A New Writing and Reading Year by Allison Symes

Image Credits:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Many thanks to Gill James for taking the image of me reading from From Light to Dark and Back Again at the Bridge House Publishing Celebration event in December 2023. All good fun!

What are you hoping for in this new writing/reading year? Writing wise, I would like more things in print. Reading wise, I would like to discover authors new to me. The big eye opener for me in recent years has been discovering the wonderful world of non-fiction, especially history.

The start of a year is when I miss most favourite authors no longer with us. I always looked forward to the new Terry Pratchett book for example. Nearly always ended up having that as a Christmas present. 

Having said that I was given A Life In Footnotes which is his biography (written by Rob Wilkins) and am loving that. (Wouldn’t surprise me now if I go on to discover more on the wonderful world of biographies!).

 

 

I look forward to book fairs etc. I love seeing what other authors are doing. I often go home with purchases. Plus, of course, they are great opportunities to share what I’m doing.

 

 

I would like to see authors appreciated more -- someone has to come up with imaginative, original content and it isn’t going to be a robot -- but this is an ongoing wish. Likely to be ongoing for some time given the continued debate on artificial intelligence. 

 

The word artificial tells me there is nothing to replace human authors and editors who understand context and so on. AI should be an aid rather than a replacement.

 

I don’t go in much for the 'predict what will happen in the year ahead' game but it would never surprise me if someone tries to convince us yet again the death of the paperback is near. I’ve heard this a few times and the paperback is still with us. Long may it be so!

Have sent in my third flash fiction collection and got the “nod,” but don’t yet know when it will be out. Am working on a fourth and hope to have a draft completed by the summer. Am also working on a longer term project and am making good headway on the editing. 

Have been following the Twitter/X debacle over the last year too. For the moment, I’m staying put on the platform. I’ve been keeping an eye out on the others. I felt Mastodon sounded more like a dinosaur. Who names these things? 

Is it just me or is it ironic Bluesky, Twitter’s nearest rival as far as I can see, is on Twitter! I refuse to call the latter X. It looks wrong. It also lacks imagination. Twitter sums up what the platform does far better.

I focus on the social media platforms on which I am most comfortable so am not on Instagram, TikTok and the like. I focus on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Linkedin. Probably age related thing going on here! 

 What I would like to see in the new writing and reading year is for those behind social media to not muck about with something that has worked well. If it is working well, leave it alone!