Quick Thoughts - 500 Strong

So those math-inclined out there, you may have noticed that Quick Sip Reviews is now over 500 posts old. I'm not even sure what to call this. Not exactly an anniversary (though this moment comes I think almost exactly one year and seven months after QSR first lanched) or a birthday or anything like that. More like…a milestone. At the very least, it seems like an excuse to take a break from heavier thoughts and just sort of…check in.

Sometimes I wonder what I would think if I looked back at my earliest reviews and compared them to what I'm doing now. Note: I do not often look back at my reviews outside about a month (because they help me pick my favorite stories for the Monthly Round). And I know that so much has changed since I changed that QSR now is…well, considerably different from how I started out. The reviews are certainly longer. And maybe more intelligent? Or more thoughtful? Or…something? It's hard to say because when I started doing these reviews I thought that they'd be shorter than my Monthly Round reviews and now…well, if anything they tend to be longer. I also tend to do more reviews per post now. And I review more publications.

I sort of went through my stats for the first seven months of the year. I have reviewed (through July) 440 short stories, 105 poems, and 24 nonfiction works. For comparison, in 2015 I reviewed 742 short stories. Which means that I've reviewed 1182 short stories since I've begun, and with nonfiction and poetry probably close to 1500 individual works of SFF. Which, hey, not bad I hope. Probably I'll sound like a broken record because I tend to return time after time to say basically the same thing but with new numbers. Probably to help me stay sane. I'm still here. I'm still reviewing. And I still love it. SFF still inspires me and I continue to believe that the absolute best SFF ever produced is coming out now. In terms of representation and complexity and fun? Yeah, right now. I tend to be in the camp of thinking things get better over time, which means we're always on the cusp of something amazing. And I really do see that reflected in short SFF.

When I think about what I'm doing now in reviewing SFF I'm…actually fairly okay at the moment. I mean, there are projects that I want to do. There are other publications that I'd like to review. And maybe at some point I'll be looking into what I review and might have to make some decisions there. But for now…well, I'm busy. I'm writing over 30k of reviews a month and have been since sometime in 2015. It's been…well, as I said, busy. I'm not even sure that I thought I'd last this long when I started. I still worry about burnout, but I've been doing this for so long that I don't think I could stop. Not with things as they stand. I just like doing it too much.

So let me just say thank you. For all who read and enjoy these reviews, thank you. For any who have helped signal boost or pointed others in my direction, thank you. I hope that people enjoy what I do here, and I hope that I'll be doing it for quite some time to come. Thanks for reading!

All the best,

Charles