Well, here we are. M[aybe m]ore interesting things are going to be about bikes or books, but I said I’d do some bullshitting and so here’s the bullshitting. Mostly this is to get the bullshitting off my plate (and thereby continue adding posts, thereby continue justifying the probably-too-much-money I spend on hosting every year) so I can attend to other things like writing prose fictions later on. But, with regard to 2022:
The first (imagined) drafts of this were a lot… darker. Also longer and better but you’re getting end-of-work-day me. Anyway, I’d forgotten that I did, in fact, have not one, but two publications, even if neither of them were fictions. And I did write,[1] even if I didn’t finish the albatross of a novel that’s been hanging around my neck (
Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.
) or really send any stories out or do much other computational stuff or — and there was a lot of disappointment this year, too, in terms of COVID still being very disruptive, in terms of communities being harder and harder to maintain, in terms of —
But anyway, instead of writing lots of literary-type shit, this year I spend appreciably more time writing code.[2] I wrote a bunch of code for work (not technically open source, though I think one repo is technically still public), published a basic but very useful (to production editors working in asciidoc, anyway) VS Code Extension, learned a lot more Python, a little Ruby,[3] and started and half-finished a number of side projects, which is something I’ve been given to understand means that I’m something of a programmer.[4]
I have mixed feelings about all the code-writing. I mean, it was good in the sense that it helps me professionally and I do enjoy it. It means that if and when I can return to doing more computational-type creative projects I’ll have a better grasp of what’s possible (and, in theory, be faster). But mostly this year it was about job stuff, and I sort of hate that it was a lot about job stuff. In part this was because I spent a lot of my free time this year riding my bike, and in part it was because my other free time was wrapped up in other things, meaning that I didn’t have as much time outside of work to do creative things, so lucky for my job they got more of my brain-energy than I usually mean to give them.[5] But the coding thing scratched a lot of itches and I’m grateful for that.
Speaking briefly of the project, here’s a half-baked introduction I wrote, thinking I’d make it into a book someday:
Presented here are 52 stories, loosely in response to the fortune-telling meaning of each card, which was found somewhere on the internet. The stories themselves are loosely related. They did not necessarily all come from the same "round" or shuffle through the deck, but the cards presented here do make up a complete deck with its four suits. The cards were written in a random order, selected by a computer script, and were typically written one a day, but there were many, many days in between various writings. There were [one] round(s), or passes through the deck in total. The final selection was made…
The script itself I wrote before I got "into coding, bro," and I haven’t looked at it and am a little scared to. I think I did one minor refactor on it at some point. Anyway, the cards were fun and the very few I did send out got nice rejections (if rejections all the same).
Some good new things happened in '22 (e.g., we moved!) and some sad things happened (e.g., RIP book club), but that year is over and this year is happening (I guess: it’s all rather arbitrary, isn’t it?). Being on my bullshit this upcoming year means however hopefully that I’ll do more of the prose writing (if also a lot of code writing, because "work"). The plan is to be process-oriented instead of goal-oriented because as everyone knows that’s the way to both get things actually done and also to enjoy them. So thus far I’ve started rereading The Pleasure of the Text because it’s nourishing, and we’ll just go from there and see.