed six months before it fell apart. In 2016, I read Erpenbeck, Mallo, Borges, Calvino, Müller, Blixen, Liu, Knausgård… all translated works. I’d like to read more books from more countries. I have a bunch of Arabic translated fiction sitting on my bookshelves, and a list of authors from various nations I’d like to try – most, sadly, non-genre. So I plan to go for it in 2017. I might even tackle some fiction written in another language (with a dictionary to hand). I’ll still maintain a gender balance in my reading, of course.
4. I will write more non-fiction. I have… thoughts about science fiction. Some of them I’ve documented on this blog. I have also seen the genre change in the decades since I first started reading it. And those changes have been both good and bad. The “genre conversation” at present is a weak and feeble thing, partly propped up by the marketing departments of assorted genre imprints – I recently saw a small press magazine tweeting requests for support for authors published by a major genre imprint, WTF. The genre is in serious needs of its conversations, and it also needs to hold off on all those five-star reviews… I cannot change this, I do not have that power. But I can start writing about science fiction in a way that I think science fiction should be written about. This, I freely admit, is going to be the hardest resolution to keep.
5. I will start reviewing again. Thanks to the dayjob I sort of dropped out of reviewing books for both Interzone and Vector. In fact, I sort of dropped out of contributing to pretty much anything. I shouldn’t have let that slide, and promise to get the two reviews I owe done as soon as I can.
6. I’ll figure out what I’m going to do with Whippleshield Books. I set up Whippleshield Books so I could publish the Apollo Quartet, but I’d always planned to publish material by other writers. Unfortunately, my one attempt to do so – the anthology Aphrodite Terra – was pretty much ignored by everyone. Even the collection I rushed out for the Eastercon in 2016, Dreams of the Space Age, has sold only a handful of copies. Selling, and promoting, books required far more energy and time than I could devote to it last year, and much as I’d like to keep Whippleshield Books running in 2017 I’m not convinced I can give it that time and energy. I certainly don’t want to use it to publish only my own stuff – I have a collection of stories I’d like to see print, for example, but I’d sooner someone else published them.

I think that’s enough for now. I don’t want to get too ambitious. I didn’t even bother with any resolutions for 2016 – oh, except for one, the Reader Harder Challenge. But I promptly forgot about it, and seem to have read 13 of the 24 types of books in the challenge more by accident than by design. Anyway, the above half-dozen above are vague enough I should be able to a) remember them, and b) make a serious attempt at following them.

Of course, no one knows yet what 2017 will throw at us, although Brexit and Trump will certainly have major impacts. And not for the good. But there’s not a fat lot we can do about those since in the twenty-first century democracy apparently no loger means rule by the majority. We are in the hands of the Super Greedy, and they will take it all, even if it kills people, even if it crashes the global economy or the climate. If we survive 2017 more or less intact, it will be in spite of Trump and May, not because of them… And on that cheery note, I need to go finish off my last two Moving pictures posts of 2016…