(no subject)
I really enjoyed reading everybody’s year-end round-up posts, and seeing my flist return to life!
So I wrote one myself, and now, six weeks later, am getting around to posting it. Seems about right.
A random assortment of things I did this year:
Took some writing classes from one of my very favourite authors, which was an incredible experience, although also kind of a struggle and messed my head up for a while.
Saw Tori Amos twice. Once with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the Opera House, which was lush and dramatic and wonderful (though it did feel under-rehearsed in places) and once at her solo request show at the much smaller Sydney Recital Hall. Despite being a fan for twenty years, it was the first time I’d seen her live, and she’s incredible: energetic, charismatic, and an amazing musician. The encore of her solo show turned into a dance party, and it was such a joyous experience being in a crowd who really loved their performer and a performer who loved them back.
On the way to the Opera House show with Meelie, I said, “If she plays Baker, Baker, I’ll probably burst into tears. That was the soundtrack to so many bad decisions in my mid-twenties,” but in fact it was during A Sorta Fairytale at the request show that I ended up with tears streaming quietly down my cheeks and could not make them stop. Many thanks to the woman in the next seat who quietly offered me a tissue.
I think the only movies I saw all year were Veronica Mars and Gone Girl (and I wanted to see Boyhood but it came and went so fast here). It feels as though nobody’s making the kind of movies I want to see any more, or perhaps I’m getting too old to want to watch the kind of movies I used to. One thing I do know is that I don’t give a damn about white male superheroes saving the world. Make a Birds of Prey movie and then we’ll talk.
To compensate for my lack of movies, I seem to have watched a lot of television. More on that in another post.
Favourite album of the year: Taylor Swift’s 1989. I’ve always liked the idea of Taylor Swift (young woman writing about her experiences, awesome!) more than the reality of most of her songs, but this album hits my sweet spot with its ‘80s beats and clever lyrics. The other album I listened to a lot this year was Tori Amos’ American Doll Posse (2007), which may have edged out Scarlet’s Walk (2002) as my favourite post-millennial Tori album. Little Earthquakes and Under the Pink are still the best, though.
I played several hundred boardgames.
I read some books, but nothing that really knocked my socks off. My favourites were probably Alphabetical by Michael Rosen, a very readable history of each letter of the alphabet, and Eleanor & Park, a YA novel by Rainbow Rowell. I also enjoyed many of the digressions about mathematics, cryptography and marketing in Scarlett Thomas’s PopCo, but found the over-reaching story a little bit silly. Or perhaps it just hasn’t aged well?
I bought a dining table and a new sofa and some chairs and a rug and finally feel like I’m living like an adult.
Somehow, without really meaning to, I deepened a bunch of friendships, went to a wedding and a baby shower, and felt more connected to other people than I have in a long time. That was nice.
Conversely, I felt very far from fandom. I’ve never really found anything that captured my attention the way popslash did, and yet I’m not even reading that right now; I haven’t read 2014’s Make the Yuletide Gay stories or 2013’s either. I told myself I’d read Yuletide this year and got through about five stories, though I do have to say that if you liked the Brother Cadfael novels, A Flourish of Gold by thelittlestbird is a wonderfully delightful coda to the series.
In the second half of the year, I wrote nothing at all… until I dug out my ridiculously long juni story in December. I’ve been writing it in Scrivener, which lets you do snapshots (perfect for me, the endless tinkerer), and it’s funny looking at them and seeing every snapshot is between late November and early January for the last four years. Apparently I get bored every January 5th and go do something else.
I didn’t think I was becoming a better writer, but I have re-written half a dozen scenes I knew had problems but hadn’t been able to fix, so maybe I am, who knows? And now I’m trying to wrangle the plot together and work out the ending. I seem to hit the wall around the three-quarters mark of every story, though this story is a bit different for me in that the three-quarters mark is 70k rather than 7k.
So maybe I’ll finish that one this year.
In conclusion: Have some Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson feat. Bruno Mars, live on Saturday Night Live. I really do miss watching five grown men dance in unison, and Mars is giving me some serious Live at MSG-era Timberlake vibes. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say they’re both calling back to an earlier era.
Click to viewCheers.