It’s the last day of 2008 and, overall, I can’t say that it was a fabulous year.

The highlights of the year were undoubtedly our trips to Spain (here) and Costa Rica (pictures forthcoming). We hadn’t planned for two international trips in one year, but our Costa Rica trip got pushed back a year due to tight finances and our Spain trip was celebrating Amy’s graduation from grad school, so it just kind of happened that way. No big trips for 2009 planned.

All in all, an absolutely lousy year for writing. My one and only sale happened in January and was for a reprint. I had a measly twenty-six submissions on the year—that’s twenty-six, my lowest output since 2004, the year I really started writing—and a lot of those were older stories that were circulating through my top markets. Compare that with the previous two years (51 subs and 39 subs, respectively) and it’s no wonder I haven’t sold anything recently.

On the brighter side, I did see my story “The Hodag” published in Black Static #7 and “Of Silver Bullets and Golden Teeth” in The Beast Within, an anthology by Graveside Press. I also received an Honorable Mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror for my story “Black Jack Davy,” and I was also mentioned in Ellen Datlow’s introduction to the book. So those things buoy me somewhat. But now that my coursework is winding down, I hope (hope, hope) to regain some time for writing.

My books read list was 54 this year, down from 64 in 2007. The highlight in this area was being introduced to the work of Louise Erdrich, as I read seven of her books in 2008. I also read seven books by Cormac McCarthy, but I still count Blood Meridian (which I reread) as being head and shoulders above the rest. Other high points include Wild Indians and Other Creatures by Adrian Louis, Fools Crow by James Welch, The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus, The Journalist by Harry Matthews, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman and Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, and Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

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2008 was an indifferent year for the teams I support. Tottenham won the League Cup but had an abysmal league season and, for the season currently underway, hover just above the drop zone. Also, Dish Network dropped GolTV, depriving me of watching the Spanish league and I find it much harder to keep focused on it now that I can’t see the action on a weekly basis. No doubt about it though, the highpoint of the soccer year was watching Spain slice apart the competition in Euro 2008. It’s so very rare that my absolute favorite teams accomplish anything, so it was a great joy to see Spain finally get their just rewards on the international stage.

Let’s not even talk about football. The Packers went from being a few plays away from the Super Bowl to being 6-10 under dolts Mike McCarthy and Ted Thompson. Letting Favre go was probably the right move, but they couldn’t have handled it much worse. The Badgers were truly awful this year and it’s remarkable they started the year so highly rated.

I took some very good classes in 2008 and I like to think I did some good work. Over this year I got a good grip on two major areas of study—Global postmodern fiction focusing on magical realism, the surreal, and the fantastic, and Native American lit—and plan on fleshing out the third (something to do with the aesthetics of texts and visual narratives) in 2009. Best of all, I got a teaching position and survived my first semester of English 101, which means (in theory) I have a lot of teaching options open in the next couple years.

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And of course, I can’t talk about 2008 without mentioning the passing of our kitty Heineken. It still tears me up to write about it and we miss him terribly. His death cast a pall over the entire year as it always seemed like something was missing as we transitioned from season to season, and the house still feels a little empty without him. Rabbits have taken up residence in his garden, and we need him now more than ever. We love you Heiner.

His sister Athena turns five in February and is just as goofy and crazy as ever. Nothing to report with her, except that she made a fantastic haul this Christmas, receiving an unprecedented number of toys. Good work Bean, you deserve it!

To whoever reads this space, thanks very much! Blog hits rose again in 2008 (probably because of the four-year archive I’ve built up) which is a nice thing. Hopefully the trend will continue in 2009. See you all on the other side!

Current Mood: Singing Auld Lang Syne |