2023
Well, the year has come and gone. It’s time for the 2023 year’s end review. This has been a fantastic year for the blog. I’ll get to that in a minute, but first I want to thank you the reader. This has been the best year by far since I began blogging on Primmlife.com, and I appreciate each and every person who stopped by for a visit. This is a labor of love. It costs me money to keep this thing up, but the blog is worth it to me. I do get the benefit of some free books, which is great. I’m very thankful to the publishers who work with me through NetGalley and Edelweiss. In addition, I’ve begun to work with more publishers directly, and that’s amazing. St. Martin’s Press and Minotaur Books have been wonderful to this blog this year. They’re new additions. I also worked directly with some publicists at the various publishing houses. In particular, I want to thank Angela Mann at Orbit and Jocelyn Bright at Tor Publishing Group for all their hard work.
Life
2023 was a year of growth for me in a number of ways. It was a year where I had to learn how to be a father and fit all I want to accomplish into my life. My son turned two and is now mobile and speaking. So, figuring out how to work around him has been a joy and a pain. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. He has brought so much joy to my life. Watching him grow up and learn is amazing. His mother and I are very lucky that we get to watch him explore life.
In addition, I began a journey towards another bachelor’s degree. One might think that adding a degree would take away from time here at the blog, but it hasn’t. I traded in time that was I spending on apps, YouTube, and podcasts learning French for a structured course. The only real change has been that I have to fit in time for conversations with other students, teachers, and, even, native speakers of the language. Before this year, I had not conducted a full conversation in French with a native speaker, and I’ve now done that four times. In the coming year, it’ll be even more. In addition, I’ve now read one full novel and a collection of short stories in another language. These are things I never though possible. It’s only going to get better from here on out.
This year, my job, while frustrating and rage-inducing at times, went very well. I got an unexpected promotion; I received official designation as an expert in damage tolerance. I received new mentees and refined some of my own mentoring practices. I’ve begun a path towards the Boeing Technical Fellowship, and though I may not get selected for the program, just applying for it has been a wonderful career retrospective. All workers are being asked to do more with less, and we’re no different. However, I like the people I work with, and I still see opportunities for me to improve and to grow as an engineer. That’s all I’ve really wanted from my day job.
The Blog
As of 12/28, I’m sitting on over 6,000 views for my website. That’s almost more than the first three years combined. I’m a small blogger, but it keeps growing year over year. I can’t believe it. My subscriptions have gone up this year, and I published 44 reviews on my blog. That was a difficult thing to do. I hope that my views just keep growing. I’ll continue to work on that.
A large driver of my traffic is Twitter. (Yes, I know that’s not it’s official name now, but, for me, it will always be Twitter.) But with the implosion of that site due to Elon Musk’s mismanagement, I’m not posting or interacting as much there. So, it’s possible in 2024, traffic will decrease. I’m okay with this. I still post links to my reviews on Twitter for the die-hards who are fighting a losing battle against the horrible people taking over Twitter. I’m experimenting with other social media, but I don’t have the engagement on those platforms that I did on Twitter. Maybe as the platforms grow, I can grow my engagement. That’s the plan for 2024.
Reviews
A funny thing happened in 2023. I began to receive more books than I could handle. Prior to this year, I would request a lot of books. My success rate was roughly 1 in 10. That’s to be expected for small bloggers without a proven track record. In 2023, that success rate jumped to 5 or 6 in 10 requests granted. I was overjoyed. It felt like a real leveling up as a reviewer. At the same time, I was quickly overwhelmed with books. I got way more books this year than I could read, and that’s unfortunate. I still reviewed a lot of books, but many were left behind. That bugs me. When a publisher or author takes a chance and sends me a book, I want to help them out with a review. I failed more time than I succeeded this year, and in 2024, I will do better. I’ve already reduced the number of requests made. My primary goal is to provide a quality review for the audience. I feel it best serves publishers and authors to get their work reviewed and in front of my audience. In order to do that, I want to match requests made with my ability to deliver a review to my audience. That’s the goal for 2024
In 2023, Strange Horizons published two of my reviews. Currently, they’re the only venue I work with, but I’m hoping to find new places as well in 2024. Strange Horizons is an excellent science fiction and fantasy magazine that you should definitely explore after you finish reading my reviews. In addition, I contributed to their 2022 Year in Review. I enjoy working with the editors and will continue to pitch Strange Horizons for reviews. Hopefully, they’ll like some of them.
General
I appeared on the Imaginary Worlds Podcast episode 229: How to Go to Infinity and Beyond. We discussed spaceship design. I really enjoyed the experience, and the episode turned out great. I highly recommend you check it out. Before I agreed to the episode, I listened to a random sampling to see what it was like. It’s a high quality podcast. I continue to listen to it when I get a chance.
So Long and Thanks for All the Views
As you can see, it’s been a great and busy year. I have high hopes for 2024, and I hope you’ll come back to the blog to check out what I have in store. Whether you do or you don’t, thank you for stopping by and spending some of your precious time with me.