2021 has been the best year of my life, creatively and socially, and while I’ve drifted away from Thousand Movie Project for a while, attending pretty much exclusively to the podcast and watching virtually nothing from the List in twelve whole months, I’ve also written a novel of which I’m very proud, and I put out an eBook that I’m happy with; I read more books in 2021 than in any other year of my life, books by which I’d previously been so daunted I never thought to try reading them (political biographies, mainly); I reached out to authors I respect, presented myself and my podcast as deserving of their time, and they agreed to join me on the show. I’m in a relationship now, which feels like a pretty jarring turn of events, and I don’t know that any of the other stuff would’ve happened if I wasn’t.

Cubafruit, the novel that’s consumed every morning for the past five or six months, is just about finished and, coinciding with its denouement, I’m feeling a hunger for input. A creative exhaustion that’s dragging the pen outta my hand at the same time that it’s compelling me toward my bookshelf. Toward streaming services. Toward the Comixology and DC and Marvel apps that I so cherish. 

While 2021 was unprecedentedly creative, as I was hoping it would be in December 2020, I couldn’t have planned what would happen. Cubafruit is based on an idea I’ve been chewing on since college, but I couldn’t have guessed that it would’ve cohered and shucked its way out of me so volcanically this year, nor that I would’ve had the energy and chutzpah to research it as extensively as I did, and wrangle the material into a coherent form. 

I have big plans for 2022, however, and I’m feeling almost vengefully committed to a new and more robust chapter of my creative life. Alas, curveballs will come. This year my aunt Jenny died suddenly, as did my paternal grandfather; COVID cases ebbed and spiked and my workplace fluxed accordingly; illness and injury seem to lurk more potently than ever. 

Whatever the case, here are the plans for 2022:

1. Cubafruit: Find an agent for the novel, or publish it myself. 
2. The Podcast: Record, edit, and post 200+ episodes. 
   1. By extension, amass 25,000 streams for the year.
   2. Interview a filmmaker.
3. Thousand Movie Project: Watch 200+ movies from the List, write about them, post about them.
4. Reading: Read 100 books. 

Simple stuff, I might come up with others over the next month or two, but for now these are the goals to which I wanna hold myself accountable ‘til 2023. 

Thanks for popping by. 

Looking forward to speaking more.