1. Introduction
2. Key Takeaways from 2024
3. Reader Engagement and Community
4. Personal Growth as a Writer
5. 2024 Myers Fiction Statistics
6. Looking Ahead to 2025
7. New Year, New Goals
8. Conclusion

Introduction

Hey Author of Tomorrow, you’ve made it to the end of the year. I’m extremely satisfied that the final post of 2024 will also be the last day of 2024. I hope that if you’re reading this today that you’re excited about tomorrow and what 2025 will bring.

Reflection and goal setting are important skills for anyone, but especially Authors of Tomorrow. As an Author of Tomorrow, you’re working toward something larger than yourself that will hopefully impact more people than you’ll ever be able to meet in person.

While we look forward to our future growth and opportunities, let’s stroll down memory lane and see both what my favorite and your favorite (according to metrics) content was from 2024.

Key Takeaways from 2024

This year we covered a lot, as expected, for focusing on science fiction and fantasy. While we dipped our toes in the overall concept of speculative fiction, there is still so much to learn about the many genres that fall under that umbrella. The goal of this year was to jump-start my and your study in the science fiction and fantasy genres. Let’s refresh on everything from the start of the year to present.

Foundations of Speculative Fiction

The foundations of speculative fiction introduced you to the basics of World-Building, character development, and understanding your genres. This was a great time for authors to build their comfort levels with science fiction and fantasy. Keeping everything high level makes writing a speculative fiction novel.

Character and World-Building Essentials

As Authors of Tomorrow, you understand that there are two critical aspects of any science fiction or fantasy novel. Taking a deep dive into character and world-building essentials helped you improve your protagonists, worlds, and understanding other tools that can enhance your readers’ understanding of your story.

Narrative Complexity and Creativity

After building the core of your stories, you transitioned your focus to the craft of fiction. There are so many ways to write a story, but writing it well requires an understanding of structure and other story elements. A few posts visited the challenges of common speculative fiction elements like time travel, tropes, and how speculative elements can reflect more than just story problems.

Genre Fusion and Unique Elements

Here’s where you got a little frisky with your story and interacted the most with the posts. Kicking off this section with Steampunk 101 got a lot of great feedback and seemed to excite most readers. We also discussed how to create alien species and the different kinds of societies often seen in speculative fiction. Truly, this part of the year was an exploration of genre and how you don’t have to restrict yourself to one genre at a time. I hope you had as much fun with this section as I did.

Practical Aspects of Publishing

You’ve now finished the year by focusing on getting your writing polished and ready to go out to beta readers, agents, or other publishers. Hopefully, these posts have cleared up some areas that seem like smoke and mirrors to those who are not familiar with them. Let me know if you found this part beneficial and if you had any success with the exercises. Also, if you get anything published, let us know! Myers Fiction and the Authors of Tomorrow would love to celebrate you here and wherever else we can!

2024 was an exceptional year of studying science fiction and fantasy. There is still so much more to learn about the genres, but this year should have set you on the path toward mastery. Thank you for the best year in Myers Fiction history! Don’t believe me? Check out the stats later in the post.

Reader Engagement and Community

I wanted to take the opportunity again to thank everyone who took part in the Myers Fiction “Year of Mastering Science Fiction and Fantasy!” Not only did you break our visitor record by June, you also commented and liked more than previous years. I wanted to give a few shout outs to frequent commenters and others who seemed to enjoy the post the most.

Satyam Rastogi was our top commenter for 2024! Thank you so much for your continued support!

There were also some great comments sharing how an article helped an author with something they’d been struggling with in their writing process.

I also had some other authors drop a line hinting at future projects that the posts aligned with.

Thank you again to everyone who helped make Myers Fiction a success this year and kept me coming back to the computer. I look forward to further discussions during next year’s posts! I know earlier I mentioned our stats, but we’ll run over those after this next section.

Personal Growth as a Writer

2024 has been quite a year for me as a writer. I finished two drafts of a novel, submitted a few short stories, and had a few mental breakdowns over the whole process. Studying science fiction and fantasy with you this year has been an incredible growing experience. I was reminded of so much outside the subgenres I’d been working within during my Epic Fantasy and Near-Future Dystopian novels.

Last year, I wrote a serial version of Please Subscribe that I was going to post on here, Wattpad, or Kindle Vella. Once I finished, though, I realized it was a novel-worthy story. So, on January 1, 2024, I started the novelization of Please Subscribe. I used more plotting to ensure things aligned early on and found Plottr an extremely helpful tool for this part of the process. Then I transitioned from working in a Google doc to working in Scrivener. I’ve loved these tools and highly recommend them if they’re within your budget.

Diving deeper into the world of Please Subscribe and America Inc. was thrilling. After finishing the next draft, I was on such a high that I couldn’t help but dive back in after working on a few short stories. Posts like “Utopias vs Dystopias” and “Balancing Exposition with Suspense” really helped refocus my efforts during the third draft of Please Subscribe.

For my third draft, I focused on each character’s interactions in different scenes, making it more complex than my first two drafts. This was quite experimental for me. I started with the most minor character and worked my way through the impact levels of the various key characters on my protagonist, finishing with the protagonist. In hindsight, I probably should have started with the protagonist to build momentum. Nevertheless, it worked, and I finished in early October.

Please Subscribe taught me that focusing on characters’ emotions and thoughts is more impactful than just action and adventure.

I’d love to hear how your personal writing has grown throughout the year! The writing process isn’t just an exploration of story, but of ourselves and our beliefs. Let me know if you had a favorite post or two from the year and how they helped you grow as a writer.

Now, let’s dive into some stats and see what the numbers say about favorite posts, and such.

2024 Myers Fiction Statistics

I will start out by saying that by mid-May, we’d already received the same amount of views of 2023, which had been a record-breaking year for me. I’ll show you the clip so you can see the growth for yourself. While I’m excited about these amazing numbers, I just hope that everyone is finding something useful as they explore Myers Fiction posts.

Top Post of 2024

The Top Post for 2024 was How to Use Character Actions to Develop Better Characters! This has received an amazing 540 views in 2024 alone!This was posted in July 2023. If you haven’t checked it out, go drop by. Let me know what’s working and if this is a topic you’d like to hear more on!

In second place with 371 views was Types of Setting: Physical where I explored building physical settings in world-building back in April 2023.

Not too far behind that is a post from this year’s series on Mastering Science Fiction and Fantasy, Alien Species Design Part 1: Biology. I hope you found this helpful in developing your alien species a bit further! This post received 332 views this year already, so it’s shaping up to be a good one in the years to come.

Thank you for everyone in visiting, liking, and subscribing to Myers Fiction. 2024 was a great year as we hit a few new records!

The first record was a staggering 130 views in one day on August 30th, 2024! This broke the old record of 50 in one day back in 2018 when I first started this blog. It made my day and has seemed to have kick-started a good flow of readers ever since.

With the posting of this today, we may be able to get over the 1000 mark for December, but September took this year for the win with 1076 views! (As of 6:50 AM on December 31, 2024, December has recorded 1,058 views. This recent surge in views has put December in close competition with September’s view count.)

At the time of writing, Myers Fiction, thanks to you readers, has reached over 7100 views in 2024! That’s almost 5 times what we had last year.

We’ve also grown in Authors of Tomorrow. I’ve always believed that anyone can achieve what they put the effort into. It’s great to see the same people coming back and liking the posts that help them on that step. Your effort is recognized and appreciated. With that, we’ve grown 52 subscribers this year, to top us off at 206! Thank you to everyone who’s stayed on since day one, and those who have just joined. Nothing makes me happier than to find another writer who is seeking to improve their writing.

So truly, thank you for an amazing year! Your work to continue to become an Author of Tomorrow is worth it, and it will pay off!

Now that the excitement of 2024 is coming to a close, it’s time to see what we’ll study in 2025.

Looking Ahead to 2025

2025 will return to the base of any story, and we’ll focus on the writing craft again this year. In 2023, you honed your craft and focused on the elements of fiction. These were shorter and simpler posts to give you high-level understandings of each element. 2025 will explore the first element of fiction, Plot and Structure! You’ll find posts about classic plot topics, but also breaking down everything you need to write a powerful scene that will drive your readers through your book.

Let me know if you have any plot questions you’d like us to study, or if you have some post ideas that you’d like to see! I love hearing from my fellow Authors of Tomorrow and would be more than happy to feature what you want to hear about!

New Year, New Goals

I hope everyone achieved what they wanted in 2024. If you didn’t, that’s totally fine. I know I didn’t reach every single goal, but we just have to keep working at what we want and adjusting time frames as necessary. With every new year comes an opportunity to begin with a fresh slate. While it may not seem any different from any other day, there’s something magical about starting a new project, goal, or practice on January 1. We tie so much into new beginnings that a fresh year seems like the best time to start something new. If you want to understand more about why that is, check out Daniel H. Pink’s “When.” This is a great book that really changed how I viewed my starting points, endpoints, and work day goals.

I want you to start 2025 off strong, so I’m going to give you a challenge. If you haven’t been, try to complete each writing exercise given at the end of each post. I’ve refined them from their long in-depth exercises to fifteen minute exercises to make it more realistic. Though, the in-depth exercises will really help those who learn by doing in understanding the topics of the respective posts. Once you complete your first one, just comment in that post’s comments section with “Done” or “Your exercise has been vanquished.” A little silly, but I hope to see all of you posting with this soon. I’ll do the same so you can help keep me accountable.

Conclusion

As we stand on the threshold of 2025, remember that every word you write is a step toward mastering your craft. The journey of an Author of Tomorrow is not just about perfecting techniques, but about discovering the unique voice within you. Your dedication to learning and storytelling will lead to success, regardless of achieving all your goals this year.

Let’s welcome the new year with excitement and a strong belief in the impact of our stories. Here’s to another year of writing, learning, and becoming Authors of Tomorrow.

Previous Post: Marketing Your Speculative Fiction: Conventions, Social Media

Next Writing Post: Introduction to Plot and Structure: The Backbone of Storytelling

Next Post: January 2025 Newsletter