2022 Year-in-Review, Hopes for 2023

Looking back, from about Easter 2021 to about August of this past year, this blog went on what might have been its most silent hiatus yet, with only the annual Thanksgiving and Ash Wednesday posts appearing in that span. But since late last summer, I’m back … if not with quite the frequency or regularity of posts that I used to have. And for once, in the past few months there’s been enough posts that weren’t themselves retrospectives to warrant a look back as well as a look into my modest hopes for the year to come.

Red Rain Reviews

The impetus that sparked me into actually dusting off the blog (which had been “on my list, one of these days” for some time) was the return to print (and digital equivalent) of a dear friend, whose work I’ve reviewed and recommended in the past. (All links in this section, except the one on her name, are to my reviews; each should contain a link to where you can get the book or story in question.)

Formerly published under the pen name “Aubrey Hansen,” she took everything down from publication for some years, but this year reissued Red Rain, “Project 74”, and the sequel I then as yet hadn’t read, all under her own (newly married) name, Rachel Newhouse. (She also published a picture book “easy reader” this past spring, which I did read but didn’t have anything to say about.) Once the Red Rain series returned, she added about one new “main line” novella or “side” story each month for several months running, at a pace that made me dizzy to think about, but I somehow managed to more or less keep up and read and review each new or new-to-me entry as it came out:

• The delightfully-madcap story “Prisoner 120518”
• The (previously-published) sequel Crook Q and new book 3 Andromeda
• Finally, the mind-bending story “Aurelius”

This past month she released an official omnibus of the series so far, which reached #1 on Amazon in the “Teen & Young Adult Christian Science Fiction” category … and there are more books and stories already in development, scheduled for release at an again rapid pace this year, so I’ll have to keep my wits about me to keep up.

Hymns and Thanksgiving

I resumed (if not resurrected) my series on “great, old, hymns”, with two entries so far:

• “Come, ye disconsolate”
• “Of the Father’s love begotten”

I have more hymns I’d like to cover in the coming months, but as I haven’t written those posts yet We Shall See.

I also wrote my annual Thanksgiving reflection in November.

Poetry

Finally, between new poems, old fragments finally finished, and old poor-quality drafts polished up to my standards, this fall and winter saw a flurry of poetry coming from my pen, and while a good deal of the new material won’t be made public for several years if ever (and some of the revised poems still aren’t good enough yet), I posted eight new (or newly-public) poems over the past months:

• Only Comfort (a blank-verse rendering or paraphrase of the first question and answer of the Heidelberg Catechism)
• The Empty Forum
• The Unasked Question
• A Tearful Farewell (in memoriam Pastor Val Chappell)
• “Long did I wander”
• Christmas Marvels
• And settings of Psalm 18 and Psalm 19.

More poems are already scheduled to appear in this space about every other week into August, with the first poem posted in 2023 scheduled for this coming Saturday.

Strategic Primer

While Strategic Primer, the strategy game I’ve been working on for many years and had been running a campaign of since 2009, has had its own blog since 2019, because it used to be one of the main “departments” here I should mention that that long-running campaign came to an end this year. Development of the game’s design will continue as I have time, with the aim of starting another campaign once it’s in a more polished state in several years, but it’s less of a priority than it once was.

Other Plans

Aside from “Hymns” posts, more new poetry, book reviews, and keeping up with correspondence, there are three projects I hope to make progress on:

• My second poetry collection, Dreams and Prayers.

The one major piece of this that’s lacking is a cover; I hope to finally get a suitable cover this year, and finally get the collection published.

I’m also considering reviving the Year in Verse blog, on which I posted one public-domain poem a week for a year to try to help promote A Year in Verse, to help promote Dreams and Prayers.

• My novel The Invasion.

I thought I was ready to start drafting this at the start of 2019, after spending 2018 making a detailed outline, but then world events revealed the “future history” I had sketched out to be utterly and egregiously inaccurate, so I need to rework that background, but once I’ve done so I hope to finally start actual writing.

Once I get momentum started I hope it won’t take too long to finish, since I’ve written (though not finished) drafts before and I have an extensive outline to follow, but We Shall See.

• Finally, a task-management app to fit the idiosyncrasies of my planning process.

I currently use Pivotal Tracker as the primary task repository and “source of truth” on task state, but it’s entirely too easy for tasks to get buried (especially when I get into a slump; once the “velocity” drops past a certain point, if there are enough tasks in a project the main Web interface can completely fail to load), and its model doesn’t work well with well-estimated but not yet fully planned tasks (“epics”, except in Tracker that term means just a special kind of label) or ones with fixed dates that other tasks need to move around as velocity changes (such as, in my case, holidays and birthdays). Tracker also asks me to estimate stories in “points” of “complexity,” unrelated to hours required to complete them.

Because of those difficulties, I have a workbook in Google Sheets with a sheet for each month, to which every new Tracker task is automatically added (in an “unscheduled” sheet). I estimate how many hours each task (whether coming from Tracker or not) will take, and record an approximation (or a retrospective estimate) of how much time they actually took, and the spreadsheet calculates a running “velocity” to help me make a plan in light of actual productivity.

One problem with this setup, aside from having to (remember to) update tasks in multiple systems, is that I can either add things like Christmas presents and birthdays well in advance, adding up to a flood in which tasks get lost, or wait and risk forgetting. To address that problem, this year I’ve set up a system to add certain tasks to Tracker (and thus the spreadsheet, where I already had placeholder lines for them) a few weeks in advance without my having to remember to do so. The way I’m having it add the tasks also generates email notifications, which will also help me keep from forgetting.

However, a proper multiplatform app that will let me manage and reorder tasks from whatever device I happen to be using, account for recurring tasks and partially-planned huge projects, and plan based on time estimates should reduce the friction and overhead of planning. (Though if, or when, productivity is truly lacking this won’t help, of course.)

Anyway, that’s the year that was (such as it was) and some of my hopes for 2023. I hope to do some goal-checking posts every so often, but as with so many things We Shall See.

• Administrivia
• Miscellany