an epilogue for 2013

We've finally reached the end of this weird, indulgent project I've been working on all year! It's been fun to have a definite goal. A lot of the stories I wrote here were part of a longer piece that got lost along with my netbook, which I lost when I made the mistake of taking it to a sketchy laptop repair place here in Seattle. It was very nearly finished, and I wanted to tell the stories without just writing the whole thing again. (I may still do so at some point, but not just yet.) This whole project has been about the stories we tell, how they change in the telling, how we contradict ourselves for the sake of narrative, or sometimes simply because we've forgotten what the truth is. I'd be happy if you read them again now that it's complete. So much of what I was trying to do relies on the contrasts between the various stories. I'm already happy if you read even one of them, of course, and even more so if you ever smiled, or thought about something differently, because of the words I've been stringing together here for almost eight years.

Quite apart from this project (which was great), 2013 was a good year in a quiet way. I spent it doing things I wanted to do, rather than things I felt like I should do. And I learned a lot of things, about myself, about the world. And of course I learned that there's many more things I have yet to learn. I earned the animosity of one person who is my opposite in many ways, and earned the terrifying, unflagging devotion of another person who is my opposite in many quite different ways. Both are interesting stories in their own right, I'm sure, but I'm not yet sure how to tell them. Perhaps 2014 will be that year. Perhaps it never will be.

And in November I wrote a short story again--not the microfiction I put on here, but a full story of about 3000 words, or probably ten to twelve pages in a word processor. It had been a couple of years since I'd done that, and I'm not sure why I stopped. It feels like coming home. I'm going to do more of them, hopefully one a month. (I cheated and started early, though. December's story is here.) I'm not sure where I'm going to put them yet, but I'll probably link to them from here, and I'm sure I'll keep telling stories here.

Regardless. By the time most of you read this the new year will doubtless have already arrived. I hope it's a good one. I hope you rediscover something you had forgotten, and don't know how you could ever have lived without. And I hope you create something beautiful, something you're proud of, something you can't wait to share with people.