Susan Fanetti

Happy New Year! I hope you had a great night and are looking forward to a bright, calm year.

In honor of the day, I thought I’d do a 2023 review/2024 outlook post today.

I’ll start by saying that 2023 was not my favorite year ever. My first draft of this post opened with a paragraph of how the year was basically suck, but I don’t want to be such a downer about it. Instead, I’m going to do the whole affirmation thing and focus on things that did not suck in 2023.

WHAT WAS: 2023

Books I Released:

My writing and my publishing has slowed down considerably, but I’m still at it, and there have been spells recently when I thought I was dried up. But there’s gas in this tank yet. This year I published three new books: Resilience and Respect (Books 6 and 7 of the Brazen Bulls Birthright, completing that series) and Christmas in Signal Bend, a standalone novella returning to the first town and characters I ever created.

I also re-published my post-apocalyptic novel, Aurora Terminus, under the version of my name I normally use (it had previously been published under a different version of my name), and I released series sets of the Signal Bend Series, the Night Horde SoCal, the Brazen Bulls MC, and Brazen Bulls Birthright.

Books I Wrote:

I wrote four books this year, including Respect and Christmas in Signal Bend. Of the other two, one will be my first release of 2024 (more on that in a second), and the other … I don’t know. It might go nowhere. It’s something I’ve never done before, a women’s fiction story with a single POV in first person, and literally no one but me has read it. But it is a thing I finished, so it gets a nod in my list of not-sucky things about 2023.

Fun Things I Did:

Local travel: We stayed in California all year, but we had several lovely getaways: to Eureka and the far northern coast of the state; to one of our favorite coastal areas, Monterey/Carmel; two long weekends at Yosemite; and a few other cool spots in the state. When I retire from my teaching job, we’ll be leaving California and returning to the Midwest, where our older sons still live. That’s only a few years off at this point, so we want to suck the marrow from California while we can.

If it weren’t for our kids and my desperate need to get back to them, you’d have to pry me out of California with dynamite. God, I love this state.

New obsession: Our younger son, who still lives with us, and I embarked on a shiny new hobby: LEGO! I hadn’t touched a plastic brick since my kids outgrew toys, but OMG the adult sets are fantastic! Hours and hours of a quiet mind and fun conversation as we build delightfully detailed models. It’s been a great thing to do together.

Books I Loved:
Empire of Sand, by Tasha Suri
Holly, by Stephen King
The House on the Cerulean Sea, by TJ Klune
Lessons in Chemistry, by Bonnie Garmus
Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Paladin’s Hope, by T. Kingfisher
The September House, by Carissa Orlando
Starter Villain, by John Scalzi
Thank You for Listening, by Julia Whelan
The True Love Experiment, by Christina Lauren

Movies I Loved:
Barbie
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Godzilla Minus One
A Good Person
Guardians of the Galaxy III
Killers of the Flower Moon
The Marvels
No One Will Save You
Sisu
Spiderman: Across the Spider-verse

TV I Loved:
1883 and 1923 (I don’t much care for Yellowstone, but the prequels are amazing!)
The Bear
Blue-Eye Samurai
The Crown
For All Mankind
The Gilded Age
The Last of Us
Lessons in Chemistry (even better than the book!!)
The Wheel of Time

So. While there were some big yucks this year, it wasn’t all bad. Still, I’m glad to see the back end of this one—not that I’m feeling especially hopeful about 2024. Election years in the US lately are just … well … um … yeah. Anyway. I’m trying to be positive here, so let’s move on from that thought asap!

WHAT MIGHT BE: 2024

First, this post is the first of what I’m intending to be monthly, newsy posts. Yep, I’m gonna start blogging like it’s 2012.

Here’s why: I SUCK SUCK SUCK at social media. I get overwhelmed pretty much instantaneously when I log onto any platform and just CANNOT keep up my engagement, commenting and posting and whatever, to stay connected to readers. I can’t even reply to a nice comment most of the time, because there’s a voice in my head screaming NOBODY CARES SHUT UP. I’m sure my quiet comes off as aloof and uninterested, when really it’s autism and anxiety.

Plus, I live in abject terror of going viral. I almost always delete a post or comment when it starts getting even three-digit engagement. The thought of that much attention from strangers is too too much. I recently had a post about Taylor Swift go mini-viral on Threads, and WOW that was stressful. But I didn’t delete it, so I consider that a feather in my mental health cap, lol!

Knowing this about myself, I decided a couple years back to start a newsletter, where I could share with readers I knew were interested, and avoid the anxiety fun house of TikTok or any other platform. Unfortunately, I got stymied when what I wanted to do with that (closer to a newspaper than a newsletter) was way too much for any of the usual apps and websites to handle, so I couldn’t get it to work right. Talk about overwhelmed!

But I have this blog, and I know how to use it. It’s a place you can subscribe and get emails when I make a post, so you can stay up on any news I might have. I’ve mainly used this for book announcements thus far, but there’s a lot more I can do here. I can make posts as long as I want, with as many links and images as I want, and I don’t have to worry about whether MailChimp or whatever can handle it.

Ergo, I’m going to start using this blog like a newsletter—or, you know, like a blog, the way they were back in the olden times. At least once a month, I plan to do updates about my writing in progress (and about book releases, too), publish blog-exclusive short stories and excerpts, share anecdotes about life stuff, do giveaways—all the usual newsletter stuff, just here on the blog instead. I’m giving myself permission to abort if there’s not a lot of interest in hearing from me regularly, but as long as readers seem engaged, I’ll will be, too.

So this would be a great time to subscribe …

Incidentally, Instagram is where I most consistently post random glimpses of my life as it’s happening, if that’s a thing you’re interested in. My FB author page is pretty much entirely book promotion. If you want to chat with other readers of my work, you can join Susan’s FANetties.

And now for my book writing and publishing plans: The BIG news is that we’re going back to Signal Bend for realsies! I am starting a new, next-generation series: Signal Bend Heritage. Book One is drafted and is getting good notes from my betas; I can therefore announce that it will be my next release, on Saturday, 2 March. Keep an eye on this blog and on my FB author page for more details—the reveal and preorder will happen in February.

Signal Bend Heritage will feature several of the OG Horde’s now-grown kids (Gia Lunden leads Book One) as well as newer members of the Night Horde and some brand-new characters too. The town and the club have changed a lot since the days of the Signal Bend Series. (BTW: you can get a taste of the changed Signal Bend and the older Night Horde MC in Christmas in Signal Bend.)

Obviously none of this is written in stone and all of it is dependent on my muse staying where she belongs, but I expect Signal Bend Heritage to be around as long as my other biker series, somewhere in the range of 7-10 books. At my current publishing pace, that’ll likely work out to about three years of releases.

As for other writing plans in the coming year, I’ll be writing the next book(s) in the SBH series, of course, and maybe a couple standalones here and there. I’ve got an idea for a 1950s story percolating in my head lately; I might see if that one is ready to live.

Overall, it should be a pretty mellow year (I hope!). We’re planning a trip back to St. Louis to visit our older boys (whom we haven’t seen since December 2021), and we’ll certainly take lots of weekenders to beautiful places in glorious California. I need my beach/forest/mountains time. Otherwise we’ll find our enjoyment where we can. Lots of movies, books, and TV, of course. And love. There is always love here.

One thing is certain, and it’s the best thing: even when I’m feeling like life and the world are kinda sucky in general, I am held aloft by great good fortune. I have a fantastic, endlessly supportive husband, wonderful sons, and great friends. I have both jobs I dreamed about when I was young, and I live in a gloriously beautiful place. I am financially secure and relatively healthy. I know there are millions of people struggling far more than I am, with far more pressing troubles than mine (I also know it’s not a competition, but it’s good to grab perspective when you can).

There were big chunks of my life when I couldn’t make such a list, when life was more than “kinda sucky,” when it was truly difficult, full of loss and pain, instability and insecurity. Those days are, hopefully forever, behind me.

As a glass-half-empty person, I need to make lists like this more often and remind myself to get out of my damned broken head and see what’s good. Pull back the curtains and see the sun shining.

I hope the sun is shining on you. I send you wholehearted good wishes for a bright, safe new year full of love and good things.

much love,
s—