A Year in Review

or, this is the new year

Seinfeld is really the only TV I watch anymore and I find it endlessly amusing

Been an interesting year! Can’t say it’s the best year of my life, but it’s definitely had some high highs, though a few lows.

Sold my house, had a son, had that son spend a month in the NICU, bought a house, spent the summer dealing with my dad’s indifference to his potential demise sped along by that indifference, and then I published three books.

The newsletter has been doing pretty well, though. I wrote 83 essays! Subscriber growth has been pretty consistent throughout the year, which has been a pleasant surprise. A very welcome development, of course. I hoped people would begin to follow along here and that seems to be happening at a nice pace. This is largely without a social media presence caused by me torching all my social media accounts six years ago. I did, however, start using instagram and twitter again. The amount of traffic that flowed from there to here was quite negligible and so the purpose I thought I needed them to serve is something they’re not really doing.

And so I deleted them from my phone the morning of January 1st. This will, no doubt, be the best decision of my year.

Since so many of you have only subscribed in the last two or three months, I’ll provide a bit of a rundown of my favorite things I published here and elsewhere. But first I’m going to talk about the coming year and my plans here.

2023

Probably surprising no one, I have big plans for this new year. Will I accomplish everything? Who knows! But I sure do intend to try.

Part of this is because of those kind souls who have decided to pay me for my writing here. As I’ve often said, this was never an expectation or requirement. I’ve never paywalled anything yet and don’t intend to. But because you kind people are paying me to write, my ambitions have grown! It’s why this Neon Genesis Evangelion essay is taking so long and why my Final Fantasy IX essay is turning into a book (to be released this year?).

The biggest change that I’ve started for paying subscribers was giving away ebooks of my books as they come out. Some people had an issue with the delivery mechanism I used so I’ll make my first paywalled post, possibly this week, where I’ll share a link so that all paying subscribers can download my books. These will continue to go out as the year goes on and I publish more novels.

Speaking of which:

Fiction

I ended up spending most of 2022 writing short stories instead of the many books I planned on writing, which sort of changed the shape of my year. I ended up writing 33 short stories, along with 36 microfiction pieces. Those microfictions kind of feel like cheating, so I didn’t really meet my goal of a story per week. But also I did.

I’ll have at least six novels coming out next year with possibly as many as six additional ones coming out.

Two of these are sequels to Howl. I finished writing the second book, Iron Wolf, last week, right before the New Year. So that’s fun.

The other four were cowritten with Kyle Muntz to be published under the name KE Wolfe, just like Sing, Behemoth, Sing. What we’ve been writing, though, could not be any more different from that novel.

To put it as simply as possible, we’ve been writing a Star Trek style episodic adventure in space! The series is called The Shattered Stars and you can read the original worldbuilding document here. If you don’t want to read that, Kyle came up with a good way to describe it:

Star Trek: The Next Generation but with the Firefly Crew.

In short, there was a Galactic Federation that humanity created, but it collapsed and fell apart, with each planet losing contact with the others. Hundreds of years later, certain planets have reconnected and are attempting to rebuild this galactic federation. But rather than the best of the best rising to command their ships (a rare commodity), the officers and crewmembers of these ships are simply the people with the knowledge and experience to do the work.

We’ll be releasing the first season this year, with each episode working as a more or less standalone, the way many Star Trek episodes used to be. So if you miss episode three, you’ll probably be fine jumping into episode four. There are long, ongoing plot threads, but each episode is intended to be as self-contained as any episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation was.

Honestly, this has been the most fun I’ve had writing in a long time. I’m so excited to share them with you that I sort of can’t wait. But wait I shall!

However, I will give you a publication schedule for the year:

• March 21st - Shattered Stars: Episode One

• Iron Wolf (Howl 2) - April/May

• June 21st - Shattered Stars: Episode Two

• September 21st - Shattered Stars: Episode Three

• Untitled (Howl 3) - October/November

• December 21st - Shattered Stars: Episode Four

For paying subscribers, that means you’ll be getting these six ebooks for free. You’ll also be getting them before publication.

Our goal with The Shattered Stars is to essentially write this forever. Each year will be a new season with new episodes. I’ll have more to say about this as those dates approach. I’ll set up the pre-order and so on as well.

This is also my goal with Howl. Though it’s possible that’ll come to a natural conclusion after a few books, especially if I stop having fun in this world. But part of me is prepared to write this for a long, long time.

And, as I said, I may sneak in a few other books. I have at least two other collaborative novels coming out at some point. Possibly this year? Who knows! That’s partly up to my cowriters and the big boss.

There’s the Final Fantasy IX book I mentioned, as well as one I haven’t mentioned about Tim Rogers, which are both nonfiction and will be more similar to what I’ve been doing here, just way bigger. I’ll talk about these later. They may not even happen until next year.

I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this but I have, like, twenty novels (and a handful of poetry collections, if you can believe it) just completely written and ready for publication on my computer. One of my friends fell in love with one of the weirdest ones in there and convinced me to publish it, so you’ll see that this year at some point. And maybe I’ll be convinced to publish something else.

I didn’t intend to publish three books in 2022. I definitely would have spread them out more if I had planned this, but here we are.

And, yes, paying subscribers get whatever I publish while they subscribe.

This Newsletter

Back in September, a reader poll led me to make plans to serialize a novel right here for free on the newsletter. I was hoping to begin publishing that in January, but that’s not going to happen. Probably I’ll start this summer. I’m thinking I’ll publish it for six months and then take a little break before beginning again. This is something I also intend to be able to write forever, but I imagine it’ll meet a natural conclusion before too long.

It’s going to be sort of like Avatar: The Last Airbender meets Pokemon. Which, incidentally, which is why I think I’ll be able to write it for a long, long time.

In 2022, I ended up writing a lot about George RR Martin’s Westeros. I had a lot of fun, despite the relatively low readership for these posts. With that in mind, a more marketing savvy writer would avoid doing something similar, but I’m intending to essentially double down on this idea.

I still haven’t picked which series to approach, but right now I’m leaning towards Harry Potter. Probably just the books, which I haven’t read in over fifteen years (am I old?). My wife and I just watched the movies and they were fun to have on while I did some grinding in a JRPG I’ll write about soon, but it made me curious about revisiting the books.

I also will probably be approaching the entire Star Wars series (probably just the movies, but who knows!) because of a sentence I wrote a few months ago defending The Last Jedi as the best Star Wars movie. So now I’m going to spend the whole year either convincing myself that I’m wrong or convincing you that I’m right.

That’s fun, yeah?

Also, I got gifted the Criterion Collection’s Wong Kar Wai boxset, so I’ll be writing about each of these movies (plus at least one more).

I encourage you all to read/watch along. The schedule will likely be somewhat irregular because I’m a slightly schedule averse person, I find, when it comes to writing essays. After all, I’ve been promising a Neon Genesis Evangelion essay since 2021 and it might not even be done this year. But I should be able to get through seven novels and nine movies in twelve months.

Right?

Think of it like a book club and a movie club. The books I’ll be reading in the obvious order and I won’t be reading any of the sequel or prequel or whatever kind of quel those other books are. If I watch the movies, I’ll also only be watching and writing the ones starring Harry Potter. For Star Wars, I’ll be watching these in release order (IV, V, VI, I, II, III, VII, Rogue One, VIII, Solo, IX). I liked the Mandalorian so it’s possible I’ll watch the TV shows but I don’t want to commit to something like that. If I do, I’ll be watching them in release order as well and I won’t be writing an episode by episode review. Unless I change my mind and do exactly that!

Other essays to expect here this year:

• Lord of the Rings

• Root

• Fury of Dracula

• Rising Sun

• More Final Fantasy

• God of War: Ragnarök

• Tactics RPGs

• Kazuo Ishirugo

• Louise Erdrich

• Mary Doria Russell

• Everything Everywhere All at Once

• Joji

• Modest Mouse

• Sigur Ros

• Thousand Year Old Vampire

And so on and so forth. Expect more of the same but also a continual elaboration on a theme.

Another Newsletter

I can probably announce this but I’ll be a bit coy until it’s really up and running, but I’ll be contributing to another newsletter about publishing and writing as a craft. I’ll be writing reviews, first chapter critiques, craft essays, and things of that nature over there.

Anyway, onto the previous year.

2022 - a year in review

Guest Posts

• Making of Mercy - Kelby Losack on writing his hillybilly cyberpunk novel Mercy.

• You Pray for Dry Weather at the Sight of the Sun - an excerpt from J David Osborne’s book-length Death Stranding essay.

• The 2000s as a Grown-up Emo - Kyle Muntz on growing up.

• The Simple Lives of Fictional Characters - Kyle Muntz on reality in fictional people.

• Write What You Don’t Know - Craig Wallwork on the impetus behind his crime thriller trilogy.

• CEECEE FOOFOO - David Simmons on Baltimore.

• Gaming with Kids - Todd Walden on playing board games with kids.

• Me and Old Godmother - Kyle Muntz on Lao Gan Ma.

I’m happy to have published some people here this year. If you’re wondering why are there only men on this list then you should send me an essay!

Published Elsewhere

Had a number of stories published in 2022. Here’s a full list:

• Cannibal Cabaret - Hate the formatting here, but that’s life. This is a very short piece all about the fun of language. But, yes, there’s cannibalism.

• Beautiful Boy - A very, very short piece of very dark fiction about a miscarriage.

• Renaissance - My version of Roberto Bolano doing his best Jorge Luis Borges impression.

• My On Fire Girl - Flash fiction about love and longing.

• Last Life in the Universe - Wrote this in 2011 and I’ve always loved it, though it’s been rejected more times than anything else I’ve written. The editor here told me she knew right away that she wanted it for this themed issue, and that was very nice to hear.

• Feline Love - This one makes me laugh. Again, an extremely short piece. Basically autobiography.

• Heretic - A few years ago I read a bunch of books SF books about priests and wondered why so many books put a priest in space. Then I decided to put a priest in a fantasy world. I love this story. If you like Guo, the central character here, just know that she exists in thousands of pages of my writing on this here laptop. You may get to see more of her soon.

Then there are my three books:

• Glossolalia

• Sing, Behemoth, Sing

• Howl

I hope you’ve enjoyed some of these. If you read the novels, try writing a review on amazon! I sure would appreciate it, even if you hated them.

One of my favorite things I wrote this year was about an obscure 1985 anime. It’s also about the month my son spent in the NICU.

• The Opaque Masterpiece: Angel’s Egg - Anime Herald

Published Here

I’ll just ramble briefly about all these. But if you’d prefer a self-guided tour, I do have a handy Table of Contents.

• headaches - One of the first things I posted here in 2022. Keep meaning to turn this into a whole book about healthcare. We’ll see if I get there. As it is, it’s about my lifetime of migraines.

• a valentine story - I will probably never know why this little story about a strange, sad man I sometimes work with has resonated so strongly with people, but it’s one of the most popular posts here. I still get emails about it!

• what your favorite franchise says about you - Another of the most popular posts of the year. I think people like when I gently mock them.

• my hot takes - as expected, this got some traction. If you wonder what I believe about things, this is probably a good enough place to get a handle on them.

• infighting in the kiddie pool - my second most popular post of all time, which was about a controversy at the small independent literary journal Hobart. I have my theories why people were drawn to this one.

• One Hundred Years of Encanto - my most popular post of all time is about the similarities and differences between the Disney movie Encanto and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude. This one got someone to call me a shill, so that’s always cool.

• Orpheus and the Titans - My least popular post of all time is still a favorite and so I’m sharing it here just to draw attention to it. It’s about Shadow of the Colossus and my strange and unsettling reaction to it.

• videogame manuals: a ritual - A meditation on videogame manuals and all that we’ve lost in losing them. I’ve always loved this piece, though others seem more indifferent to it. But this is my newsletter and I get to make you look at it again.

• ray bradbury never said that - My experience as a writer is sort of summarized here. I attempted, somewhat casually, to write a short story every week this year. As I said up above, I both did and didn’t achieve this.

• why do writers hate writing? - My contempt for writers who hate writing is bottomless. Never read anything by anyone who doesn’t enthusiastically enjoy writing.

• The Goldfinch won a Pulitzer and it sucks - pretty self-explanatory, yes? I really hated this book though.

• In Defense of FFXV - Chapter 13 - You don’t need to have played Final Fantasy XV to enjoy this one. But I sure do love that game! I also loved the brutally difficult and unpleasant original version of its 13th Chapter. But this one just made me cackle while writing it so you should read it.

• Dragon Quest XI - I loved this game. Go play it. I had a lot of fun writing this one too.

• A Storm of Swords - my review of George RR Martin’s third book in his A Song of Ice and Fire series was probably the best of these essays that I wrote this year. That I ended up spending so much of the year in Martin’s world was purely accidental, but I also enjoyed it quite a bit. I like all these essays and understand that their appeal was always going to be rather limited, but I think they’re worth reading.

• top threes - Might do something like this again in 2023. I find it kind of fun to take a snapshot of the things I like at any given moment. These were my top three books, movies, albums, TV shows, and videogames based on the day that I wrote this. If I do it again, I will not be looking back at what I wrote in 2022.

Now, if I were a smarter person, I’d put the following essays at the top of this list, because the odds of anyone, let alone most people, clicking on all of these links is very low (according to my metrics, most will click on nothing and some will click on a few). And the odds are best that you clicked at the ones higher up, but I am who I am and I do what I do, and I think always in terms of narrative progression and so all of these essays should lead you, dear reader, to these ones.

I have tried at varying times to put a description or explanation of why this site exists. I have failed to really come to anything worth publishing. It’s something I’ve often tried to do throughout my life - wrap a bow on what I attempt with my writing and why I think it matters. Which is, you know, something probably only I would care about anyway.

But I suppose the best way to describe this place is an evolving manifesto. Or rather, an ever expanding attempt to deform, break, and reshape what art criticism and an essay are. The following essays are the best examples, from 2022, of what I mean by this.

Because I’m not always trying to do something new. Sometimes I’m just trying to lmao with my friends. But every so often, I’m trying to make you understand something. Sometimes about me, but usually about yourself. Though I’m using my own body of memories and experiences as the tool to get us all to this new place of understanding.

• we were once so young - Sort of a companion piece to last year’s lofi, in which I discuss my friend Megan, who I haven’t seen in years, and terrible music that used to make us cry. Also my first real attempts to discuss my memory here. Something that became a bit of a theme culminating in next week’s essay. So, uh, look for that next Tuesday. It’s a good one.

• The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante - Sometimes our best friends and our most important relationships are the worst ones, the ones we need to run from. Also, the perfect omelette. And, uh, you know, I also talk about Elena Ferrante¹.

• Final Fantasy VII Remake - A snapshot of April 2021, when I wrote this. For those doing the math, this was five months before I started this newsletter. Why did I wait until November of 2022 to post it? I’d been saving this until I wrote my essay about the original Final Fantasy VII but I just never got around to it. Anyway, I discuss violence, both personal and political, and the ethics of ecoterrorism here.

• House of the Dragon: Episode Eight - You don’t need to watch House of the Dragon to read this, despite the title. But that’s sort of my running joke here, too: using a piece of media to write about something else entirely. And this is, so far, me pushing this deformation of art criticism the furthest (until next Tuesday’s essay!). Put to put this essay in its simplest terms: this is a eulogy for my dying father. It’s probably the most important thing I’ve written here in this newsletter. It’s about memory and family and love.

• mario, daddy - My final essay of the year was one I’d spent the last 13 months trying to figure out how to write. How does one write about Mario? I didn’t know and I tried at different times to write this in different ways. I did, however, write the title for this version back in February. I deleted the original opening three paragraphs to that on December 20th, when I finally sat down to write this version. It has become one of my most popular essays. For that, I’m thankful. This one means a great deal to me. It’s about fatherhood, published on my son’s fourth birthday. It’s about Mario, who has always been with me, who will likely always be with me.

thank you

If you’re still reading this overly long look both forward and (mostly) back, I just want you to know that I appreciate how you continue to stick with me despite my meandering, sometimes labyrinthine detours. I promise the labyrinth is on purpose and at least part of the point.

It’s fine if you don’t see that or don’t understand the point.

Life isn’t about understanding. I mean, sort of it is, but the more important part of life is the attempt. Trying to understand is more important than understanding.

Anyway, I’ll wrap this up. Thanks for reading. I’m excited for the coming year. I hope you’ll follow along.

1. The trick of something like this, to me, is that all of this is about Ferrante’s novels. I was told by a reader that they didn’t understand what any of this other stuff had to do with the books. To answer this question is to give the game away, but I’ll say it here, now, in this footnote where most people won’t see it (because this is the funniest place to put an explanation): the story about making eggs and about my calamitous friendship is also about the book. Or rather, the book is also about those things. It’s both. It’s everything. It’s a metaphor but it’s also a memory and it’s also the way art pierces through our lives to explain ourselves to ourselves.