Day: December 31, 2013

Twenty fourteen

2013 was an okay year, if a little ordinary in retrospect. There were assorted highs and lows, and probably more of the former than the latter, but I’m not sure there was anything to really make the year truly stand out.

I think I’d like that to change in 2014. I’m not usually one for sweeping resolutions, but I have a few general ones in mind for the new year.

I’m going to write more. I have a residency scheduled for the Banff Centre in September. I still need to send in some forms and the payment, officially book the time off and buy my plane ticket, but I am going back there in the fall. It’s a great place, encouraging to artists and really conducive to writing, but I don’t want the eight and a half months between now and then to just be me wishing I was writing more. My plan is to get back into writing morning pages every day, and then try to carry that momentum forward in the evening. It worked last year, and this isn’t strictly speaking a new resolution, but the trick will be to keep that momentum going.

I’m going to put more of a personal stamp on Kaleidotrope. (The Winter 2014 issue is available to be read, by the way.) Right now, I’m not entirely sure what that means yet, beyond returning to the fake advice column I wrote for a couple of issues, but I don’t want to spend the year just reading submissions and copyediting the ones I accept.

I’m going to exercise more. I very much want to lose weight. And while that’s a bit of a cliche as far as resolutions go, it’s nevertheless true.

I’m going to find an apartment and move out. This was also something I’d hoped to do last year, but I feel like it’s something I really have to do now. This coming year will mark ten years since I moved back home from Pennsylvania, and I think it’s well past time I found a place of my own. For a couple of reasons, it will likely need to wait until the early spring, but with luck I’ll be writing my 2015 resolutions post next year from my (no doubt over-priced and small) apartment.

I’m going to read more.

And I’m going to do at least one thing that scares me. No idea what that is just yet, but I don’t think I can call 2014 a success unless I figure it out.

Anyway, it’s been a long year, even if it hasn’t always been exceptional, and it’s been a long vacation. I’m still off tomorrow, with the office closed, but I go back to work this Thursday and Friday. (Just in time, apparently, for huge snows.)

Happy New Year, everyone, and thanks for reading the blog!

A year at the movies

I watched 107 movies this year. Fully a quarter of those have been in this past month alone.

I find it difficult to pull together “best of the year” lists. I mean, some of the most fun I had watching movies this year was with films like Equilibrium and Mongolian Death Worm, and I’m not going to claim either of those were good movies.

There were a lot of very good movies on my list, and even a few from this calendar year like Captain Phillips, Gravity, Before Midnight, Upstream Color, and The World’s End. (I’d include Frances Ha, but I think technically that first came out at the end of 2012.)

Most recently, the best movie I’ve seen has definitely been Beckett, with terrific performances from both Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton. The worst, on the other hand, was easily Jonah Hex.

I saw a few really great movies this year, a few really terrible ones, a few really terrible ones that were made great by live-tweeting them with friends, and the rest kind of a normal mix.

Favorite books of 2013

I read too few books this year, down considerably — laughably, even — from last year. I’d be tempted to blame the longer novels on my list for eating into my time, and they did, but I also saw my attempts to zip through a pile of very short books from the library backfire. (Seriously, a couple of those two-hundred-pages-or-fewer books seemed to take me forever.) There was also some re-reading, listening to audio books of the first four Dark Tower novels, and submissions to Kaleidotrope that also ate into the final count, but whatever the cause I reader fewer books than I wanted to this year.

With a good fair-sized helping of comics and graphic novels, I managed to get the count up to fifty. Of those, these were probably my favorites: