Looking at 2015

Here’s what’s happened on the website this year.

That spike in January was from a great podcast I did with Lars Doucet and James Cavin about computer games. Some more of those spikes are another podcast I did with Ferret Steinmetz about obsession, a podcast about tie-in novels with Josh Vogt, Stephanie Lorée, and Gary Kloster, yet another podcast with Eric Schwitzgebel about philosophy, and a pair of short stories about human evolution. That general upward bulge in the summer was because of…fairies? I don’t know. Do you guys have any better theories?

The trend is pretty clear: people are attracted to great content. The problem is content is, like, hard, man. My health got so bad staying up late to record those podcasts that the podcasts themselves suffered (it’s hard to be witty when your intestine is punching you from the inside). And usually when I write a good short story I want to try to sell it to a magazine. The rest of the time, I’m writing my next novel or proofing/publishing my last novel.

Because that’s the name of the game: novels. I don’t want to grow up to be a podcaster or even a short-story writer. I want to be a novelist, and when my time and energy is in short supply, I have to be careful about where I invest it.

So my resolution in 2016 is the same as it was in 2015: write a better novel than last year.