Now, at the end of another journey around the sun, it’s time to look at the data and validate my feelings.
This is my 2024 Year in Review! The seventh data-backed story of my year.
The Data
I wrote, read, and revised a total of 831 hours rounded down. This is the least amount of hours I’ve worked per year since I’ve started tracking. It’s also 141 hours less than last year, and almost half my highest total. Yeesh.
As usual, reading took the top spot. I read slightly less than usual, but still about as much as I normally do per year. Perceiver 2 takes second place, and the sequel, Perceiver 3, takes fifth. “Told You So” is a short story that I’ve spent far too long on. Diary is, of course, my diary.
Why is my total number of hours lower than ever? I think it’s because my writing resolutions conflicted with my other resolutions for exercise. I weight lift and cycle, and in 2024, I had strength and speed goals that I was trying to reach. My Apple health app reported that I had increased the time per day that I work out. Factoring in travel to the gym and to my bike club, it matches the chunk of time missing from this year.
Wasn’t 2024 going to be the year I bounced back? Well, I sort of did.
2023 Resolutions
- Bring my current WIP short stories and novella to submission-ready status. Concrete goal: 1.0 hours/day of revision, submission, workshopping, etc, until all of them are out on submission. Yes! I actually exceeded this goal. Two short stories were accepted for publication, one to be published early in 2025, and the novella and two short stories are out on submission.
- Continue TikTok series: Concrete goal: at least two TikTok posts per week, goal of 100 posts by the end of the year. Nope. I made around 40 posts. When the news broke that TikTok would be banned, it killed a lot of my momentum to keep working on that platform.
- I want to bring the sequel to my second book to publication-ready status. Nope. But I made a massive amount of progress. I reckon I’m 70-75% of the way through.
- Three pages every day. Yes! 13 years strong!
2024 Resolutions
- Finish the current draft of Perceiver 2 and send it to beta readers. Concrete goal: Work on it every day until it’s sent off.
- Finish another draft of P3. I didn’t get very far writing the third book in 2024. The second book has changed so much that it feels premature to write in such detail. Concrete goal: once P2 is off to beta-readers, work on P3 every day.
- Try to write, read, or revise at least 2.75 hours per day. I want to make a yearly goal to work on writing at least 1,000 hours per year, which breaks down to about 2.75 hours per day.
An anecdote of significance
Someone online said it’s scientifically impossible to be sad while riding a bike. I said, Oh really? and got into bikepacking. Backpacking is where you head out into the wilderness carrying everything you need on your person: food, shelter, toiletries, and so on, but on a bike.
My thinking was that I could get fit, save on gas, get some social time, and do some cool camping and touring activities while researching for my stories. I’d started a series of short stories focused on Tulsa in the year 2050, after a climate disaster known as the Summer of Storms ravaged infrastructure, crops, and the grid across the world. I imagined that bikes would be critical to survival—not just for daily life, such as commuting or errands, but for key services like delivery, communication, and even escaping from dangerous areas. One of the stories, “Soft Serve”, had already been published (go here to read the story, here to read my notes for it).
I joined a local bike club’s Monday Funday rides. We meet at the bike shop to ride to a new restaurant each week, about five miles away. No one gets left behind.
Or so I thought.
My very first ride was on a day with a heat advisory. One of those flat, blue-sky days where the sun beats down, the road feels like a griddle, and you’re in the middle of it, mashing the pedals. I was the slowest by far, riding a bike that wasn’t suited for the task. Before we headed out, one of the regulars asked me what kind of bike I was riding. I said, “Extra small.” I later learned it was a fitness bike, also known as a commuter or hybrid bike. Most of the regulars had road bikes and wore the tight lycra bike outfits and the little shoes that clip into the pedals.
I was chatting with one of them as we headed out. I was trying hard to stay next to him to keep talking, but he wasn’t trying hard at all. He had the air of someone out on a Sunday stroll.
I thought I was doing okay, but then we hit a hill. A small hill. A hill I’d walked and run and cycled up a hundred times before. But that day, I had already ridden 5 miles at an rpm far higher than my usual syrupy-slow spin. My breathing was ragged when we started. Halfway up, my vision started dimming around the sides. At the top of the hill, my breath wouldn’t catch. When I called for a break, my heart was hammering. Dumping my water bottle over my head didn’t help, and we were only halfway to the restaurant.
I felt embarrassed that people had to stop for me. I had been weight lifting and running for a year and a half, and I considered myself in good shape. I didn’t understand why I was having such a hard time keeping up with the regulars. Yet the break stretched on, and I failed to catch my breath. At last one of them mentioned when they would start again. I knew then that I would probably pass out if I tried to finish the ride with them.
I considered dropping out and going home. The group had just passed my lushly air conditioned apartment. My confidence had been pantsed. At that point, I didn’t like cycling that much, and I was worried it would become yet another expensive hobby doomed to be abandoned after a year.
But instead, I took a ride in the support vehicle, and I met up with the group for dinner at a greasy spoon. Part of why I stayed was stubbornness. I don’t like being humiliated, but I’ll deal with it if it means finishing something to my satisfaction. I was likely the only one embarrassed by my lack of stamina and speed. I wanted to make sure that embarrassment was temporary, and I knew if I went home I would never return.
And I did return, again and again, every Monday. Several months passed. I’d practiced hard and completed my first bikepacking trip: a 60-mile round trip from Tulsa to Keystone Dam. It was paved road-only, not too many hills. 30 miles per day. Difficult but achievable for a new bikepacker.
But the second trip started with an 85-mile leg that was mostly on gravel. The second day was 50 miles, half on gravel. I doubted I could make it, but I was determined to try.
The first 10 miles were smooth and paved. I screwed up on velcroing my dry bags to my bike rack and had to stop to reattach them securely, and so did someone else. Then, I got a flat, and the main group got lost and turned around on the backroads. We had a few uneventful miles.
It all went to shit on gravel. Gravel is loose. Your bike skids and judders underneath you, like riding a jackhammer. Uphill, already the opposite of the bee’s knees, is worse because your tires spin and slip. Downhill, you’re too worried about skidding off to enjoy the ride.
Starting around noon, the wind picked up and whipped gravel dust into our eyes, nose, and mouth. One sip from my water bottle gave me twice my daily minerals and probably other minerals I shouldn’t have eaten. As the sun traveled on, the wind turned into a 20 mph headwind. The literal air was against us. We rode like this for hours.
I was thinking insane shit trying to keep my legs spinning. I sung the first lyrics to the Marine’s Hymn. “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, we will fight for right and freedom, and to keep our honor free….” I couldn’t remember further than that so I just sung those lines over and over. When looking for the link to the song lyrics, I discovered barely anything I sung were the correct lyrics. I thought of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was an asshole who deserved his boulder, but what did I do? I thought of a haiku:
If this wind doesn’t
goddamn stop blowing on me
so help me god
It’s one syllable short but it captured my feelings. On trips this long, there’s nothing for your mind to do but spin in its cage of bone and chatter. I cajoled my legs to keep working at all costs. I was already in the back of the pack, and I fell behind even further. I didn’t have the trip map or a GPS, and I wasn’t close enough to the main group to be able to see and follow them, so one of the trip leaders stuck with me so I wouldn’t get lost. I was being babysat, and I didn’t want to hold him back. I didn’t want to stop riding, and yet, I couldn’t keep going. I was wrung out, close to bonking.
After 37 miles, I tapped out and caught a ride in the support truck. The guy who had stuck with me took off like a shot, and I thought, be free, my dude. I tried to reason with myself in the truck. It sucked that you weren’t able to finish, but you got further than you thought you would. Tomorrow was a shorter ride. Why not chill out, rest, refuel, and try again tomorrow?
Upon checking my phone, I found that I got a rejection from a literary magazine, which had also delivered a stinging critique of the submitted story. I had paid extra for editorial feedback, so I expected something. Still. It felt like being kicked when I was down.
The critique of the story also came at a moment when I felt like I was losing steam as a writer. My writing group of five years had broken up right before the trip. It had been on the rocks for a while, and it seemed like I was the only one regularly submitting work for critique for months.
I had hit rough patches for revising Perceiver 2 and 3, and I had no responses from magazines about my other short story submissions.
Writing has always been a very inward-facing activity, usually practiced by the introspective—who, paradoxically, succeed when their writing connects with others. Writing primes you to love bikepacking. Both are endurance activities. Both activities are described as journeys. Both are what you might call “Type 2 fun.”*
*(Type 1 fun is fun in the moment. Type 2 fun is only fun in hindsight. See the Fun Scale.)
What do I see in embarking on these journeys? Why do I pick up a boulder and go up and down hills? My answer is in this relevant Buddhist parable, as related by Pema Chodron:
“There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly.” ― Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World
During the second trip, I remember looking up after fighting to keep up, sweat stinging my eyes, and seeing autumn leaves against a blue sky. Clouds scattered above a gravel road stretched out before me, everyone grinding up the hill, calling and laughing to each other. I was dead last, not even 10 miles into the trip, but I was alive. That was one strawberry among many on the trip. Baby goats in a yard. The people who sit around the campfire with me. The delicious lemonade and BBQ smoked meat from some random truck parked across a gas station! (Why is the best food always from the sketchiest places?)
My strawberries in writing are a phrase that perfectly captures what I’m trying to say. Or I think of a scene that surprises me but fits perfectly. Or I finally reach that point where the story has a current that catches the protagonists and carries them inexorably to their transformative end.
It feels precious and cringe-worthy to delight in these things. But happiness—real happiness—often feels embarrassing to admit when the world is so heavy with pain. It feels easier to admit failure or rage because these reactions seem more justified, more expected. It is worse, somehow, to admit the strawberries foraged from daily writing are also not enough to sustain me, when American culture is so adamant that practicing your art should be enough to do it for you. To need is mortifying.
I need magazines to get back to me. I need people to stop using Chat GPT to write their stories for them, so magazines would have shorter response times and get back to me sooner. I need TikTok to not get banned, so I can keep using the one platform that I’m good at. I need a giant hand to reach down, sweep away the gravel, change the direction of the wind to be at my back, and pluck me up and set me on top of a hill, so I can ride down.
What I have—is a great group of people to ride with. They arranged the campgrounds and mapped out the rides. They encouraged me and gave me advice. They introduced me to great local eats. They also hung back to make sure I didn’t get lost. I got to camp that day thanks to the drivers of the support vehicle. When I started, I merely liked cycling. But it is their enthusiasm that has moved cycling next to my heart, just behind writing.
The following day, I tried to ride with the group, and stayed close enough to glimpse the second-to-last person appearing and disappearing around the hills. I quit at 30 miles. I was simply not conditioned enough to keep going. Thus, I spent the drive home thinking about how to train for the next trip.
I wish I could give you some parable about perseverance in the face of silence and apathy. For bikepacking and cycling, it’s the people. On the other hand, writing is a habit I don’t know how to quit. The merest encouragement sustains me for months. Ex., shortly after the trip, I received a notice from a magazine that my story had made it to the final round. The accompanying editorial comments were so nice I danced around my apartment like a nut. That story was eventually accepted, and it will be published in early 2025.
What have I learned in 2024? Perhaps that objects of desire lie just beyond the grasp of reason, but are within reach if you keep going? No, it is the same lesson I learn every year: that I like writing, and that I’m going to keep doing it, uphill, downhill, against the wind, or not.
Still: I will be looking for a new writer’s group in 2025.