Not Everything I Published in 2018
I've seen a lot of people posting their end-of-the-year tweet threads of everything they published in 2018 and I've seen a lot of people criticizing the act of making end-of-the-year tweet threads about everything people published in 2018, but what I haven't seen are any end-of-the-year blog posts about everything I've published in 2018. So here it goes.
I think it's especially fitting to do a blog post about my 2018 because some of the best writing I did was published right here on Misreader. Not that I didn't publish in any other venues in 2018: I had one online publication this year, "Janopolis" in Cartridge Lit, and a few acceptances that don't look like they'll make it to print before the year is out. But that's normal for me. There's been a lot of talk lately about not feeling bad about not publishing too much, the benefits of laying fallow, that non-production is not a metric for writing ability or progress. I agree that drive to overproduce is a problem. Some people blame it on capitalism. Knowing my own deeply peasant ancestry, I would put the blame further back, with feudalism or even prior to that. Since when have poor people NOT felt as if they were in danger for being non-productive?
But back to the here and now. With the publication of this post here on Misreader I have completed a full year of posting successfully each month, continuing a trend that started back in June 2017. That output level might not seem like much, but consider that blogging isn't exactly what it used to be, and the fact that many of those pieces might have been accepted for publication elsewhere but weren't sent out, either because I wanted to meet that one-post-a-month quota or because I wouldn't want to have them published anywhere else. Those posts, as follows, are:
Gateskeeping: A lot of what I just talked about above is directly related to this post, which I think was my best of the year.
Aiight at the Museum: I went deep inside the new Steinhardt Museum of Natural History to see how Israel's political histories were portrayed along with the natural ones.
Pairing: William Blake and Wu-Tang: I originally tried to get Tolkien into this mix, but decided it would be better to just let these two very strong elements pair on their own.
Creating Biography: Bohemian Rhapsody, Carl Sagan, Getting Weird: Via my own laziness, this post leveraged my notes for the panel I was on at AWP 2017 in Washington DC about writing creative biography. I also embedded my review of Bohemian Rhapsody in there. It was okay.
The 2018 "It Could Always Be Worse" Tarot Misreading: And so we end how we began, facing down the barrel of another new year, not knowing what to expect, and looking into pieces of fancy paper for the right answers. Something stuck with me about this post, but something never felt quite right about it either and I'm undecided whether I'll continue the tradition and do another one of these for 2019.
Like I said, I did a lot of good work outside of Misreader as well. There was the story in Cartridge Lit as well as this explanation of my typical writing day that I did for Rob McLennan's My Small Press Writing Day series. I'm also very proud of this tweet I made on Halloween:
See you in 2019, boys and ghouls.
