First newsletter of 2024! I’m back home in Pune, settling in. We got back home early on the 5th, which turned out to be Friday, so I don’t have to officially start the year till Monday.
Since I have that breathing space, I wanted to reflect on the coming year before it properly begins.
I talked about 2023 in my last post. With 2024, my hope is to carry forward what I learnt in the last few years.
Given that I achieved none of the “goals” I set for myself, but had a good year nevertheless, I’m thinking about what made the year good for me, and that was having a lot of free time – it gave me flexibility, but it also gave me the space to wander, to think, to spontaneously meet people, and to write and draw when I felt like it. (I used to nearly achieve these goals in previous years, till the pandemic hit and everything went haywire.)
I want to retain that freedom in 2024, work on improving myself physically (create opportunities for movement outside of travel and directed exercise), and to nourish my brain. I would also like to continue writing and drawing, but those aren’t, for the moment, the important bits. While I feel a lot better than I did in the last couple of years, I’m not sure my burnout phase is over yet, so I don’t want to put pressure on myself(which I think was a big factor in not achieving most of last year’s goals – they were noble, but they wouldn’t have improved my life in that year, and I had to ignore them for my own good).
The trick with setting a goal for yourself – one that most people setting resolutions fail to understand – is that it has to incremental rather than monumental (so it can’t be “work out every day”, because then a single failure is a complete failure), and achievable from where you are right now (so it can’t be “write a short story a week” if it takes you two months at your usual speed), while still being a bit of a stretch (one movie a week would just be silly for me, for example). And finally, it has to be one where failing also feels good. So if, say, I write four short stories instead of six, that’s still four more than I’d have otherwise had. Based on that …
Work-wise, as I said, I’d like to land at the same number of pages as 2023 or less – i.e. 1,100. My 2024 worksheet currently says 2,340 pages, but this is a lie I’m telling myself. This is the number of pages I’d be receiving if 1) an ongoing series came in every single month, 2) every project I’ve agreed to began at the earliest possible moment, 3) each issue had the maximum number of pages possible for it to have.
I’ve taken very seriously the maxim that overwork happens if you plan for the best possible day everyday and then break yourself to achieve it, rather than planning for the worst possible scenario and giving yourself that buffer. So since last year, I’ve used this fake maximum possible number to prevent myself from taking on more work than I want to handle. I wanted my fake number to be 2,000 or below this year, but, to be frank, I was offered just far too many amazing projects I couldn’t say no to. There were a few more that I desperately wanted to say yes to, but they were either ongoings (I’m accepting no more ongoings till the three that I’m on right now are over), or they were going to have deadlines with no leeway, and from experience, the letterer usually bears the brunt of that – I don’t want any more all-nighters in my life.
Last year’s “super-big fake maximum to frighten myself off” number was 2,600, and I landed at 1,100 by the end of the year. Let’s see where 2,340 lands me this year. (It’s already down to 2,300 based on a couple of email exchanges I had on Friday.)
The next thing, since I have no writing goals, is entertainment.
I’d love to watch more movies this year, so my goal for that is 200. I have an addendum to that – numbers I’d like to hit, but wouldn’t be miffed at all if I don’t, because they’re markers of interest – 50 English-language movies, 50 movies in Indian regional languages (i.e. languages I don’t natively speak), 50 non-English movies from around the world, and finally, to split the last 50 – 25 movies in Hindi/Marathi, and 25 documentaries.
The addendum is just to remind myself to watch more documentaries and Indian movies this year – it’s more important that I try than that I get there.
I hit 44 prose books last year. I’d love to get to a book a week this year – so, 52.
I’d definitely like to read more plays than 2 (TWO!) this year. But since the last post taught us that 52 is a stretch, I’ve putting this one at 24 – two per month. To make this even easier for myself, I’m expanding the remit to plays and screenplays. The two are different beasts – a play is mostly dialogue with some guidance on setup, with description that acts purely as a guide to the crew. When you read a play, you’re mostly reading dialogue. A screenplay, on the other hand, is a document used to sell a movie, so it has some responsibility to make you see a film in your head. It’s still largely dialogue, but the description is doing a fair amount of stuff, from being simply well-written, to “directing on the page”, to adding colour and form that wouldn’t be possible in dialogue. The two experiences have a lot in common, but they’re not the same, and since I spent a lot of my teenage reading online screenplays of movies I couldn’t afford to rent, I know I like reading screenplays.
Comics – I don’t think I want to put a number on this. Last year I read fewer comics than I have in any year in the last two decades, and that was still a fair number. I buy a lot of comics because they’re exciting and I don’t want to miss out, but that means there’s a ton of great comics sitting unread on my shelves at the moment, including many of everyone’s top ten comics of the year. So it’s not like I’ll end up landing at zero, or, god forbid, two.
But there’s something off about my comics reading for the last many months, and I think that means something – maybe I just need the rest, maybe I need to recalibrate what I’m reading, maybe I just understand too much of how the sausage is made, or maybe I’m over comics after two decades of near-ecstatic love. Maybe reading prose and watching movies is satiating whatever needs the hybrid form of comics was fulfilling while I was off both those mediums for almost a decade. On the other hand, like any of my several ongoing obsessions, my love for the form waxes and wanes, and perhaps it’s currently in a waning phase, and I’ll make up for it in a flurry come next year. Another possibility is that my brain will click into another gear once I start scripting SEASIDE rather than just outlining it, and I’ll want to drink in everything I can that involves visual storytelling on the page. We’ll find out.
Finally, I keep not hitting my “work out 200 days of the year” goal, and this is one that I need to have every year whatever number I land on. Except – maybe I want a number this year that I’m more likely to hit. The highest I’ve gotten with this ever was 120 days, and the lowest was 60. So let me bring the goalpost a bit closer this year, and keep it at 150.
So in sum, my goals for 2024:
- Letter 1,100 pages or less
- Watch 200 movies
- Read 52 prose books
- Read 24 plays/screenplays
- Work out 150 days of the year
This has only one goal in common with previous years, and it’s the important one. I think I feel good about that.
No work this week, since (as mentioned above) I landed on Friday and I don’t start working till Monday, but I did spend most of Friday sending emails to everybody to figure out what work in January is going to look like.
Other than that, I was nominated once again for the Broken Frontier Awards for Best Letterer this year, alongside some great people. Comic Book Yeti’s ICE Awards also included me in their Best Letterer nominees this year.
Links for the week:
- I know we have a generalised sense of stuff being less well-made now, but here’s Izzie Ramirez on how consumerism has led to badly made products.
- TCJ posted their usual annual list of the best comics of the year from several of their contributors.
- Ritesh has a great list of comics he loved in 2023.
- Here’s Abigail Nussbaum’s favourite books of the year.
I wanted to write about some of my favourite things of 2023 in the previous newsletter, but I was travelling and didn’t want to trawl through my blog/Twitter history, so we’re doing this now.
Book of the Year
Easily, easily Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors. I’m on social media nodding terms with Vajra, and he’s always struck me as an extremely smart, incisive person and a great critic, but I hadn’t read any of his fiction before I picked this up. I knew this landed vaguely in the “new Weird” genre, but nothing else. If possible, I recommend you likewise go into this book not knowing anything. The first half-page of prose convinced me I was in safe hands, and that I was going to love this book, which was handy, because for most of the reading, you have no idea where this is going to go.
It’s rare these days to read a story that I genuinely can’t predict, and it’s a vertiginous, exhilarating experience when that happens. Usually, even with unpredictable setups, things settle down in the back half, but Vajra’s story keeps you guessing till the end, and it’s not because it’s afraid to show its hand, but because it’s got far more tricks going than you think.
But that’s just the story. What captivated me just as much – perhaps more – was the prose. Vajra’s writing is dense, chewy, and nearly every sentence is doing more than one thing. In fact, I couldn’t resist reading bits of this book out loud to K all the way through, just because of how much they delighted me, and even with that meagre context she enjoyed listening to the writing itself. The thing is, a story like this, which is so invested in wrong-footing the reader, or turning into a different story at intervals, can start to seem arbitrary or inconsequential (this was my problem with Barbarian, for example) if not done with an assured hand, and Vajra lets you know in the first few pages that you’ll be taken care of, that this writer knows what he’s doing.
I finished reading this book in two days, and it took that long only because I didn’t want to skim at any point. Reading this book was my full-time job for those two days, because I couldn’t stop.
There’s much more to say here, to do with the book’s relationship to politics, and its sharp-but-mature commentary on genre storytelling, but I’d rather not delve into anything here that might spoil the book for you.
So here’s the opening paragraph instead:
The moment Fetter is born, Mother-of-Glory pins his shadow to the earth with a large brass nail and tears it from him. This is his first memory, the seed of many hours of therapy to come. It is raining. His shadow is cast upon reddish soil thick with clay that clings to Fetter as he rolls in it, unable to raise his head, saved from drowning in mud only by the fortunate angle of his landing. The arch of Mother-of-Glory’s knee frames what he sees next. His shadow writhes slowly on its nail. Mother-of-Glory dips her hands in that mud to gather up the ropy shadow of his umbilical cord and throttles his severed shadow with a quick loop, pulled tight. The shadow goes to its end in silence – or if it cries out, if shadows can cry out, that sound is lost in the rain.
Happily, it seems that The Saint of Bright Doors has done well, and it has Been Noticed, appearing on several best-of lists, including some by sf luminaries.
Vajra’s next book, Rakesfall, is coming sometime in 2024, and I can’t wait. The announcement (linked in this essay Vajra wrote about how one writes in engagement with the world in general and Palestine in particular) says that it’s a standalone, but I believe I read somewhere that it’s a thematic companion to Saint, though I might be wrong on that count.
Honourable mentions: Signs Preceding the End of the World, Difficult Men, A Clash of Kings, Ghachar Ghochar, Space Odyssey, Grind Your Bones to Dust, The Devil All the Time, No Country for Old Men, Ways of Seeing, You Never Give Me Your Money, Minor Detail, For Profit.
Film of the Year
I finally watched Night Is Short, Walk On Girl this year, and it already seems to retroactively have become part of my psyche for my entire adulthood. The same team’s tv show The Tatami Galaxy had made a strong impression on me, but it was nothing like the revelatory experience of watching this film. At its core it’s a simple if slightly surreal picaresque based on a campus novel, but the precise pacing, the animation style and the constantly innovative staging flourishes elevate it to something strange and wonderful.
Most of my feelings about this film are quite personal, and I’m not sure I could convey them adequately, but you know how, once in a while, you watch something and think, They made this just for me. I feel that about most things Dan Watters writes, much of Nick Cave’s music, David Milch’s Deadwood, and about this film. They made this for me.
(PS: Turns out I’d been terrible at logging my film-watching last year, and in fact watched 121 films in 2023, and not 107 as I’d thought. Not too bad. I’ve updated it in the previous post as well.)
Honourable mentions: Punishment Park, Aftersun, Suzume, The Witch, Oppenheimer, Medusa Deluxe, Audition, Asteroid City, Court, Under the Skin, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Tenet, In the Mouth of Madness, The Loved Ones, The Outwaters, Snowflake/Tornado, Shin Godzilla. Rewatches: Oldboy, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Into the Spider-Verse, This Is Not a Film, Top Secret.
Comic of the Year
Honestly, after a short burst of reading lots of manga, particularly Yuri, my comics reading fell off for the rest of the year. I don’t know why that was – maybe the aftereffects of burnout, not wanting to look at a comic after working on them all day, or just a renewed interest in books and films not leaving me enough bandwidth to read lots of comics. So this one’s selected from a very slim stack.
Kowloon Generic Romance was the only book this year that had that “made for me” vibe. I read the first three volumes, which are extremely strong slice-of-life drama in a surreal/sf setting, with hints of a larger plot whose threads are being pulled at slowly. The writing’s fun, but where the book excels is the art – the city of Kowloon, in this fictional version, is lushly rendered, deeply imagined, and treated like a real place. Mayuzuki is a master of small expressions and details of body language, and, along with the setting, treats these people as entirely real, which was a highlight of her previous book After the Rain, which I read after this and enjoyed just as much.
And finally, this book is horny as hell in the best way. I don’t know if it started out as fan-service and got that way, or this is just what Mayuzuki enjoys drawing (the “women eating triangular food” theme continues in both books, so I’m assuming it’s her thing), but this book is Sexy in a way we don’t see much in genre fiction in the West. Generally, I feel things get more interesting and thorny when writers are willing to be, to use a modern expression, Horny on Main. This book has that in spades.
I did peek ahead into the next volumes, and it seems like the plot takes over in a way I might not enjoy, but I’ll always have these three volumes to pore over.
Honourable mentions: The Nice House on the Lake Cycle One, She Loves to Cook, She Loves to Eat, Dandadan, How Do We Relationship?, After the Rain, The Girl She Liked Wasn’t a Girl At All, Goodbye Eri. Rereads: Pluto, Scott Pilgrim.
TV Show of the Year
No question about it – The Bear Season 2. I wrote about Season 1 here, and wanted to do the same for Season 2, but I think I’d like to rewatch both seasons and marinate in their choices before I do that. For my money, though, this was even better than Season 1. A near-immaculate combination of great writing, great direction and production and perfectly pitched performances.
Honourable mentions: Seinfeld Season 8, Cinema Marte Dum Tak, Extraordinary, Poker Face, Chainsaw Man, Barry Season 4, Rewatches: The Tatami Galaxy.
App of the Year
This category might feel like a lark, but we spend so much time on devices that the apps we use form an important part of our life. I’ve been looking for a great Gmail app for the Mac for years now. I keep thinking that Spark will be it, but it’s never quite gotten there, and recently, it made some changes that put me off it entirely. Airmail had its own problems, the chief of which was that my emails could take ages to send, and it’d update my inbox rather eccentrically.
Mimestream, so far, does everything I need, does it extremely well, and several other things besides. It’s Mac-only, so it won’t work on your phone, but I’m okay with that, since I no longer have email on my phone (try it if you can – it’ll take so much stress out of your life). I love the interface – it’s Mac-native, I love that I can use my Gmail keyboard shortcuts, it updates like a dream. Just … everything you need in a good email app. Very happy with this.
Honourable mentions: ReadKit, Ulysses, Pocket Casts.
As you can tell from the title, I’m splitting this one into two parts. We’ve already crossed 3,00 words, so I figured I’d shunt the usual movie and book talk into a post by itself.
I’m making a few changes in how I do things here to accommodate the fact that it’d be easier for everyone if I could separate reviews into their own posts, but it’s far more convenient for me to write them all at once over the weekend. We’ll see how that works out.
I’m also planning a couple of “blogging projects”, which, if I can work them out, will see me posting more and shorter posts on the blog.
See you in a couple of days for Part 2.