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Year in Review 2021
2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 (limited-access appendix), 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007
I'm going to be less thorough/contemplative than usual, so I may forget some things.
1. What did you do in 2021 that you'd never done before?
- Chris and I finished the musical, The Lady Takes the Mic. We'll probably write some others eventually (we've sketched out a few) but at the moment are working on getting this one produced. We've recorded a lot of demos and have submitted to a few development programs. We're finalists for a couple but won't know for a while. A few times, we came close to doing a cabaret-style preview to run through the show in front of an audience, but Coronavirus kept surging and it never came together.
- cracked my phone screen - dropped it on concrete when it was very cold (slipped out of my very cold hands). It still works; I put a film over it. This is the first and so far only time I've cracked a screen.
- appeared on Twitch streams a couple times - once as a cross-promotion of the rpg Negocios Infernales and the magazine Strange Horizons, and once as a streaming test with Faith where we played the board game Dune (an Avalon Hill design from 1979).
- became CFO of an arts org (which is similar but not the same as being a producer of a movie - it's the difference between getting one project to the end and making sure there is funding to do indefinite future projects at a steady rate) [Strange Horizons is where I'm talking about.] Relatedly, figured out how to get a paypal account transferred to me.
- ran a kickstarter [Strange Horizons again]
- was a webmaster (as opposed to someone who jumps in and does a lot of coding but isn't actually the webmaster) [for the Winchester cub scout pack]
- switched to working part time, and relatedly used the post-Obamacare insurance marketplace for the first time; for the entirety of the existence of the affordable care act, I've either been employed full time or have lived in a country with a national health service (UK or Italy; Italy's model is based on the UK's)
- had two poems commissioned: "Death Opus," for the inaugural issue of The Deadlands, and "Clawing Through Mud as More Leaves Silt Down, as Plastic Bags, as Cast-Off Bottles" for an anthology called Misfits, which isn't out yet. I think they're the first two poems I've written that weren't on spec, that were editors approaching me instead of me pitching them.
- wrote a big essay/interview "Gender Expression and Exploration Through Gaming," which was once of the pieces we decided to submit for the Pushcart Prize this year; I've had fiction nominated before but not nonfiction. It won't make it and it's to some extent me being nominated by me, but it's still a first.
- drew a lot of concept art for Radiance, a short film I wrote, to help the producer pitch it. Relatedly, did a lot of other science fiction illustrations for my own amusement and to experiment with different drawing styles. I naturally gravitate toward very spare line drawings and have been challenging myself to play around more with line weights and shading, and to a lesser extent color. I also put together a feature treatment for Radiance, which was handy late in the year when it was suggested I apply for a screenwriting residency and I had all the materials already to hand (I won't hear back for months; my odds are good but not certain).
- got more in the habit of playing around with camera timers; to some extent, the main actor/model I have to work with right now is me, so if I want anything dynamic I can't have the camera in my hand.
- signed on as producer of a documentary that's already in postproduction, purely to help see it through the festival process. It's something I like very much and have been happy to cheerlead, an abstract and lyrical art film about the train system in Tokyo. Partway through the year, my producer saw it and was like "this seems like very much your thing and you should check it out" and I was like "it's funny you should say so." It's called "Locomotion/Murmuration."
- started work on a new novel. I keep being drawn to time travel stories that overlap with crime noir, and this is more of that. Progress is slow and I'm still in the outlining stage.
- experienced a coup attempt in the country where I live
- grew eucalyptus. Figured out leeks grow really well in a strawberry pot. I did this because I thought it would look cool to have a tentacle-y strawberry pot. But as it happened the leeks also grew better than the ones in ordinary beds.
- farmed mushrooms (specifically, lion's mane mushrooms, which are native to my region)
- garment construction clicked for me; I can just make stuff now. I could always do alterations and embellishments and could always work from patterns. But at some point this year I got to where I could think of the shape I wanted to make, sketch the pieces on fabric, and put them together to form the shape I was looking for in the size I wanted it to be. It's not like I've never tried this before, but now it works.
- something that shows up as a character trait in various fantasy books (and sourcebooks) is that there will be a character, usually a pirate, usually Mediterranean, who uses perfumed oils on his hair. I've started doing this in the more staticky months of the year; I'll put argan oil or whatever on my hands and run them through the bottom few inches of my hair, basically like how you'd use moisturizer on your hands. It's kept my hair healthy and manageable but does also make me laugh because of having encountered it so many times as a fictional personality trait. (Not as a description of a character's appearance or day to day tasks! Personality trait!)
2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
Things I said I was going to do in the 2020 year in review and in fact did:
- cut back on work hours
- finished the musical
- submitted the short story I said I would (and another one as well)
Didn't do:
- get back to editing Romie and James Take a Walk in the Woods; replace/reclear music on Hayseeds & Scalawags
this is even though I have three different film distributors who are interested. It wasn't possible, logistically. The editing computer is also Ciro's main computer (particularly since his laptop was out of commission for a good chunk of the year), plus a huge chunk of work/school/socializing was taking place through Zoom and Discord. I wasn't able to book chunks of time to use it as an editing bay the way it's intended to be, because it had to fill so many other pandemic-linked gaps. With that said, one of the things Ciro was doing was a major image restoration of Hayseeds and of my short film "The Sleeping People," so it now looks much more like it was intended to look. I did record one of the replacement songs ("Silver Medalist," although it hasn't been mixed/mastered yet). We tried to record "Dandelion," another of the replacement songs, but I didn't like how the recording sounded; I've had to go back to the drawing board on it.
A lot of my goals for this year are Strange Horizons related, because I need to get it on more sustainable footing from a labor perspective. (We don't have a problem raising money; we have a problem promising to do things that take a hell of a lot of time and which are outside our skillset.) I'm trying to get us set up with more passive sources of income (a merch store, books and ebooks for sale) and am gaming out whether we can start offering honorariums to editors. I'm trying to shift people off the idea that we need to do our own shipping and warehousing (NO) and that we need to be learning how to do bilingual stuff on the fly instead of better integrating the department we already have that already does that. And we're trying to get a formal code of conduct written. It's a lot.
And then a lot of my goals are really more like hopes. There are so many things I've applied for, or that were supposed to happen and were then delayed. It seems really possible that something could break through for me in a huge and life-changing way. It also seems really possible that it'll be another limbo-ish year.
I've committed to doing more solo writing projects, whether that's finishing various short stories and novels or starting new ones. This last year or two has really been swallowed by collaborative big projects, which I don't think is bad, but I don't want to lose the habit of being able to produce polished individual work.
I plan to reorganize the attic, because people keep piling stuff in there to the point where I can't get access to my own stuff. Also, the kids are now old enough that it's safe for me to bring back out some of my more breakable objects.
I need to get a workflow established for recording and editing music; I do a lot of it these days (both for my own songwriting and for the musical) and it's always stressful and too dependent on Ciro. I don't know how to fix that, but I'm tired of not having it fixed. Right at the end of the year, I wrote a new song, "Darkest of the Days," and I'm going to need to multi-track it before I hand it off to Paul, because right now the only person who can actually hear it is me in my own head (it's got a counter melody and I can't sing two notes simultaneously live).
I've been toying around with putting a chapbook together, of what I think of as my "caretaker" poems. I'd been thinking about printing them with a local letterpress, just for the pleasure of having a beautiful handmade physical object, but there's also a publisher who has been kind of following me based on my music and visual art, so I might approach them first.
I also keep thinking I ought to put together Postorbital as a book, and/or some of my micro-journaling Tweets; I don't really use social media socially or temporally. We'll see, though, because it's something I've thought about for ages and I have a lot of other things to do.
3. Did anyone close to you give birth or get married?
I attended two weddings - Chris and Brandon's in New York, and Molly and Cedric's in Massachusetts. I was the officiant for the latter one (jointly with Ciro).
Ed and Ashley divorced after being married more than 20 years (and married 3 times, once before gay marriage was legal at all, once when it was legal in some states but not all, and then finally when it was nationally recognized).
4. Did anyone close to you die?
No, although there were a lot of second-order deaths - very many of my friends had friends and family members die, often pandemic-related (either directly or as a result of stress and disruption making medical conditions worse). The deaths that struck me most were the ones in the Ukpo family (I'm friends with two cousins, and both of their parents and another aunt died in the same week), the death of Gerald Burnett (a choir director I went to high school with whose heart failed), and bell hooks (who I did not know personally but who influences my thinking a lot).
The death that was closest to me, and that will continue to reverberate, is the death of Chris's mom, who I liked a lot and expected to have more time with. I've known her since I was 15, and she was one of the people we were showing previews of the musical as we worked on it. It was strange not to have her at the wedding and it will be strange not to have her in the audience when the show finally goes up. She's someone I'll grieve for a long time. It feels like she's still supposed to be here.
Several friends and acquaintances have cancer. One of them (who has a baby) seems to be maybe coming out of it. One of them (a high school friend) has been given months to live, but has just entered an experimental program. One of them (a close friend) just had all of his bone marrow destroyed and it's now being regrown from stem cells. Then he'll have to have all his vaccinations (all) again since he'll have an infant's immune system.
That last one has an extra element of the uncanny, because in my (as yet unpublished) first novel, there's a character based on him (but a mirror universe version that is also me), and in the novel the character develops a blood disorder all of a sudden. It's a horror novel, and in the novel what's happening is that supernatural forces are creating emptiness inside him to inhabit. I wrote it like 15 years ago. In the novel, it doesn't kill him (but he does die; the haunted house eventually collapses on him). So anyway, in reality and in the present day, we facebook chat while his blood is being filtered.
5. Where did you travel?
With the kids not vaccinated, it just didn't seem worth the risk. I barely left Winchester. Ciro went down to Texas for about a week to help Ed post-divorce (working on refitting a school bus to be a mobile home). Mom and Dad went to Atlanta for a week during low transmission to visit REL. Ciro and I went down to New Jersey for two days to visit with Kristina and Linda and to hop into NYC for Chris and Brandon's wedding.
6. What would you like to have in 2022 that you lacked in 2021?
Almost everything seems out of reach until I can be more confident that inviting someone into my house won't kill them (or vice versa).
7. What date from 2021 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
January 6, not only because that was a weird time to be someone who works in live broadcast news, but because it's been said a lot since then and probably will continue to be said a lot - much like "September 11," it's a day which is talked about using its date more often than a proper name (e.g. "The Capitol Riot")
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Finishing the musical, but honestly "Death Opus" is pretty close. In general, my poems this year have been ambitious and have each tended to take a month or two to write; very much the opposite of my usual tossed-off style. I still mostly prefer reading lighter and quicker verse than the heavy and esoteric things I'm writing, but I'm writing the heavy and esoteric things because I know a lot of people who are writing light and quick verse well, so I know it's taken care of. Whereas this accumulative, accretive, decaying thing I'm doing is pushing toward something else I haven't arrived at yet.
9. What was your biggest failure?
I have trouble knowing how to be there for Nicodemo right now; he's picked up some really maladaptive behaviors during the pandemic. If I'm right and it's anxiety, then the way to respond to it is basically the opposite of if I'm wrong and it's depression. And unfortunately I have not so far gotten much of any helpful feedback from social workers and therapists, who have mostly been like "well what do you think". So that's some pretty high stakes stuff I could be getting wrong, which I won't know for a while.
10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
I continue to be in good health but also to suffer from seasonal allergies pretty much all of the time. (Thanks, climate change.) I felt like there was a while where my cardiopulmonary fitness wasn't what it used to be, partly because of being indoors so much and partly because I deliberately scaled back aerobic exercise to give my muscles some time to build (aerobics are kind of the enemy of body building), but it bounced back pretty quickly when I started hiking again.
Due to stress, I spent the back half of the year with autoimmune dis-regulation stuff like eczema; I'm probably going to have to get another gum graft (although that could also just be timing - my periodontal stuff is congenital and inherited from my dad and grandmother; my gums have receded unusually far for someone my age, but also much more slowly than you'd expect for someone who is me, and that's a testament to how well I take care of my teeth).
11. What was the best thing you bought?
As a Christmas present, I got Ciro an electric bass and amp. So we can jam together now.
12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
I feel like mostly the people I know or know of have been working much harder than they should have to, unsustainably, so I don't really want to celebrate it. And then everybody who is not doing that is being pretty awful. Ilario has mostly been thriving in a situation where that's difficult, and despite his own disabilities, and I've tried to make clear to him how proud I am.
C. S. E. Cooney helped me out in a big way, totally selflessly. I mean, a ton of people stepped up to save Strange Horizons from inside and outside the magazine, without even knowing the full outline of the crisis. Claire in particular stands out as going above and beyond for essentially no other reason than knowing it would help us, and for rallying a ton of other people to do the same.
13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
About 15% of the country.
14. Where did most of your money go?
Normal bills. Fancy food, the gym, art supplies, media. Health insurance premiums through work (but not since I went to part time; I make about the same money now just by not having to pay that insurance premium).
15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
I've been pretty emotionally flat, which is not even unusual. I've probably been excited about plenty of things, but don't remember. I got obsessed for a while with triboelectric charge, which I was researching to try to create a metaphor; there's a chart on wikipedia of the triboelectric charges of various things, and it became the basis for most of my jokes for probably two weeks. During the Olympics, the only sport I cared about was Artistic Swimming (which is what they call synchronized swimming now) and I was particularly excited about the performance by Ukraine. They got bronze. I rewatched their routine a lot of times.
16. What song will always remind you of 2021?
"Stay" by Kid LAROI and Justin Bieber (which I heard a lot; somebody in the house is obsessed with it)
"Technicolor" by Montaigne (Australia's Eurovision entry) - I like the official music video as well, but really this performance in front of a stadium of people is special
17. Compared to this time last year, are you happier or sadder?
Sadder. In many ways, it's been an easier year, but I have a harder time relating to other people. There's a philosophical knot I haven't been able to untangle. I use basically Kantian reasoning where I try to check my ethics to see whether I can apply them equally to myself and to other people, and in the past that's been a good way to keep myself from getting grandiose. But it's been a problem lately because it seems good right now to not expect anything from other people, to feel extreme compassion for the difficulty of what everyone is facing.
However, if I extend that to myself, and give myself license to behave horribly, then there's no way out, and any given day in my life is pointless and hopeless. It actually seems more important than usual that I hold my head straight, and do what I say I will, because there's almost no meaning outside what I personally create. So it's bad. It would be bad for me to hold anybody else to the standard I hold myself, but the idea of not holding myself to that standard feels bleak as all hell. For the moment, I just let my mind slip off the idea when it occurs to me, like for now it needs to be a marble instead of a knot.
ii. thinner or fatter?
Slighly thicker, I think, but I'm not all the way sure. My clothes are slightly tighter but I also have visible abs. I don't know what to think. It may just be muscle. Or it could be more fat. I don't know. I look basically the same; whatever it is, it's on the margins.
I've gone backwards in terms of strength, though. Early in the year, I'd gotten to where I could do 11 pushups and also looked fantastic. But then in May when the Strange Horizons succession crisis happened, my cortisol levels shot way up, my sleep was disrupted, and I had to spend basically all my waking hours that weren't at my day job on making sure the magazine didn't collapse. I dropped back to only being able to do three pushups in a set. I've only very recently gotten back up to the 4 or 5 range. I think my squats and lunges are better, though.
iii. richer or poorer?
Richer. Once again, we were spending most of our income, but once again my investments were savvy. I made $25,000 on my investments (for context, my take-home pay in a given year is about $48,000, so I made half-a-year's worth of money), better than a 25% return, which beats the Dow's 19% and the Nasdaq's 20%. S&P 500 was 27%. (I was ahead of the S&P for the first half of the year and just behind it for the second half.) This is year three of three that I've beaten the market. I made $4800 in dividends, all of which I reinvested. My focus is getting that number high enough that I don't need a day job anymore.
(I say "focus," but it's pretty passive most of the time; I make long term plays and I do almost all of them early in the year because fund managers and boards do weird-ass shell game stuff later in the year to goose their bonuses, and it's hard to get a read then on how a company is actually doing.)
18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
I miss museums and live performances very much. I did go to the DeCordova sculpture park, and the Griffin Photography Museum's outdoor exhibits. I miss the Boston Symphony Orchestra (I usually have season tickets), and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.)
19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
When I took over the SH accounts in the aftermath of two resignations (one of which shouldn't have happened and one of which should have been a firing) I knew, correctly, to my bones, that both people had quietly buried a lot of work they had not done, in an amount that impacted our finances and legal safety. So I did an audit and kept finding more and more missing stuff. In this year I've written literally hundreds of emails saying "hi, you don't know me, but in x month this paperwork didn't happen / you didn't get paid and maybe thought this wasn't something we paid for / didn't get the merch you paid us for".
I had a dozen other staff helping me with this, but I was coordinating it. And toward the end of December, I found a new pocket of another 60 people I'm going to have to reach out to directly and another 300 people I don't have to contact directly but who are owed things. So the next month or two is going to be more of the same instead of me finally being able to pivot to the restructuring that needs to happen.
It was also not a smooth process shifting to part-time work at my day job; it happened at a time when HR was overwhelmed, and I had to babysit the process way way too much; it was not smooth.
20. How did you spend the holidays?
I worked my usual shift on Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and New Years Eve. I had actual Christmas and New Year's Day off since they fell on Saturdays (outside my shift), which also meant I didn't get any holiday pay (except for Thanksgiving), although the company issued a small holiday bonus for the first time, which I did get.
Thanksgiving was pretty much just a regular day. There was a big turkey and not all of it cooked well, although it was all ultimately able to be rescued and turned into various dishes over the next week (and some of it was frozen for later).
The cats were excited to have the Christmas tree back up. Our new ornaments for the year were snoflakes. We also hung a lot of candy canes. For the entire advent season, we ate in the formal dining room with candles. (After Christmas, we transitioned back to the kitchen table and the dining room went back to being the board game room.) We watched Scrooge, Muppet Christmas Carol, Rare Exports, A Christmas Story, and It's A Wonderful Life. We read various Christmas children's books and sang Christmas carols at bedtime.
On boxing day, we visited our neighbor Emily and took presents to her dog, Buddy. Our neighbors Evan and Heather brought us homemade peppermint bark. I cooked an enormous Brussels sprouts stalk my friend Stacy gave me, and roasted chestnuts, although not many of them (most of the nuts had mildewed in the damp weather; only about half a dozen were still good).
New Years Eve, Ciro cooked lentils and cotechino (and New Year's Day, mom made black eyed peas). Nicodemo turned his room into a dance club, and later we played some Rock Band. The kids were very crabby but determined to stay up; I folded out the sofa bed for them.
23. What was your favorite TV program?
This was the year we caught up on all of The Expanse; Ciro had tried a few episodes years ago and hadn't liked them, but we picked it back up on the fourth or fifth episode (I hadn't watched the first ones) because Jared Harris. And then we watched the rest of it. We refer to the show as "our space people."
The other show I cared about was the fourth season of Castlevania.
Right at the end of the year, we got into Only Murders In The Building.
We watched season one of The Wheel of Time but I don't know how I feel about it yet; it was way too short a season, so I can't tell whether most of their weirder choices are going to pay off or not.
I'm most of the way through Twin Peaks but am stretching it out.
Mixed feelings about Search Party's fourth season, but definitely loved the production design (including the replica apartment made of felt).
I've intended to watch Reservation Dogs and The Great, but haven't gotten to them yet.
24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
Absolutely. For search engine reasons, I'm not saying the name, but I will not ever work with the editor who left this year after a brief tenure during which he didn't do his work. I would leave a project if he signed on to it. I would encourage you to do the same in the unlikely event it ever happens. He's bigoted and abusive in a way that is very easy to recognize if you've been involved in activism a long time, but that still slips through with people because he can use social justice language.
This is not the first magazine where he's caused resignations and the collapse of a project. I would be much more public about it but some of the people he abused are worried he would retaliate against them. (He's wealthy and proximate to celebrity, although he will represent himself as marginalized.) I suspect that's how this keeps happening. If you can work out who I'm talking about and put him on blacklists at any publishers you work for/with, I strongly suggest doing it. Message me privately for the name if you need to.
I want to point out how unique this is; I've remained friendly with plenty of colleagues even after they've yelled at me, stolen money from me, plagiarized my work, or messed up commissions so badly I've had to erase their work and redo it. People are fallible and mess up and get overwhelmed, and I just keep a closer eye on them next time. In contrast, this is somebody who I feel is an active threat to the safety of anyone who works with him.
25. What was the best book you read?
I read David Mitchell's Utopia Avenue, and I read Adrian Tchaikovsky's The Expert System's Brother and The Expert System’s Champion, a two-book series. I read the series backward (book 2 and then book 1) and I recommend this.
I tried to read City of Brass, the start of the Daevabad Trilogy, which I'd been looking forward to, but I didn't connect with it at all. I could appreciate what it was doing, but it wasn't for me and I stopped maybe halfway through. I may try again sometime.
From July to December, I read the nine books of The Expanse. I like them even more than the TV show, which I also like. I thought about writing an essay about the way the TV adaptation shows the differences in how the format shapes the narrative (what kinds of stories you can tell and how you can surface them, and how this often changes which character seems to be active and what their motivation is).
This isn't a book, but I don't know where else to fit it - the computer game Disco Elysium is very text-focused and very good. It's a branching narrative and also has excellent art, but ultimately it feels like a piece of writing. Strongly recommend.
Some of the books I read to Ilario were books I hadn't read before - parts of Diane Duane's Young Wizards series which hadn't existed when I was a kid (we stalled out when we got to A Wizard of Mars), plus White Fang, plus books two and three in the Pirates! series (The Pirates! in an Adventure with Whaling/Ahab (title seems to vary with edition) and The Pirates! in an Adventure with Communists - the one with Ahab is very funny and the one with Communists is just ok). He was very obsessed with Sophie's World and with A Disappearing Spoon, which I had read before.
26. What was your greatest musical discovery?
I didn't find much new music. The CD player in the kitchen was malfunctioning for a lot of the year, which mostly meant listening to the radio, and most radio formats now are either classic rock or top 40, so I mostly heard the same few things repeatedly. (Streaming algorithms are in my experience equally bad about presenting me with things that sound like what I've already heard.) I've been listening to Sharon Van Etten's recent stuff - she showed up on Twin Peaks and I remembered that I liked her. I looked at more of Montaigne's stuff after I liked her Eurovision song.
There's a harpist in Glasgow named Romy Wymer who I found by accident because a friend was in the same festival and I saw a name a bit like mine; her playing is lovely.
27. What did you want and get?
Vaccinations. Also, there was a brand of lipstick I liked which went out of production, but I found a bunch of it. Nobody in my household was ill.
28. What did you want and not get?
Ease. For NPR to quit both-sidesing everything. There are a lot of people I've wanted to visit, or wanted visits from. It seemed for a little while in the summer like we could start to mingle again. But then no. Basically, I'd say what I miss is the small risks, like trying out a new restaurant or taking a day trip or going to a networking event - the kind of stuff where you're not actually sure you'll have a good time but figure you're not going to lose anything by trying it out. Currently, yeah you could lose quite a lot, so it seems like a goofy risk to take for an uncertain reward. Basically, I miss having the freedom to be curious about things.
29. What was your favorite film this year?
I think the only 2021 releases I saw (which I watched from home) were Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, In The Heights, Dune, and The Matrix Resurrections.
2021 releases I still want to see: The Green Knight, The French Dispatch, The Power of the Dog, The House of Gucci, The Last Duel, Licorice Pizza, The Lost Daughter, The Tragedy of Macbeth
Movies I watched this year for the first time included Tenet, John Carpenter's The Thing, In The Mood for Love, and The Hot Rock, all of which I liked.
The Hot Rock I found by accident; I'd never heard of it. Heist movie by Peter Yates starring Robert Redford, with a screenplay by William Goldman. It's extremely funny and weird and clever, and uses genre conventions extravagantly, as you'd expect from Goldman. It starts as a pretty typical heist movie (guy gets out of prison, gets pulled back in for one more job) but then because of mistakes during that one heist, they have to heist something else to fix the problem, which then means they have to heist something else. Fantastic comedy and witty action sequences. I loved it. It should have a better reputation than it has.
I was also impressed by Claire Denis' High Life (2018).
30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
Shortly before my birthday, a sickly lime tree of mine finally died; it was a tiny key lime given to me by a friend, and was a white elephant of a gift because it's terribly wrong for the climate, plus I'm not good at raising citrus, plus it already had root damage. I nursed it along for several years, but with this year's weird wet summer it gave up. Which was a relief. Unfortunately, my kids completely misunderstood my relationship to the tree, and for my birthday they bought me another (fortunately more hardy) citrus to replace it. I turned 41.
31. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Hard to say. I feel as though I'm surrounded by a bramble hedge, so I know I'm extremely constrained but also protected. I mostly work with what I have at hand. At any given time, I would like to have enough income from art that I don't have to have a day job anymore - I don't dislike it but it takes up a lot of time. I've taken steps in that direction, but I'm not there yet.
Mostly, it would be nice if my house was in any way organized to make it easy for me to do the things I like to do; inevitably I have to use the majority of the time I have available either cleaning up someone else's mess, searching for where somebody has put my things, or waiting for someone else to have time and/or stop making noise and/or stop asking me for things. "A Room of One's Own," you might say.
32. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2021?
I think I've mostly worn either minidresses and leggings, or highwater flares with boatneck pullovers. I usually have my hair up and out of the way, either in a French braid, a side braid, a braid crown, pigtails, a French twist into a high bun, or a chignon in the Korean style (held together with a stick and a ribbon instead of bobby pins). I think the latter is called jjok meori; it's a style that goes back to at least the 1200s. It's very comfortable.
More than one person has compared how I look to Audrey Hepburn, so I guess I'm looking like Audrey Hepburn. But that could be another way of saying I'm a slender brunette with clothes that don't seem tied to a specific era, which I tailor so I won't step on them when I'm barefoot.
33. What kept you sane?
I play Genshin Impact most days as sort of a stand-in for being able to go out. It's not exactly that it's an escape from the pandemic; it's more like it reflects my experience of the pandemic in a soothing way. This is another thing I've thought about pitching an essay about (I think Polygon might be into it). The way I relate to the game has strong parallels to how the characters use the Empathy Box in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (a videogame/simulation world which does not show up in the movie, and which is not called a videogame in the book because home videogame consoles didn't exist when it was written. But it's a videogame.)
34. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Wes Chatham, who plays Amos Burton in The Expanse, is just wonderful; I always enjoy when he's on screen. I'm happy any time I see a recording of a Miley Cyrus live performance; aside from the fact that I like her voice, it comes through loud and clear that she enjoys singing and enjoys playing music with other people. It reflects the way I myself feel when performing music with friends. It feels deeply right.
35. What political issue stirred you the most?
Same as always: racism, poverty, homophobia, misogyny, climate change, misuse of power
36. Who did you miss?
Val. It's not even that abnormal for us to not see each other in person for a year or two, but she's been even more swamped with work than I am. So we still talk regularly, but with less of the usual time for frivolity and back-and-forth. And there have been a lot of times when I think both of our lives would have been easier with each other being able to come over and help with small things like cooking a meal or wiping down a counter, or just being on computers in the same room. We're a good team and haven't really been able to team. If I could just show up at anybody's door to help out with something, that would be who.
37. Who was the best new person you met?
Evan and Heather moved in down the block, and our kids hit it off while scootering around the neighborhood, so we kind of wound up being in a pod with each other - people who you can call for help if you get locked out of your car or something. We haven't been able to hang out that much in a direct way, but it's like having an improvised familial tie. I like them.
As part of the grand unwinding of other people's undone work, I stepped in and did some developmental manuscript edits for strangers' short fiction, which I haven't done in a long time. (It's something I usually only do for friends or for money, and I don't really advertise that I do it for money, because I don't have the time to take much of it on.) One of the writers I edited, Derek, suggested that we continue to keep in touch afterward as writing buddies because we seem to have a lot in common in terms of how we approach writing, which was true enough that it did actually sound like a good idea. So we're still sort of feeling out the boundaries and rhythms of that relationship, but it seems potentially like it's going to be fruitful.
38. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2021.
I don't know. I've spent so much time reacting and plugging leaks and putting out fires. But it's also clearer than ever that my talents as a writer and musician and analyst are unusual and that people (both strangers and people who know me) want me to make more of it, which is also what I enjoy. It keeps being a fight to carve out space for it, but it usually takes less time for me to do a thing than I think it's going to take.
For a long time, I've avoided showing people works in progress, because I have had too many bad experiences with it. (Mostly, people start giving me advice on it as though it's done, and the advice is bad because it makes wrong assumptions about what was and wasn't going to make it to the final version. It also frequently invites "what if you stopped doing this and instead made this other thing I want" from people who should know better.) It's a policy I adopted about 20 years ago. I make exceptions for my sister, and Ciro, and people who are active collaborators on the project. That's basically it.
But I've relaxed that policy this year, so far without bad effects. I don't know whether it's because at this point I'm respected enough that people take my works in progress seriously (instead of thinking they're things that will never be finished, or thinking that I'm unsure of what I'm doing), or whether the cultural discourse has been shifted by social media (where people are more used to encountering works in progress, and where criticism has become more democratized for better or for worse, and where there is cultural capital in getting "early access.") Anyway I'm giving everybody more opportunities to bug me about stuff (for now) so that it winds up staying on my immediate to-do list with the other leaks and wildfires.
39. Quote a song that sums up your year:
"At the end of the tour
When the road disappears
If there's any more people around
When the tour runs aground
And if you're still around
Then we'll meet at the end of the tour"
-They Might Be Giants, The End of the Tour
I'm going to be less thorough/contemplative than usual, so I may forget some things.
1. What did you do in 2021 that you'd never done before?
- Chris and I finished the musical, The Lady Takes the Mic. We'll probably write some others eventually (we've sketched out a few) but at the moment are working on getting this one produced. We've recorded a lot of demos and have submitted to a few development programs. We're finalists for a couple but won't know for a while. A few times, we came close to doing a cabaret-style preview to run through the show in front of an audience, but Coronavirus kept surging and it never came together.
- cracked my phone screen - dropped it on concrete when it was very cold (slipped out of my very cold hands). It still works; I put a film over it. This is the first and so far only time I've cracked a screen.
- appeared on Twitch streams a couple times - once as a cross-promotion of the rpg Negocios Infernales and the magazine Strange Horizons, and once as a streaming test with Faith where we played the board game Dune (an Avalon Hill design from 1979).
- became CFO of an arts org (which is similar but not the same as being a producer of a movie - it's the difference between getting one project to the end and making sure there is funding to do indefinite future projects at a steady rate) [Strange Horizons is where I'm talking about.] Relatedly, figured out how to get a paypal account transferred to me.
- ran a kickstarter [Strange Horizons again]
- was a webmaster (as opposed to someone who jumps in and does a lot of coding but isn't actually the webmaster) [for the Winchester cub scout pack]
- switched to working part time, and relatedly used the post-Obamacare insurance marketplace for the first time; for the entirety of the existence of the affordable care act, I've either been employed full time or have lived in a country with a national health service (UK or Italy; Italy's model is based on the UK's)
- had two poems commissioned: "Death Opus," for the inaugural issue of The Deadlands, and "Clawing Through Mud as More Leaves Silt Down, as Plastic Bags, as Cast-Off Bottles" for an anthology called Misfits, which isn't out yet. I think they're the first two poems I've written that weren't on spec, that were editors approaching me instead of me pitching them.
- wrote a big essay/interview "Gender Expression and Exploration Through Gaming," which was once of the pieces we decided to submit for the Pushcart Prize this year; I've had fiction nominated before but not nonfiction. It won't make it and it's to some extent me being nominated by me, but it's still a first.
- drew a lot of concept art for Radiance, a short film I wrote, to help the producer pitch it. Relatedly, did a lot of other science fiction illustrations for my own amusement and to experiment with different drawing styles. I naturally gravitate toward very spare line drawings and have been challenging myself to play around more with line weights and shading, and to a lesser extent color. I also put together a feature treatment for Radiance, which was handy late in the year when it was suggested I apply for a screenwriting residency and I had all the materials already to hand (I won't hear back for months; my odds are good but not certain).
- got more in the habit of playing around with camera timers; to some extent, the main actor/model I have to work with right now is me, so if I want anything dynamic I can't have the camera in my hand.
- signed on as producer of a documentary that's already in postproduction, purely to help see it through the festival process. It's something I like very much and have been happy to cheerlead, an abstract and lyrical art film about the train system in Tokyo. Partway through the year, my producer saw it and was like "this seems like very much your thing and you should check it out" and I was like "it's funny you should say so." It's called "Locomotion/Murmuration."
- started work on a new novel. I keep being drawn to time travel stories that overlap with crime noir, and this is more of that. Progress is slow and I'm still in the outlining stage.
- experienced a coup attempt in the country where I live
- grew eucalyptus. Figured out leeks grow really well in a strawberry pot. I did this because I thought it would look cool to have a tentacle-y strawberry pot. But as it happened the leeks also grew better than the ones in ordinary beds.
- farmed mushrooms (specifically, lion's mane mushrooms, which are native to my region)
- garment construction clicked for me; I can just make stuff now. I could always do alterations and embellishments and could always work from patterns. But at some point this year I got to where I could think of the shape I wanted to make, sketch the pieces on fabric, and put them together to form the shape I was looking for in the size I wanted it to be. It's not like I've never tried this before, but now it works.
- something that shows up as a character trait in various fantasy books (and sourcebooks) is that there will be a character, usually a pirate, usually Mediterranean, who uses perfumed oils on his hair. I've started doing this in the more staticky months of the year; I'll put argan oil or whatever on my hands and run them through the bottom few inches of my hair, basically like how you'd use moisturizer on your hands. It's kept my hair healthy and manageable but does also make me laugh because of having encountered it so many times as a fictional personality trait. (Not as a description of a character's appearance or day to day tasks! Personality trait!)
2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
Things I said I was going to do in the 2020 year in review and in fact did:
- cut back on work hours
- finished the musical
- submitted the short story I said I would (and another one as well)
Didn't do:
- get back to editing Romie and James Take a Walk in the Woods; replace/reclear music on Hayseeds & Scalawags
this is even though I have three different film distributors who are interested. It wasn't possible, logistically. The editing computer is also Ciro's main computer (particularly since his laptop was out of commission for a good chunk of the year), plus a huge chunk of work/school/socializing was taking place through Zoom and Discord. I wasn't able to book chunks of time to use it as an editing bay the way it's intended to be, because it had to fill so many other pandemic-linked gaps. With that said, one of the things Ciro was doing was a major image restoration of Hayseeds and of my short film "The Sleeping People," so it now looks much more like it was intended to look. I did record one of the replacement songs ("Silver Medalist," although it hasn't been mixed/mastered yet). We tried to record "Dandelion," another of the replacement songs, but I didn't like how the recording sounded; I've had to go back to the drawing board on it.
A lot of my goals for this year are Strange Horizons related, because I need to get it on more sustainable footing from a labor perspective. (We don't have a problem raising money; we have a problem promising to do things that take a hell of a lot of time and which are outside our skillset.) I'm trying to get us set up with more passive sources of income (a merch store, books and ebooks for sale) and am gaming out whether we can start offering honorariums to editors. I'm trying to shift people off the idea that we need to do our own shipping and warehousing (NO) and that we need to be learning how to do bilingual stuff on the fly instead of better integrating the department we already have that already does that. And we're trying to get a formal code of conduct written. It's a lot.
And then a lot of my goals are really more like hopes. There are so many things I've applied for, or that were supposed to happen and were then delayed. It seems really possible that something could break through for me in a huge and life-changing way. It also seems really possible that it'll be another limbo-ish year.
I've committed to doing more solo writing projects, whether that's finishing various short stories and novels or starting new ones. This last year or two has really been swallowed by collaborative big projects, which I don't think is bad, but I don't want to lose the habit of being able to produce polished individual work.
I plan to reorganize the attic, because people keep piling stuff in there to the point where I can't get access to my own stuff. Also, the kids are now old enough that it's safe for me to bring back out some of my more breakable objects.
I need to get a workflow established for recording and editing music; I do a lot of it these days (both for my own songwriting and for the musical) and it's always stressful and too dependent on Ciro. I don't know how to fix that, but I'm tired of not having it fixed. Right at the end of the year, I wrote a new song, "Darkest of the Days," and I'm going to need to multi-track it before I hand it off to Paul, because right now the only person who can actually hear it is me in my own head (it's got a counter melody and I can't sing two notes simultaneously live).
I've been toying around with putting a chapbook together, of what I think of as my "caretaker" poems. I'd been thinking about printing them with a local letterpress, just for the pleasure of having a beautiful handmade physical object, but there's also a publisher who has been kind of following me based on my music and visual art, so I might approach them first.
I also keep thinking I ought to put together Postorbital as a book, and/or some of my micro-journaling Tweets; I don't really use social media socially or temporally. We'll see, though, because it's something I've thought about for ages and I have a lot of other things to do.
3. Did anyone close to you give birth or get married?
I attended two weddings - Chris and Brandon's in New York, and Molly and Cedric's in Massachusetts. I was the officiant for the latter one (jointly with Ciro).
Ed and Ashley divorced after being married more than 20 years (and married 3 times, once before gay marriage was legal at all, once when it was legal in some states but not all, and then finally when it was nationally recognized).
4. Did anyone close to you die?
No, although there were a lot of second-order deaths - very many of my friends had friends and family members die, often pandemic-related (either directly or as a result of stress and disruption making medical conditions worse). The deaths that struck me most were the ones in the Ukpo family (I'm friends with two cousins, and both of their parents and another aunt died in the same week), the death of Gerald Burnett (a choir director I went to high school with whose heart failed), and bell hooks (who I did not know personally but who influences my thinking a lot).
The death that was closest to me, and that will continue to reverberate, is the death of Chris's mom, who I liked a lot and expected to have more time with. I've known her since I was 15, and she was one of the people we were showing previews of the musical as we worked on it. It was strange not to have her at the wedding and it will be strange not to have her in the audience when the show finally goes up. She's someone I'll grieve for a long time. It feels like she's still supposed to be here.
Several friends and acquaintances have cancer. One of them (who has a baby) seems to be maybe coming out of it. One of them (a high school friend) has been given months to live, but has just entered an experimental program. One of them (a close friend) just had all of his bone marrow destroyed and it's now being regrown from stem cells. Then he'll have to have all his vaccinations (all) again since he'll have an infant's immune system.
That last one has an extra element of the uncanny, because in my (as yet unpublished) first novel, there's a character based on him (but a mirror universe version that is also me), and in the novel the character develops a blood disorder all of a sudden. It's a horror novel, and in the novel what's happening is that supernatural forces are creating emptiness inside him to inhabit. I wrote it like 15 years ago. In the novel, it doesn't kill him (but he does die; the haunted house eventually collapses on him). So anyway, in reality and in the present day, we facebook chat while his blood is being filtered.
5. Where did you travel?
With the kids not vaccinated, it just didn't seem worth the risk. I barely left Winchester. Ciro went down to Texas for about a week to help Ed post-divorce (working on refitting a school bus to be a mobile home). Mom and Dad went to Atlanta for a week during low transmission to visit REL. Ciro and I went down to New Jersey for two days to visit with Kristina and Linda and to hop into NYC for Chris and Brandon's wedding.
6. What would you like to have in 2022 that you lacked in 2021?
Almost everything seems out of reach until I can be more confident that inviting someone into my house won't kill them (or vice versa).
7. What date from 2021 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
January 6, not only because that was a weird time to be someone who works in live broadcast news, but because it's been said a lot since then and probably will continue to be said a lot - much like "September 11," it's a day which is talked about using its date more often than a proper name (e.g. "The Capitol Riot")
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Finishing the musical, but honestly "Death Opus" is pretty close. In general, my poems this year have been ambitious and have each tended to take a month or two to write; very much the opposite of my usual tossed-off style. I still mostly prefer reading lighter and quicker verse than the heavy and esoteric things I'm writing, but I'm writing the heavy and esoteric things because I know a lot of people who are writing light and quick verse well, so I know it's taken care of. Whereas this accumulative, accretive, decaying thing I'm doing is pushing toward something else I haven't arrived at yet.
9. What was your biggest failure?
I have trouble knowing how to be there for Nicodemo right now; he's picked up some really maladaptive behaviors during the pandemic. If I'm right and it's anxiety, then the way to respond to it is basically the opposite of if I'm wrong and it's depression. And unfortunately I have not so far gotten much of any helpful feedback from social workers and therapists, who have mostly been like "well what do you think". So that's some pretty high stakes stuff I could be getting wrong, which I won't know for a while.
10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
I continue to be in good health but also to suffer from seasonal allergies pretty much all of the time. (Thanks, climate change.) I felt like there was a while where my cardiopulmonary fitness wasn't what it used to be, partly because of being indoors so much and partly because I deliberately scaled back aerobic exercise to give my muscles some time to build (aerobics are kind of the enemy of body building), but it bounced back pretty quickly when I started hiking again.
Due to stress, I spent the back half of the year with autoimmune dis-regulation stuff like eczema; I'm probably going to have to get another gum graft (although that could also just be timing - my periodontal stuff is congenital and inherited from my dad and grandmother; my gums have receded unusually far for someone my age, but also much more slowly than you'd expect for someone who is me, and that's a testament to how well I take care of my teeth).
11. What was the best thing you bought?
As a Christmas present, I got Ciro an electric bass and amp. So we can jam together now.
12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
I feel like mostly the people I know or know of have been working much harder than they should have to, unsustainably, so I don't really want to celebrate it. And then everybody who is not doing that is being pretty awful. Ilario has mostly been thriving in a situation where that's difficult, and despite his own disabilities, and I've tried to make clear to him how proud I am.
C. S. E. Cooney helped me out in a big way, totally selflessly. I mean, a ton of people stepped up to save Strange Horizons from inside and outside the magazine, without even knowing the full outline of the crisis. Claire in particular stands out as going above and beyond for essentially no other reason than knowing it would help us, and for rallying a ton of other people to do the same.
13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
About 15% of the country.
14. Where did most of your money go?
Normal bills. Fancy food, the gym, art supplies, media. Health insurance premiums through work (but not since I went to part time; I make about the same money now just by not having to pay that insurance premium).
15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
I've been pretty emotionally flat, which is not even unusual. I've probably been excited about plenty of things, but don't remember. I got obsessed for a while with triboelectric charge, which I was researching to try to create a metaphor; there's a chart on wikipedia of the triboelectric charges of various things, and it became the basis for most of my jokes for probably two weeks. During the Olympics, the only sport I cared about was Artistic Swimming (which is what they call synchronized swimming now) and I was particularly excited about the performance by Ukraine. They got bronze. I rewatched their routine a lot of times.
16. What song will always remind you of 2021?
"Stay" by Kid LAROI and Justin Bieber (which I heard a lot; somebody in the house is obsessed with it)
"Technicolor" by Montaigne (Australia's Eurovision entry) - I like the official music video as well, but really this performance in front of a stadium of people is special
17. Compared to this time last year, are you happier or sadder?
Sadder. In many ways, it's been an easier year, but I have a harder time relating to other people. There's a philosophical knot I haven't been able to untangle. I use basically Kantian reasoning where I try to check my ethics to see whether I can apply them equally to myself and to other people, and in the past that's been a good way to keep myself from getting grandiose. But it's been a problem lately because it seems good right now to not expect anything from other people, to feel extreme compassion for the difficulty of what everyone is facing.
However, if I extend that to myself, and give myself license to behave horribly, then there's no way out, and any given day in my life is pointless and hopeless. It actually seems more important than usual that I hold my head straight, and do what I say I will, because there's almost no meaning outside what I personally create. So it's bad. It would be bad for me to hold anybody else to the standard I hold myself, but the idea of not holding myself to that standard feels bleak as all hell. For the moment, I just let my mind slip off the idea when it occurs to me, like for now it needs to be a marble instead of a knot.
ii. thinner or fatter?
Slighly thicker, I think, but I'm not all the way sure. My clothes are slightly tighter but I also have visible abs. I don't know what to think. It may just be muscle. Or it could be more fat. I don't know. I look basically the same; whatever it is, it's on the margins.
I've gone backwards in terms of strength, though. Early in the year, I'd gotten to where I could do 11 pushups and also looked fantastic. But then in May when the Strange Horizons succession crisis happened, my cortisol levels shot way up, my sleep was disrupted, and I had to spend basically all my waking hours that weren't at my day job on making sure the magazine didn't collapse. I dropped back to only being able to do three pushups in a set. I've only very recently gotten back up to the 4 or 5 range. I think my squats and lunges are better, though.
iii. richer or poorer?
Richer. Once again, we were spending most of our income, but once again my investments were savvy. I made $25,000 on my investments (for context, my take-home pay in a given year is about $48,000, so I made half-a-year's worth of money), better than a 25% return, which beats the Dow's 19% and the Nasdaq's 20%. S&P 500 was 27%. (I was ahead of the S&P for the first half of the year and just behind it for the second half.) This is year three of three that I've beaten the market. I made $4800 in dividends, all of which I reinvested. My focus is getting that number high enough that I don't need a day job anymore.
(I say "focus," but it's pretty passive most of the time; I make long term plays and I do almost all of them early in the year because fund managers and boards do weird-ass shell game stuff later in the year to goose their bonuses, and it's hard to get a read then on how a company is actually doing.)
18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
I miss museums and live performances very much. I did go to the DeCordova sculpture park, and the Griffin Photography Museum's outdoor exhibits. I miss the Boston Symphony Orchestra (I usually have season tickets), and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.)
19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
When I took over the SH accounts in the aftermath of two resignations (one of which shouldn't have happened and one of which should have been a firing) I knew, correctly, to my bones, that both people had quietly buried a lot of work they had not done, in an amount that impacted our finances and legal safety. So I did an audit and kept finding more and more missing stuff. In this year I've written literally hundreds of emails saying "hi, you don't know me, but in x month this paperwork didn't happen / you didn't get paid and maybe thought this wasn't something we paid for / didn't get the merch you paid us for".
I had a dozen other staff helping me with this, but I was coordinating it. And toward the end of December, I found a new pocket of another 60 people I'm going to have to reach out to directly and another 300 people I don't have to contact directly but who are owed things. So the next month or two is going to be more of the same instead of me finally being able to pivot to the restructuring that needs to happen.
It was also not a smooth process shifting to part-time work at my day job; it happened at a time when HR was overwhelmed, and I had to babysit the process way way too much; it was not smooth.
20. How did you spend the holidays?
I worked my usual shift on Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and New Years Eve. I had actual Christmas and New Year's Day off since they fell on Saturdays (outside my shift), which also meant I didn't get any holiday pay (except for Thanksgiving), although the company issued a small holiday bonus for the first time, which I did get.
Thanksgiving was pretty much just a regular day. There was a big turkey and not all of it cooked well, although it was all ultimately able to be rescued and turned into various dishes over the next week (and some of it was frozen for later).
The cats were excited to have the Christmas tree back up. Our new ornaments for the year were snoflakes. We also hung a lot of candy canes. For the entire advent season, we ate in the formal dining room with candles. (After Christmas, we transitioned back to the kitchen table and the dining room went back to being the board game room.) We watched Scrooge, Muppet Christmas Carol, Rare Exports, A Christmas Story, and It's A Wonderful Life. We read various Christmas children's books and sang Christmas carols at bedtime.
On boxing day, we visited our neighbor Emily and took presents to her dog, Buddy. Our neighbors Evan and Heather brought us homemade peppermint bark. I cooked an enormous Brussels sprouts stalk my friend Stacy gave me, and roasted chestnuts, although not many of them (most of the nuts had mildewed in the damp weather; only about half a dozen were still good).
New Years Eve, Ciro cooked lentils and cotechino (and New Year's Day, mom made black eyed peas). Nicodemo turned his room into a dance club, and later we played some Rock Band. The kids were very crabby but determined to stay up; I folded out the sofa bed for them.
23. What was your favorite TV program?
This was the year we caught up on all of The Expanse; Ciro had tried a few episodes years ago and hadn't liked them, but we picked it back up on the fourth or fifth episode (I hadn't watched the first ones) because Jared Harris. And then we watched the rest of it. We refer to the show as "our space people."
The other show I cared about was the fourth season of Castlevania.
Right at the end of the year, we got into Only Murders In The Building.
We watched season one of The Wheel of Time but I don't know how I feel about it yet; it was way too short a season, so I can't tell whether most of their weirder choices are going to pay off or not.
I'm most of the way through Twin Peaks but am stretching it out.
Mixed feelings about Search Party's fourth season, but definitely loved the production design (including the replica apartment made of felt).
I've intended to watch Reservation Dogs and The Great, but haven't gotten to them yet.
24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
Absolutely. For search engine reasons, I'm not saying the name, but I will not ever work with the editor who left this year after a brief tenure during which he didn't do his work. I would leave a project if he signed on to it. I would encourage you to do the same in the unlikely event it ever happens. He's bigoted and abusive in a way that is very easy to recognize if you've been involved in activism a long time, but that still slips through with people because he can use social justice language.
This is not the first magazine where he's caused resignations and the collapse of a project. I would be much more public about it but some of the people he abused are worried he would retaliate against them. (He's wealthy and proximate to celebrity, although he will represent himself as marginalized.) I suspect that's how this keeps happening. If you can work out who I'm talking about and put him on blacklists at any publishers you work for/with, I strongly suggest doing it. Message me privately for the name if you need to.
I want to point out how unique this is; I've remained friendly with plenty of colleagues even after they've yelled at me, stolen money from me, plagiarized my work, or messed up commissions so badly I've had to erase their work and redo it. People are fallible and mess up and get overwhelmed, and I just keep a closer eye on them next time. In contrast, this is somebody who I feel is an active threat to the safety of anyone who works with him.
25. What was the best book you read?
I read David Mitchell's Utopia Avenue, and I read Adrian Tchaikovsky's The Expert System's Brother and The Expert System’s Champion, a two-book series. I read the series backward (book 2 and then book 1) and I recommend this.
I tried to read City of Brass, the start of the Daevabad Trilogy, which I'd been looking forward to, but I didn't connect with it at all. I could appreciate what it was doing, but it wasn't for me and I stopped maybe halfway through. I may try again sometime.
From July to December, I read the nine books of The Expanse. I like them even more than the TV show, which I also like. I thought about writing an essay about the way the TV adaptation shows the differences in how the format shapes the narrative (what kinds of stories you can tell and how you can surface them, and how this often changes which character seems to be active and what their motivation is).
This isn't a book, but I don't know where else to fit it - the computer game Disco Elysium is very text-focused and very good. It's a branching narrative and also has excellent art, but ultimately it feels like a piece of writing. Strongly recommend.
Some of the books I read to Ilario were books I hadn't read before - parts of Diane Duane's Young Wizards series which hadn't existed when I was a kid (we stalled out when we got to A Wizard of Mars), plus White Fang, plus books two and three in the Pirates! series (The Pirates! in an Adventure with Whaling/Ahab (title seems to vary with edition) and The Pirates! in an Adventure with Communists - the one with Ahab is very funny and the one with Communists is just ok). He was very obsessed with Sophie's World and with A Disappearing Spoon, which I had read before.
26. What was your greatest musical discovery?
I didn't find much new music. The CD player in the kitchen was malfunctioning for a lot of the year, which mostly meant listening to the radio, and most radio formats now are either classic rock or top 40, so I mostly heard the same few things repeatedly. (Streaming algorithms are in my experience equally bad about presenting me with things that sound like what I've already heard.) I've been listening to Sharon Van Etten's recent stuff - she showed up on Twin Peaks and I remembered that I liked her. I looked at more of Montaigne's stuff after I liked her Eurovision song.
There's a harpist in Glasgow named Romy Wymer who I found by accident because a friend was in the same festival and I saw a name a bit like mine; her playing is lovely.
27. What did you want and get?
Vaccinations. Also, there was a brand of lipstick I liked which went out of production, but I found a bunch of it. Nobody in my household was ill.
28. What did you want and not get?
Ease. For NPR to quit both-sidesing everything. There are a lot of people I've wanted to visit, or wanted visits from. It seemed for a little while in the summer like we could start to mingle again. But then no. Basically, I'd say what I miss is the small risks, like trying out a new restaurant or taking a day trip or going to a networking event - the kind of stuff where you're not actually sure you'll have a good time but figure you're not going to lose anything by trying it out. Currently, yeah you could lose quite a lot, so it seems like a goofy risk to take for an uncertain reward. Basically, I miss having the freedom to be curious about things.
29. What was your favorite film this year?
I think the only 2021 releases I saw (which I watched from home) were Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, In The Heights, Dune, and The Matrix Resurrections.
2021 releases I still want to see: The Green Knight, The French Dispatch, The Power of the Dog, The House of Gucci, The Last Duel, Licorice Pizza, The Lost Daughter, The Tragedy of Macbeth
Movies I watched this year for the first time included Tenet, John Carpenter's The Thing, In The Mood for Love, and The Hot Rock, all of which I liked.
The Hot Rock I found by accident; I'd never heard of it. Heist movie by Peter Yates starring Robert Redford, with a screenplay by William Goldman. It's extremely funny and weird and clever, and uses genre conventions extravagantly, as you'd expect from Goldman. It starts as a pretty typical heist movie (guy gets out of prison, gets pulled back in for one more job) but then because of mistakes during that one heist, they have to heist something else to fix the problem, which then means they have to heist something else. Fantastic comedy and witty action sequences. I loved it. It should have a better reputation than it has.
I was also impressed by Claire Denis' High Life (2018).
30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
Shortly before my birthday, a sickly lime tree of mine finally died; it was a tiny key lime given to me by a friend, and was a white elephant of a gift because it's terribly wrong for the climate, plus I'm not good at raising citrus, plus it already had root damage. I nursed it along for several years, but with this year's weird wet summer it gave up. Which was a relief. Unfortunately, my kids completely misunderstood my relationship to the tree, and for my birthday they bought me another (fortunately more hardy) citrus to replace it. I turned 41.
31. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Hard to say. I feel as though I'm surrounded by a bramble hedge, so I know I'm extremely constrained but also protected. I mostly work with what I have at hand. At any given time, I would like to have enough income from art that I don't have to have a day job anymore - I don't dislike it but it takes up a lot of time. I've taken steps in that direction, but I'm not there yet.
Mostly, it would be nice if my house was in any way organized to make it easy for me to do the things I like to do; inevitably I have to use the majority of the time I have available either cleaning up someone else's mess, searching for where somebody has put my things, or waiting for someone else to have time and/or stop making noise and/or stop asking me for things. "A Room of One's Own," you might say.
32. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2021?
I think I've mostly worn either minidresses and leggings, or highwater flares with boatneck pullovers. I usually have my hair up and out of the way, either in a French braid, a side braid, a braid crown, pigtails, a French twist into a high bun, or a chignon in the Korean style (held together with a stick and a ribbon instead of bobby pins). I think the latter is called jjok meori; it's a style that goes back to at least the 1200s. It's very comfortable.
More than one person has compared how I look to Audrey Hepburn, so I guess I'm looking like Audrey Hepburn. But that could be another way of saying I'm a slender brunette with clothes that don't seem tied to a specific era, which I tailor so I won't step on them when I'm barefoot.
33. What kept you sane?
I play Genshin Impact most days as sort of a stand-in for being able to go out. It's not exactly that it's an escape from the pandemic; it's more like it reflects my experience of the pandemic in a soothing way. This is another thing I've thought about pitching an essay about (I think Polygon might be into it). The way I relate to the game has strong parallels to how the characters use the Empathy Box in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (a videogame/simulation world which does not show up in the movie, and which is not called a videogame in the book because home videogame consoles didn't exist when it was written. But it's a videogame.)
34. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Wes Chatham, who plays Amos Burton in The Expanse, is just wonderful; I always enjoy when he's on screen. I'm happy any time I see a recording of a Miley Cyrus live performance; aside from the fact that I like her voice, it comes through loud and clear that she enjoys singing and enjoys playing music with other people. It reflects the way I myself feel when performing music with friends. It feels deeply right.
35. What political issue stirred you the most?
Same as always: racism, poverty, homophobia, misogyny, climate change, misuse of power
36. Who did you miss?
Val. It's not even that abnormal for us to not see each other in person for a year or two, but she's been even more swamped with work than I am. So we still talk regularly, but with less of the usual time for frivolity and back-and-forth. And there have been a lot of times when I think both of our lives would have been easier with each other being able to come over and help with small things like cooking a meal or wiping down a counter, or just being on computers in the same room. We're a good team and haven't really been able to team. If I could just show up at anybody's door to help out with something, that would be who.
37. Who was the best new person you met?
Evan and Heather moved in down the block, and our kids hit it off while scootering around the neighborhood, so we kind of wound up being in a pod with each other - people who you can call for help if you get locked out of your car or something. We haven't been able to hang out that much in a direct way, but it's like having an improvised familial tie. I like them.
As part of the grand unwinding of other people's undone work, I stepped in and did some developmental manuscript edits for strangers' short fiction, which I haven't done in a long time. (It's something I usually only do for friends or for money, and I don't really advertise that I do it for money, because I don't have the time to take much of it on.) One of the writers I edited, Derek, suggested that we continue to keep in touch afterward as writing buddies because we seem to have a lot in common in terms of how we approach writing, which was true enough that it did actually sound like a good idea. So we're still sort of feeling out the boundaries and rhythms of that relationship, but it seems potentially like it's going to be fruitful.
38. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2021.
I don't know. I've spent so much time reacting and plugging leaks and putting out fires. But it's also clearer than ever that my talents as a writer and musician and analyst are unusual and that people (both strangers and people who know me) want me to make more of it, which is also what I enjoy. It keeps being a fight to carve out space for it, but it usually takes less time for me to do a thing than I think it's going to take.
For a long time, I've avoided showing people works in progress, because I have had too many bad experiences with it. (Mostly, people start giving me advice on it as though it's done, and the advice is bad because it makes wrong assumptions about what was and wasn't going to make it to the final version. It also frequently invites "what if you stopped doing this and instead made this other thing I want" from people who should know better.) It's a policy I adopted about 20 years ago. I make exceptions for my sister, and Ciro, and people who are active collaborators on the project. That's basically it.
But I've relaxed that policy this year, so far without bad effects. I don't know whether it's because at this point I'm respected enough that people take my works in progress seriously (instead of thinking they're things that will never be finished, or thinking that I'm unsure of what I'm doing), or whether the cultural discourse has been shifted by social media (where people are more used to encountering works in progress, and where criticism has become more democratized for better or for worse, and where there is cultural capital in getting "early access.") Anyway I'm giving everybody more opportunities to bug me about stuff (for now) so that it winds up staying on my immediate to-do list with the other leaks and wildfires.
39. Quote a song that sums up your year:
"At the end of the tour
When the road disappears
If there's any more people around
When the tour runs aground
And if you're still around
Then we'll meet at the end of the tour"
-They Might Be Giants, The End of the Tour
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