It’s almost the new year and that means that it’s time to take a look back on the years greatest hits. This year I managed to actually update this writing blog pretty regularly (!) but it means that you might have missed some things so let’s take a second to rewind.
I’m going to toot my own horn here and say I’m incredibly proud that I wrote over 90 blog posts this year, nearly all of them 1,200 words or more which is a lot of writing. Some of it wasn’t my best but all of it is published publicly so I’m going to give myself a big round of applause for doing scary things and just owning them. That said, I picked ten pieces that I am still proud of at the end of the year to highlight this banner year for my blog. Why ten piece and not eleven or six or four? I don’t know, ten seemed like a good number. Stop questioning me this is my blog not yours!
Quick note: These are listed in the order they were posted not ranked
A reflection on size and stature versus perception of myself. I still really like this piece. I think about my size only when I’m with other people so I really enjoyed exploring some of the ideas I have around it.
I wrote a 7-part series about the women that my dad dated while I was growing up and this is my favorite piece. I still think about the book series that Peggy sent to me and how much it has strangely influenced my life.
These are three short vignettes of a interactions I had during a single day. I like this piece because I wrote it in an unconventional structure and I think the voice in the piece is different than how I normally write.
I wrote this piece is one straight sitting on a night when I couldn’t sleep and I realized I’d been in over 100 art museums during the course of my life and it struck me how varied and beautiful those experiences were.
I re-wrote this piece two times and I’m still not 100% happy with it but it really did benefit from being rewritten and there’s a few sentences in here that make me feel like I am very clever.
This is a selfish pick. I’m not even sure if this piece of writing makes any sense outside of its very specific context to me but it conveys exactly what I wanted to convey so well that sometimes I re-read it because it makes me happy.
I was joking that every story I tell is a love story but I think the joke is on me because it’s true. It’s mostly because every day in my life is a love story.
This one is very brutal but I think I managed some good imagery and they no longer make / have the Frownie Brownie at Kings so I’m doing my part to immortalize it.
This is one of my longest pieces I think. This was a difficult one to write and I cut almost 3,000 words out of it to try and boil down to the essentials but it’s just a meaningful piece to me and I got a lot of good feedback on it.
Spending a month writing stories that were positive was a great idea and I might do it again next year. I was trying to get a really difficult emotion across in this piece and I think I did a pretty good job.
So that’s the list. As for the future I want to post less stories about myself because they seem easy to write and therefore aren’t really challenging me in the way I want to be challenged. I do have 12 more storytime posts that are in various states of finished so there will (likely) be at least one of those a month but I’d like to branch out into other things. I have FOUR cafe reviews I haven’t written up, 12 more episodes of Max Headroom, and I think it’d be cool if I actually made the other two Eurovision posts I had wanted to make back in May. Plus I’ve got thoughts on perpetual motion, aging, some movies, some books, some theories…
Most of all I want to continue to be very brave and not terrified that I’m not doing things right. I want to write the things I want to write and not worry that it’s just not good enough to be read.
With all that said there’s only one more post coming before the end of the year so hope you had a merry holiday and here’s to a fruitful, writing-filled new year.