A Decade of Archives 8: 2005

This is the eighth in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found here.

2005 was a big year around these here parts, as the blog was nominated for a World Fantasy Award. I went to the World Fantasy Convention and wrote up a report of that experience here. It was an exciting time.

From my perspective now, though, 2005 doesn't seem like all that great a year for actual blog posts,. There are lot of them — 2005 is second only to 2004 in the number of individual posts — but most of them are quick links, bits of news, etc. The stuff that I now will just throw on Twitter, or ignore altogether.

This is reassuring, actually, because I often look back on the number of posts in 2005 and 2004 with fondness and even a certain awe — how did I ever write so much? (My life was no less busy and crazy back then; indeed, it was busier and crazier.) I often fear the blog is lying fallow, victim of my other work. But if anything, the number of substantial, substantive posts here has increased over the years.

Getting back into the oldest of the archives brings about mixed feelings. A bit of nostalgia, certainly, occasionally a moment where I'm impressed with something I wrote, but mostly a lot of cringing. There's a youthful enthusiasm, a youthful naivete to a lot of it that just makes me want to hide under a table. I was 29 and 30 in 2005, and yet often wrote like a precocious 12-year-old. (Eight years from now, if I'm lucky I'll be able to say my writings in 2013 remind me of a precocious 20-year-old.)

I'm not going to go back and laugh at my younger self. The archives are there for you to explore and chuckle through all you want. Instead, I'd just like to note a few posts that don't seem to me entirely worth sending down into the memory hole quite yet...

A New Clare Dudman Novel is Now in the Wild!

Clare Dudman's new novel, A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees, has just been released in the UK.  (It's currently selling for just under US$10 with free shipping via the Book Depository, so even those of us who are stuck out here in the colonies can get it.)

I wrote about Clare's 98 Reasons for Being back in 2005, and our fiction has shared space in a couple of anthologies since then.  Both of her previous novels have stayed with me long after reading them, and my assessment of them has only grown more positive with time, since I remember details and images from them far more vividly than from many other books I have read since.  

I am terribly excited for the new novel, which not only promises the wonderful Dudman prose, but happens to be one sort of story I am particularly attracted to: travelers adjusting to all the unexpected hardships of a world new and alien to them.  There's a 3-minute YouTube video introducing the book, and it had me thinking of all sorts of things, from Uttermost Part of the Earth to In Patagonia to Natives and Exotics (another novel that has stuck with me far more than I expected it to) and on and on...