With the new year, Wuxia Wanderings enters its seventh year, which may prove to be the last, I don’t know. 2023 was a bad year for me, no energy, mental health deteriorating. But despite only publishing 19 posts las year, the views continued to climb. This is a very niche site, and most pageviews occur only on a handful of the more popular posts, such as the article about the flame stick, the translation list, and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms buyer’s guide. 2023 saw 45,222 views total, up from 35,859 in 2022. The site averages around 100 views a day, give or take.
This year, in effort to expand my reach and because I like layout and design, I plan to focus most of my wuxia attention on a wuxia magazine, to feature original fiction, articles on wuxia and xianxia, chapter summaries of novels, and maybe some translations of some public domain works.
I envision the magazine for readers and writers of wuxia, xianxia, or any other Chinese historical (real or made up) fiction, though with emphasis on wuxia. The articles will be about things that people looking to write their own fiction might need to know, and also things that readers and writers alike will be interested in. It’s my attempt to present the genre of wuxia as I know it to a wider audience.
At first I’ll just be writing everything myself as I can’t afford to pay contributors. But if the magazine picks up some traction then hopefully in the future I will be able to afford to pay others to contribute (so this will not be a free publication). I would like the magazine to be a home for original wuxia fiction.
In conjuction with the magazine, I plan to focus this year on my own original fiction, and also on a “crash course” guide to writing wuxia fiction. I just want to get more information out there so that more people who maybe only know wuxia through film and TV can be better equipped to write their own. I’ve talked about such a guide before. It will have practical information that anyone writing wuxia, xianxia, etc. would need to know. Like terms of address, the Chinese time system, major wuxia tropes, weapons, character archtypes, and so on. A quick start guide, if you will.
As far as other projects go, I do want to finish the Nangong Xue novel translation I’m about halfway done on. Before that though I’m going to do a Ximen Ding translation of one of his Twin Amazing Hawk Constables novels: Venomous Schemes. That should be starting this month. I just want to get the second chapter translated before I begin, and it’s a pretty long chapter. This is a whodunnit wuxia mystery, but with a different vibe from such series as Wen Rui’an’s Four Great Constables or Gu Long’s Chu Liuxiang or Lu Xiaofeng series. That translation will start in probably a week or so.
That’s all I have planned for 2024 at the moment. It’s enough. The magazine and my own fiction writing will take up the bulk of my time, I suspect. I’d like to do another Snowblade Vagabond novel if I can muster the energy for it, cause those are fun to translate. I’ve got a Yun Zhongyue novella that I’m just about halfway done translating, but I don’t know if I will finish it. I also have some novel excerpts I did years ago that I’d like to finish editing so that I can post. I have a some other excerpts and half-finished story translations that have never seen the light of day. I’d like to get those out eventually. But I don’t know. If this year goes how last year went, then this might be the last year of Wuxia Wanderings altogether. But the above is what I’d like to get done this year if I can.
Comments are always welcome. Everyone is also welcome to the Discord server.
