But even as a kid, I don’t think I was defined by what I read. Kids experience a more passionate connection to fiction. I remain myself and the book remains itself, but it’s a true pleasure to sit down and listen to the book tell me something interesting. More and more, I feel that the best I can hope for is a book that’ll become my friend. I’ve spent my adult life waiting for the book that’ll truly transport me, and I’ve found them to be very rare. More than that, fiction (but not just fiction, I’m talking about all art) is a shadow-play. And even when it comes to ideas, most peoples’ ideas, including mine, are largely the same as what their peers believe. People are more influenced by what they ate for dinner or by the fit of their shoes than they are by books. ![]() ![]() I remain convinced that narrative fiction is, like gravity, the weakest of the many forces that act upon a life. See, I’m doing it again–writing about my process!īecause at the other end of the thing, at the consumption stage of my relationship to media, I’ve been wondering more and more what it’s about. There are some images that make the heart beat faster and that make your skin tingle, and those are the ones you’ve got to write. You put your pen over the paper or your keys over the keyboard, and you listen to your own heart. This year I started to learn the secret: you just listen. For years all I knew was that I wanted to find it, but I had no idea how to go about it. For me it’s a perpetual struggle to get closer and closer to the heart of longing. Some years I post little about this, but for some reason I intellectualized a lot of it this year. Looking back on my year, I posted largely about my writing process. But about these things too I posted nothing. I even, finally, after bouncing off it for many years, got into Skyrim! I watched plenty of The Good Place and You’re The Worst, I fell in love with Riverdale, I saw Sorry To Bother You and Eighth Grade and Roma and Blackkklansman and A Star Is Born (and plenty of much worse movies) in theaters. I beat Borderlands 2 and the Pre-Sequel, I beat Fallout New Vegas (after 100 hours) and put another fifty hours into Fallout IV. This year I must’ve put at least 200 hours into Diablo 3. I also watched way more TV and played more video games than in years past. I read Gawain and the Green Knight, a truly bizarre medieval Arthurian tale with the crazy, strange morality that medieval tales are known for. I spent two months reading Clarissa and posted hardly anything about that. Like I just read a ton of Michael Crichton novels, including some pretty bizarre ones, and I didn’t write much about him. ![]() I’ve read just as much, and I’ve gone through some pretty interesting phases in my reading. This year I’ve posted less often about books. ![]() Instead I can just write about the shit that comes to mind. I never thought of the blog as a marketing tool, but now I can ignore the pressure to turn it into a marketing tool. And this is despite me writing way, way less often than in the past. Last year I had twenty thousand unique visitors and like forty thousand page views, this year it was thirty thousand unique visitors and sixty thousand page views. One post I swore I’d never write when I started this blog (more than ten years ago!!!!!!) was the one where you apologize for not writing more often, and so far I have successfully avoided falling into this trap, even as the gaps between posts have increased!īlog readership is substantially up from last year, for some insane reason.
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