{"id":53320,"date":"2024-01-01T17:16:48","date_gmt":"2024-01-02T01:16:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/?p=53320"},"modified":"2024-01-01T17:16:48","modified_gmt":"2024-01-02T01:16:48","slug":"2023-is-dead-long-live-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/?p=53320","title":{"rendered":"2023 Is Dead, Long Live 2024!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>In today&#8217;s post, I&#8217;m going to talk about the following:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>A Review of Brian Buhl&#8217;s 2023, In Brief<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>2024 Anticipations<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>My 2024 Blog Challenge<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">2023, In Brief<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>This was the year I published <em>The Repossessed Ghost.<\/em>  It debuted at Baycon, and I felt like a rock star that entire weekend.  I participated on the Small Publishing in a Big Universe podcast a couple of times.  Huge highlights meant the year could have been great.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>On the other hand, my day job became harder and my mental health took a dive.  I haven&#8217;t been this depressed since before I joined Trimark, and if you know anything about my level of depression back then, you know that&#8217;s saying something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This was the year that my blood pressure became an issue.  This was the year that someone I thought was a friend told me that we weren&#8217;t, really, because of something that happened years ago.  This is the year that I stayed home when others were going out.  This is the year I wanted to give up.  Like, really give up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I stopped writing at the beginning of November, and my mind went to dark places.  I <em>need<\/em> to write.  When I&#8217;m not writing, I get like this.  It&#8217;s hard to write when I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;m going to be able to share my stories, but 2023 showed me that I can get my stories and my posts out in the world, even if it&#8217;s only to a handful of people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, now that I&#8217;m safely standing inside 2024, I bit 2023 farewell.  You had your high points, but you were mostly a long, difficult time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">2024 Anticipations<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Here&#8217;s a big one!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><a href=\"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/image.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"827\" height=\"872\" src=\"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/image.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-53321\" srcset=\"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/image.png 827w, https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/image-285x300.png 285w, https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/image-768x810.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 827px) 100vw, 827px\" \/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><em>One For the Road<\/em> is a short story about two witches trying to save their modern city by capturing Father Time and delivering him to the annual New Year&#8217;s ritual.  Without Father Time, the city will fall apart, and it&#8217;s up to Tina and Alexa to make sure that doesn&#8217;t happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Melissa had this idea for a story, and I kept telling her that she should write it.  It&#8217;s her story.  Then just before Christmas several years ago, it dawned on me that she was asking me to write her a very specific story.  How could I say no to that?  <em>One For the Road<\/em> is sweet and fun, just like Melissa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;ll talk more about <em>One For the Road<\/em> over the next couple of weeks.  It will be available everywhere on January 12th, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.arisia.org\/\">the first day of Arisia in Boston<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Speaking of which, Melissa and I are going to Arisia in Boston.  Then next month, we&#8217;re going to <a href=\"https:\/\/boskone.org\/\">Boskone<\/a>, which appears to take place in the same hotel.  We&#8217;re front loading this year with some fun writing conventions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What else am I anticipating this year?  There&#8217;s something with my day job I&#8217;m looking forward to, but I have my doubts about how it&#8217;s going to go.  We will see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There&#8217;s some Writing Excuses stuff that we still have to decide on.  I would love to go to WorldCon, but that&#8217;s a lot of money, and if things are uncertain with my day job, I might not want to commit so much money to that kind of trip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m looking forward to writing more this year, which brings me to my final topic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">My 2024 Blog Challenge<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m going to try and write a blog post every day in 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Are they going to be like what I&#8217;ve done in October?  Sort of.  In October, I plan out the entire month before it begins.  I write the posts on the day that they&#8217;re to be posted, and I deviate from the schedule when the whim takes me.  A lot of the October posts wind up being these long, thoughtful essays, usually about writing or something writing related.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m not going to plan out the entire year in advance, but I will plan it out in 2 week chunks.  I know that the next couple of weeks, I need to talk about <em>One For the Road<\/em>.  I&#8217;m an author, and I need to promote my story.  I don&#8217;t need to be obnoxious about it, but it still needs to be present and put at the forefront.  I can keep it interesting and more than just &#8220;buy my book.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m going to try and adhere to a format in order to make it easier to write something every day.  The basic format I&#8217;m planning is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Personal news<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Upcoming events\/promotion\/follow-ups to previous posts<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The Actual Topic<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>The Actual Topic can be nearly anything.  I will mostly talk about writing, but I&#8217;m freeing myself to include video games, programming, and other things I&#8217;m into.  I contain multitudes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is an election year, so as things get spicy, I&#8217;m sure some of my political thoughts might take the spotlight.  I&#8217;m not going to turn this into a political blog or go on any of the rants I&#8217;ve enjoyed in the past.  At the same time, I&#8217;m going to be me, and I&#8217;m a person that cares deeply about my world, my country, and the future we&#8217;re leaving for our children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One thing I might do as an Actual Topic is publicly write a story.  That is, I will expose my entire process here and write a story out in the open.  It won&#8217;t be a Mel Walker story, and it won&#8217;t be related to anything I&#8217;ve already written that hasn&#8217;t been published yet.  This will be an entirely new thing.  Maybe it&#8217;ll be a short story.  Maybe it&#8217;ll be a novel.  Once we get to the brainstorming part, I&#8217;ll figure that out with you.  I think it could be fun, and it will go farther than anything I&#8217;ve done before to teach writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is going to be hard, and I&#8217;m going to be tempted to treat this like so many other New Year&#8217;s resolutions.  I&#8217;ve proven I&#8217;m capable of keeping this up for an entire month, so maybe I&#8217;ll re-evaluate this plan when I get to February.  I think it&#8217;ll be good for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is 2024.  Let&#8217;s make this year actually great!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In today&#8217;s post, I&#8217;m going to talk about the following: 2023, In Brief This was the year I published The Repossessed Ghost. It debuted at Baycon, and I felt like a rock star that entire weekend. I participated on the Small Publishing in a Big Universe podcast a couple of times. Huge highlights meant the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53320"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53320\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53322,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53320\/revisions\/53322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}