Hello and welcome to the Quick Sip Reviews 2020 Year-In-Review. I got stats! Thoughts! Uh...that's mostly it! A lot of this is similar to what I've gone over in my 2020 Awards Eligibility Post, Comprehensive Post List, and Recommended Reading List. But while I've been able to touch there on a number of things that I've done and stories I've read, this is something more like a State of the Blog. I'm checking in to give the final stats of the year (though they'll be updated a bit after posting this as my final reviews come out, probably, over the next week or so). I'll probably ramble a bit as I go, and I might get a bit emotional, but if that doesn't bother you, let's get to it!
So 2020 has been something of a return to form when it comes to reviewing numbers for me. I closed out with over 900 reviews for the first time in a number of years, and the year ranks high when it comes to overall number of reviews. On top of that, my average word count per review remains high, meaning that I've probably written over 400,000 words of reviews this year on this blog alone. It's...a lot. To give you a better picture of what "a lot" means, though, here's my stats for numbers of reviews for the year.
January: 55 stories | 11 poems [66 reviews]
February: 56 stories | 13 poems [69 reviews]
March: 63 stories | 14 poems [77 reviews]
April: 66 stories | 13 poems [79 reviews]
May: 59 stories | 14 poems [73 reviews]
June: 62 stories | 20 poems [82 reviews]
July: 61 stories | 12 poems [73 reviews]
August: 69 stories | 14 poems [83 reviews]
September: 68 stories | 12 poems [80 reviews]
October: 74 stories | 9 poems [83 reviews]
November: 76 stories | 14 poems [90 reviews]
December: 65 stories | 20 poems [85 reviews]
2020: 774 stories | 166 poems [940 reviews]
Total: 4365 stories | 880 poems | 126 nonfiction [5371 reviews]
Plus, well, I made it to the end of the year! Truly I wasn't sure I was going to there for a while. But I wanted to make it to the six year mark and I will. And while the blog will continue, is not ending, what is ending is my in-depth comprehensive coverage of the publications I've followed. I won't be doing full issue reviews, or if I do, it will be rare. You can see more about my plans for next year at this post. It's pretty much unchanged from what I feel now. Looking back...
It has been my honor to review these stories. To find that by and large people have trusted me to engage with the work and have opinions on the internet. It's a little strange now, because this blog has been called something of a relic of a different time, back when personal blogging was more popular and common, before the rise of social media to replace a lot of that. And really it's just what I knew, to throw myself into this blog. I've learned...a lot. One of the things is that there's never enough short fiction reviewers. It's a daunting, exhausting, not-entirely-thankless-but-kinda-close job that requires a lot of work. I've been doing it for over six years now and it's meant reading and reviewing something like 75 pieces of short SFF a month, every month. My posting schedule is basically every weekday, including most holidays. I've loved doing this. I am ready to step back, refocus, and try something new.
As always, I leave an open invitation for people looking to get into short SFF reviewing to contact me, either by the contact info I have under the About Me section or however you can, and I will offer what assistance I can. I still think the field is very hungry for short SFF reviews. I have a lot of opinions on the "discoverability problems" of short SFF, but that's a rant for another time. What I will say is that reviewing short SFF has made me a better reader, a better writer, and likely a better person. I will miss it dearly, and will feel guilty about it, even as I'm still doing it. I look forward to seeing who might come up in the field and who might start some entirely new conversations and trends. I'll still be around, doing what I can, and I hope people will still find my work useful and entertaining.
Thanks, friends! In some ways it's been easy to get into short SFF reviewing for me, because the field has been so welcoming. Cheers!
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