I give 2022 a solid D-. Pretty bad, and lots of room for improvement. In football terms, I didn’t really move the ball down the field. In fact, I might have picked up negative yardage. I am swimming in place, running on a treadmill, back where I started, nowhere closer to my goals and perhaps farther than ever.
Time is cruel, a finite resource nobody can create more of. You can only divvy up the limited supply, sacrificing here for a little bit more there. And there is also the necessity of sleep, a necessity which I resent since it has kept me from doing much of anything at all as of late. For reasons beyond just the fact that its winter, lights-out time is beginning increasingly earlier and lasts a little longer. To add insult to injury, I don’t even feel particularly well-rested when I awake. It’s the worst of all worlds; par for the course.
One can create energy, oftentimes by doing things like eating well, exercising, and, yes, sleeping. I get this. It is why I try to watch what’s on my plate, lift weights, and get a few hours of shut-eye each night But I also enjoy doing things, so I shave off an hour of sleep here, another there, and get on a weird cycle where I’m up very late one night writing (assuming there’s nothing else that needs attending to), and then going to bed when the kids do the next. In case you haven’t noticed, sleeping for 8-10 hours is not conducive to getting stuff done.
In Greek mythology, Hypnos was the god of sleep. His mother was Nyx (Night), his father was Erebus (Darkness), and his brother was Thanatos (Death). I appreciate the connection. Sleep is like a temporary death, after all.
In some stories, Hypnos lived in a cave in the ocean near the gates of Hades; in others, on or under the island of Lemnos. Regardless of location, his cave palace had a couch of ivory, upon which the god would recline. Poppies and other sleep-inducing herbs grew around the entrance, and through the palace flowed the River Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. And Hypnos himself was often depicted as having two wings growing out of his head. Wild!
Sleep is powerful. I’ve often said that, if magic were real, you were the only person in the world who could cast it, and you could only pick one spell, the Dungeons & Dragons “Sleep” spell would make you the most powerful person on Earth. In a totally non-violent manner, you’d be able to get what you want just by putting people to sleep. No one could stop you from achieving your goals if you could make them start sawing wood with a few wiggles of your fingers. You could be Joe Blow down at the office or the President of the United States (a man who can probably fall asleep on command without any magical aid, but I digress) and it wouldn’t matter once you’re off to dreamland.
Or you could be king of the gods. Hypnos used his great power to great advantage, twice to even mess with Zeus. Tricky business, going after the king. Unsurprisingly, both times were at the behest of Zeus’s wife, Hera. The first was to help Hera vent her wrath against Heracles without Zeus knowing. Zeus found out but even he couldn’t punish Hypnos and just gave him a stern talking-to. The second time was to help Poseidon get around Zeus’s command not to help the Achaeans during the Trojan War. Hera had the idea that she’d seduce her husband and, when the good times were supposed to happen, have Hypnos put him to sleep, allowing Poseidon to do his thing and sparing Hera from having to use the old “Not now, honey, I’ve got a headache” excuse. For this latter task, Hypnos was able to wrangle the hand of Pasithea, the Charity of relaxation, meditation, hallucination, and other altered states, in marriage. The Charities, according to the poet Nonnus, were the children of Hera and Dionysus.
Looking at what Pasithea embodies, it’s no wonder Hypnos had a thing for her. Things worked out for the two crazy kids: They had a quartet of children, the Oneiroi: Morpheus the god of dreams, Phobetor the god of nightmares, Phantasus the god of fake and illusory dreams, and Ikelos the god of true dreams.
All four of these deities have tormented me at some point over the past year, typically Morpheus, though Phantasus has displayed his handiwork from time to time. I am lucky in that Phobetor doesn’t visit me very often. The one time Ikelos had, several years ago, it was more terrifying than anything Phobetor could throw at me.
I, of course, do not believe in the Greek gods, but they provide a useful way to talk about one of the things that has kept me from achieving my goals in the year 2022. There are other things I can blame besides sleep, but nobody likes to listen to excuses. Sleep, however, is an easy one that is fairly unobjectionable: we all have to do it, and everybody understands.
So that was 2022 for me: lots of inactivity, and slightly worse than 2021, which in turn was slightly worse than 2020, and so on and so forth. I got one book published back in February, the Pulp Rock anthology, which was largely written the year before, and one short-story published in the recent Periapsis Christmas anthology. I finalized the manuscript of The Final Home, the concluding volume of The Swordbringer, and ran a successful crowdfunding campaign to cover the costs for the cover art and production, as well as hitting stretch goals for (1) an omnibus edition with a brand-new cover, (2) interior illustrations in The Final Home, and (3) interior illustrations in The Last Ancestor and The Second Sojourn. This success, in turn, pushed back my publication timeline since, in addition to the art taking time, I am taking the opportunity to revise and re-edit the first two books. So I cannot get the old versions without the interior art to backers who got them as their perks, nor am I going to send out copies of the new book with the illustrations. It’s all a big headache, making more work for me, and causing me to rethink the wisdom of doing crowdfunding campaigns in the first place.
There are worse problems to have, far preferable to all of my other problems. But nobody wants to read about those. This is one of those “what’s next?” year end posts, so I suppose I should get to it.
My sci-fi story, tentatively titled Set the Controls, languishes where I left it back in September or so, some 50 percent complete, as I worked to revise The Final Home and get the crowdfunding campaign going. I would like very much to finish that next year, though I make no promises as to when it will be released. I’m also looking to have a sword-and-sorcery short story published in an anthology early in 2023. Beyond that, I don’t do public displays of resolutions. For starters, they rarely come to naught. Second, I feel silly making bold declarations and then not living up to them. Some people find that vocalizing their goals makes the more likely to come to fruition. Not me. Most of what I accomplish is by accident, when I can avoid the snares that Hypnos sets for me.
Thanks for reading and bearing with my lack of output. Interacting with you all in the comments and elsewhere is truly one of life’s little pleasures that helps beat back the darkness for a little while longer. I’ll try to stay awake a little while longer. Happy New Year, stay safe, and God bless.
– Alexander
We might be past Christmas Day, but it’s still the Christmas Season. so there’s no reason not to snag Periapsis Christmas. These stories are timeless anyway. I know you’ll enjoy them.
I'd say you still did better than the great majority of the population. XD
2022 was the year I got baptized, so it gets an A+ from me.