THE YEAR OF RATHKE
or, looking forward and seeing back
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Well, 2023 sure was something! Since time keeps happening to us, we’re now into a new year, pregnant with expectation and hope. In some ways, 2023’s been my most productive but in other ways I’ve felt like I’ve been chasing myself, trying to catch up to where I’d like to be. But that’s sort of a permanent position likely inherited from a childhood of being tasked with doing things.
I have been shocked by the growth of the newsletter in the last year. I began with about 150 of you last January and now there are about 2,000 of you receiving this. For that, I truly am grateful. And as has become typical, I’m going to post about where we’ve been over the last year.
But first I’m going to speak a bit about where we’re heading in this very new year.
2024
Last week, I was considering changing my ambitious plans for the new year, but then a friend of mine told me to shut up and so I’m back on that horse, riding into a perilous sunset full of Big Plans and High Hopes.
I’ll break this down into a few categories for easy navigation but mostly to keep myself focused an on track. In case you haven’t noticed, I have a tendency to wander far afield before circling back to my initial point. This is a stylistic quirk of mine, I suppose—try talking to me in real life!—but some seem to think that when I go on a tangent about Orpheus while writing about Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, for example, that I’m simply losing track of the subject.
I promise you that there was a reason. You may not have seen it or connected the dots, but the dots were there.
Anyway, let’s begin with fiction.
Fiction
Oh, boy, here’s where the real big plans begin.
I’ve opened up an online store so you can buy my books directly from me, rather than using the biggest monopoly in the world.
You can go to my store here. It’s a work in progress.
I’m going to release twelve books this year. While that should be one per month, various aspects of this beyond my control may cause a month here or there to go without a book. But rest assured, I will be releasing twelve total books!
2024 marks the Ten-Year Anniversary of my novels Noir: A Love Story and Twilight of the Wolves. It’s also been twelve years since the publication of Ash Cinema.
Several years before even beginning this newsletter, I put my books out of print. There are boring and good and bad reasons for this that I’ll maybe talk about sometime (maybe I already have?), but I’m bringing them back.
Noir: A Love Story was the first novel I ever wrote. Ash Cinema was the third and Twilight of the Wolves was the fifth. Curiously, they were all written in the same twelve-month period and then released very out of order (Ash Cinema → Twilight of the Wolves → Noir: A Love Story).
Noir: A Love Story and Ash Cinema will have some editorial cleaning up done on them, new covers, and a few extra special features for the physical versions. Twilight of the Wolves will have a more substantial rewrite along with a new cover and, most importantly to me, it will be published under its original title: To Live.
I was very unhappy with how Noir: A Love Story and Twilight of the Wolves were handled back in 2014 so I hope to address many of the problems from way back when and reclaiming my own work.
Shifting gears to my two ongoing series:
Season One of The Shattered Stars ended with Libertatia; or, The Onion King. Season Two kicks off in March and will once again be released quarterly. Three of the four episodes have already been written, edited, and finalized, so these will come exactly on time.
I cannot wait for everyone to see what we’ve done with this new season. These are some of my favorite episodes (though Libertatia remains my favorite), and especially Episode Seven: The Wicked Flee. Sadly, we all must wait until September for that specific one.
The Howling Earth series will also continue onward! I’ve been slightly overwhelmed and delighted by the response people have had to it. I’ve sold about 1,500 copies of the series since Howl came out last December, which is pretty all right with me, considering this is really the only online presence I have (more on that below).
I’ll be releasing at least two more books in the series this year. Who knows, maybe more. And since each book gets longer than the last, it’s possible you’ll have far more to chew on in 2024 than you did in 2023.
And then the rest. I’ll be releasing The Adventures of Horus & Motherfucker through Kickstarter this year, which will be my first attempt at crowdfunding. The rest of the books coming may flex and fluctuate a bit, since it’s possible that other publishers may pick up one or two.
Here’s a snapshot of THE YEAR OF RATHKE, at least from the perspective of books:
January - Noir: A Love Story
February - Ash Cinema (introduction by Pablo D’Stair)
March - House of Ghosts (Episode Five of The Shattered Stars)
April - Book Four in The Howling Earth
May - To Live (rewritten version of Twilight of the Wolves)
June - Gnashing Teeth (Episode Six of The Shattered Stars)
July - Book Five in The Howling Earth
August - TBA
September - The Wicked Flee (Episode Seven of The Shattered Stars)
October - The Adventures of Horus & Motherfucker (fulfilled via Kickstarter)
November - TBA
December - Episode Eight of The Shattered Stars
As you can see, only two months are really unaccounted for right now. Don’t fret, though. I have literally twenty unpublished novels ready for publication to fill in here and there. But it’s also possible that I’ll release the Collected Essays on Harry Potter during one of those months or the Collected Essays on Wong Kar Wai or possibly the book length essay on Final Fantasy IX or maybe even just two more books in The Howling Earth series. Maybe, even, I’ll collect the nearly 200 100-word stories I wrote over on Substack Notes from June until December.
And as I said above, expect some fluctuation in there, with the exception being The Shattered Stars. Those are locked in and ready to go.
I’ll be launching the Kickstarter for The Adventures of Horus & Motherfucker in March. The cover is by
, who will also be doing illustrations for the novel. Possibly there will be an introduction to the novel as well, by one of my favorite writers.And then I need to make this announcement since we had originally planned to launch this month, but Flatline Magazine, Broken River Books’ magazine for original short fiction, is getting pushed back. Possibly just until the summer.
You can subscribe over there to keep up to date.
My own short fiction pursuit continues, though I must admit that writing short fiction and submitting it is often the first thing to fall to the backburner, so I’ve been tremendously bad about all this. But I persist. Maybe next year I’ll do some more with this kind of thing.
Emrys the Fool will continue in 2024! Though, once I reach the end of the first arc, I’ll think I’ll set it aside for the rest of the year, unless something changes. So far, it’s mostly failed to gain a readership. Since this newsletter began as nonfiction and has remained primarily nonfiction, I think it makes perfect sense that most of you are here because you’re interested in reading nonfiction. Also, I just haven’t done anything to market it or try to reach readers who may be into this sort of thing. And so I’ll set it aside and probably pick it up again in 2025. I just have too much planned for 2024 to also do this at the same time, since it sort of functions as a constant weight hanging over me.
Though, as a reminder, paying subscribers get all ebooks of my novels for free. So if you’d like to receive these ebooks, consider subscribing.
Now, onto what is probably the most important thing about next year for subscribers here.
This Newsletter
I don’t expect much to change around here. At least not in any way that you should notice. On average, I’ve released two essays per week since this newsletter began, but I’ll probably slow down to just one per week.
Of course, I’ve been saying I’d do just one per week since this newsletter began, so who knows. But you can expect at least one essay per week. Usually about books, games, movies, music, or TV.
I’ll also continue to release on paywalled essay per month for paying subscribers. You didn’t see one of these in December.
The holiday spirit and all that.
But here are some essay topics you should see over the next year:
Book of the New Sun
Lord of the Rings
The Boy and the Heron
The John Wick franchise
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Artificial Intelligence
Final Fantasy IX
Dragon Quest V
Neon Genesis Evangelion
And, you know, a whole lot more. Especially since I think House of the Dragon returns for its second season. I may decide to do a post per episode like I did for season one. Who can say.
One thing I do intend to shift is the focus here, though. I’ve had a tendency to focus on the sorrow of my past, but I’m intending to write more about the joy of my present and the hope I have for the future. Except in the upcoming AI essay. That one is more about the nightmare or our collective present. But we’ll get there.
I’ll be publishing more giant essays as well. I don’t know exactly how people feel about reading the very long posts on substack, but I’ve decided to do that rather than split them across several posts. In my mind, it’s more annoying to receive an essay in parts, spread over several weeks or months, than it is to have one gargantuan piece land in my lap all at once. But I also just like the cleanliness of it all.
Anyway, if you love or hate this method, feel free to let me know.
And then something new for the newsletter:
Audio
The Dadpod Gamescast that Joe Owens, Rik Johanson and I host will continue into 2024 and beyond!
Joe and I will be debuting a series of episodes on the novel House of Leaves, which, in all likelihood, will lead us into a full-on literary podcast where we go through the entirety of Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen and probably Ian C Esselmont’s Novels of the Malazan Empire and beyond. This would be a multi-year project, but I’d say we’re, like, 90% convinced that we’re going to just go for it.
More on that soon. I don’t know if we’ll also host it on substack, though. I don’t love the metrics I get via substack for podcasts, but this may be a user error kind of thing.
Speaking of hosting podcasts on substack—
I have yet to use the podcast element of substack for this newsletter, but I’m going to give it a go in a very specific and selective way.
In 2023, I made reading all of Cormac McCarthy my reading project for the year (more on that below), and 2024 has me eyeing the work of William Gibson. Since I’d like to talk more about these projects as I go along and since it’s more fun to not go alone (inspired by
’s McCarthy series), I’ll be hosting conversations about each novel as I read them. Which works out well, since Gibson has twelve novels out, so expect one episode per month about a specific book.Here’s the schedule:
January - Neuromancer (The Sprawl Trilogy - Book One)
February - Count Zero (The Sprawl Trilogy - Book Two)
March - Mona Lisa Overdrive (The Sprawl Trilogy - Book Three)
April - Virtual Light (The Bridge Trilogy - Book One)
May - Idoru (The Bridge Trilogy - Book Two)
June - All Tomorrow’s Parties (The Bridge Trilogy - Book Three)
July - Pattern Recognition (The Blue Ant Trilogy - Book One)
August - Spook Country (The Blue Ant Trilogy - Book Two)
September - Zero History (The Blue Ant Trilogy - Book Three)
October - The Peripheral (The Jackpot Trilogy - Book One)
November - Agency (The Jackpot Trilogy - Book Two)
December - Jackpot (The Jackpot Trilogy - Book Three)
Assuming that final book is released next year, which it probably won’t since it hasn’t been given a date yet. Anyway, there will be a few bonus episodes, including one on Burning Chrome, The Difference Engine, The Peripheral adaptation, the script he wrote for Alien 3, and Johnny Mnemonic. Not exactly sure on the schedule for those ones, but this should be a fun little time.
Collaborations & Other Stuff
I’m always looking for collaborators. Especially visual artists. So if you draw or paint and want to do something together, get in touch! I have a few ideas for graphic novels but I’d also be interested in following someone else’s lead, depending on the project.
I am looking specifically for an illustrator for some special editions of novels.
And as a reminder, I’m inviting anyone and everyone to use the worlds I’ve made for their own stories and whathaveyou.
Sci-Friday: An Invitation, a Publishing Opportunity
And then in the background, I have a few things I’ll be writing this year. I was writing a book for my nephew and meant to get it to him for Christmas, but it’s expanded dramatically. This will be one of my projects for 2024. It began as the idea for a novella, but I think it might end up being a Lord of the Rings lengthed epic instead.
The other major project for 2024, at least on the fiction end of things, is that I’ll be writing an Arthurian novel focused on the character of Mordred.
And you all thought all this Arthurian research was for nothing! I mean, initially it was. But it bloomed into a novel idea that will take me some time and focus to complete. I’m hoping I can devote the summer to it.
More on this at some later date, but, for now, I figure that’s enough information about the books coming at you this year.
I also have a few game ideas I’ll be working on in various formats. My goal is to have a prototype of a board game by the end of summer, but we’ll see how this all goes. As you can already see, I have quite a lot planned for this new year.
And now that we’ve looked forward, indulge me as I take a look back.
2023
164 posts!
Now, not all of those were essays. I’d say 50 or so of them were Emrys the Fool and the weekly recaps that I was doing. I think I’ll stop doing them weekly (unless people really like that) and keep doing them monthly. Some amount of these posts were sending the ebooks to paying subscribers or announcements of various things, but I’d guess that 80-100 of them were proper essays.
And so now the time for the rough estimates of what I wrote in 2023:
Probably about 200,000 to 250,000 words in this newsletter.
85,000 of those were in Emrys the Fool.
Wrote another 150,000 to 200,000 words of fiction outside of this newsletter. Maybe you’ll hear more about this eventually.
Designed the rules for a Tabletop RPG and two Card Games.
As a reminder, you can always look back at what’s been published here in my Table of Contents, which is broken down by genre and topic. It is purposefully incomplete, because some essays just don’t need to be easy to find.
But here’s a quick guided tour:
Fiction
Novel(la)s
Short Stories
A Forbidden Affair in Rorei’s Court - Ballad of the Distant Reaches
Another Fool in Pearl’s String - Ballad of the Distant Reaches
Your Heart Looks like a Fist Wrapped in Blood - Bookworms
All My Heroes are Russian Folksingers - Untold Stories Anthology
He sleeps with garlands woven in his hair - Into the Forest Anthology
The Brother Lorax - Another Name for Darkness Anthology
Crow (Flash Suite) - Defenestrationism
Two more were meant to come before the end of 2023 but I didn’t see them. Also, if you’d like some of those stories locked away in anthologies, which, honestly, is most of them, you can ask me. Just don’t tell anyone I sent them to you.
Nonfiction
Negative Reviews are Good - Broken River Writers’ Collective
the open hand of worldbuilding - Broken River Writers’ Collective
I keep saying I’ll do more to submit nonfiction elsewhere, but I just keep not doing that. I don’t know if I’ll submit anything out to other venues in the coming year.
Guest Posts
Interviews (conducted by me)
- Read Here
- Read Here
- Read Here
- Read Here
- Read Here
- Read Here
- Read Here
- Read Here
- Read Here
- Read Here
- Read Here
- Read Here
Podcast Appearances
From the Newsletter
And now a list of my favorite things I published here this year.
I remember you - A love letter to my wife, and also a review of Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Walmart Noir - I invent the name for a genre that we need more of.
Videogame criticism needs to grow up - Discussing bias and conflicts of interest in journalism but especially within criticism, using Hogwarts Legacy as an example. This made a lot of people unsubscribe, but I like it. Also, if you’re angrier about JK Rowling’s statements on trans people than monopolies destroying billions of people’s lives, like Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft, I’d say your moral compass needs to be adjusted.
The Roald Dahl of it all - What a strange controversy that bloomed and disappeared. I use it to discuss general idiocy, using progressive language as censorship and as a tool for pumping money into markets.
Revisiting My Neighbor Totoro - On the anniversary of my second son’s birth, I return to My Neighbor Totoro and the strange resonance it developed.
Where to Start with Kazuo Ishiguro - One of those enduring posts with evergreen popularity. I go through Ishiguro’s career and tell you where to start, what to read, and so on. A public service, if you will.
Lord of the Rings - a lifetime - Consider this the first chapter of my life in memoir, as told through books.
torture the audience who loves the artist - In which I discuss terrible people who make art we love, that means everything to us.
Brandon Sanderson and the Metrics of Spite - Wrote about ragebait and how making you angry is a reliable form of getting clicks to your website, and therefore a money printing engine. This is also an indictment of current journalistic and critical techniques which are more about gaining clicks than informing the public, along with a few pieces up above.
barbie and all that - I make a case for why and how Christopher Nolan destroyed movies.
libertalia - The ethics of piracy and theft in the streaming era.
who is to blame for why movies are terrible? - As the title suggests, I make a case for what’s wrong with movies. My answer probably won’t surprise you, but I know I’m right.
what we talk about when we talk about style - I discuss writing style, and especially the notion that invisible prose is superior.
PREY - A review of Prey and Predator, two movies that reflect one another almost perfectly.
Super Mario RPG - I pitched a book idea to a publisher and they rejected it so I condensed it into an essay instead. Also gave me a chance to talk about one of my favorite games.
guilty by association - In which I discuss the tragic decimation of politics based on the transitive property by discussing gaming criticism.
The Children of Succession - A fun dissection of the characters of the show Succession.
narrative flow: a brief writerly lesson - Talking about pacing.
And then because I reread James Joyce and reread/read all of Cormac McCarthy, I had a few posts dedicated to both writers. I separate these out because I like this sort of thing, where I give myself a project and then produce something worthwhile from it.
a hole in the floor - A review of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which I didn’t like in 2007, but which became, perhaps, one of my favorite books of all time this year.
Where to Start with Cormac McCarthy - A somewhat controversial guide to the work of the late, great McCarthy.
Cormac McCarthy reviews Super Mario 3 - A dumb little thing I did for fun. I hope it makes you laugh.
ULYSSES - A review of Ulysses, focusing specifically on the Nausicaa section of the novel.
why Cormac McCarthy? - In which I discuss the stylistic quirks of McCarthy and what makes him surprisingly addictive, paying special attention to polysyndeton and asyndeton. This is the kind of thing that’s very word nerdy, I’m afraid, but I enjoyed writing about it.
Cormac and James and a boy - In which I discuss how influential these writers have been on me, invisibly, even before I read either of them.
And then to round out my other two main projects of the year, I wrote a novella lengthed essay for the final instalment of my Harry Potter and Wong Kar Wai retrospectives. I enjoy doing these kinds of things, but the numbers show me that my readers are less interested. In 2022, I went through George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, and that was also largely a miss with readers, but I’m always open to doing such things.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - In which I came to the end of a long journey rereading Harry Potter. I discuss TH White’s King Arthur, Orpheus, the rape of Persephone, Caravaggio’s The Denial of Saint Peter, the three trials of Dumbledore, the absolution of Snape, Anubis, the dogs of my life, motherhood, brotherhood, and love.
In the Mood for Love & 2046 - A film review and bildungsroman that functions as a transition piece to the entire newsletter. I really hope you read this one.
And, finally, I was mostly quite good about avoiding politics directly on the newsletter, but then October came upon us all and I disappointed myself a few times.
the internet is a diseased brain - In which I discuss the insane reactions and impulses commodified and incentivized by social media. Along the way, I touch upon Ursula K Le Guin, drone pilot’s psychological trauma, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Instagram, the degradation of information, the history of Palestine, American political obsession with skin color and identity, the elevation of the personal over the political, the dissolution of solidarity in the face of identity and personal experience, and futility and fatalism. Somehow, this ended up being my most popular post of all time. There’s no accounting for taste!
the end of nonviolence - Wrote a eulogy for America’s nonviolence movement.
HENRY KISSINGER WON, IDIOT - I suppose you could call this a eulogy as well, if you’re feeling a certain way. Mostly another lashing of internet culture.
Last but now least, I began another substack serializing Varney the Vampyre, among other obscure or forgotten classics from the Public Domain.
Well, this post is already too far and I’m sure I forgot something important, but this should work well as a recap of 2023 and a projection of what to expect in the coming twelve months.
Hope you had a great 2023 and together we can make 2024 everything we hope.
Or, you know, maybe not.
My novels:
Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster
Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion
Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure
Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera
The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.
Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.
Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers
Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.
Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants
Some free books for your trouble:
What a fantastic year, bravo! I enjoy the super-long essay format that really digs into the meat of a topic, whether philosophically aligned, story analysis, or whatever really. Depth, I like depth.
Ambitious plans are the best plans, power to you.
Incredible stuff, man. You're a machine. I don't know how you'll manage to make 2024 even more productive than 2023, but I'm sure you'll find a way, and I'm looking forward to watching it unfold.