I did not write a lot on this blog this year – I have been incredibly busy. However, I am very happy to report that the blog has not died! I still managed to post some stuff here and there despite all of the craziness, and I’ve very happy with the quality of all of the blog posts I did manage to publish. I’m not as proud of all of the draft blog posts I started that I’ve yet to finish, but oh, well. You win some, you lose some. I still managed to write some spur-of-the moment angry rants but post them shortly thereafter, which I think is really what the spirit of this space existing is all about.

Alright, time to look back at another year of writing. I’m not quite sure what to think of this year. Last January feels like it was ages ago – I barely remember any of what happened, and it feels super removed from now. That being said, I probably did the most variety of writing this year that I’ve done in years, because I took an experimental fiction course, which forced me to write fiction.

I started writing this blog exactly a year ago. The research project I was working on at the time was driving me insane, I’d started writing an article about corporate dress codes out of sheer frustration, and I felt like it was a good time to stop merely thinking about starting a blog and actually sit down and do it.

The year 2024 was a really bizarre year for me, writing wise – while I had work come out in a relatively high-profile venue, and I finally started blogging again, I didn’t produce much in terms of “literary work”, and definitely did not write any creative works that I would consider to be publishable, which kinda sucks. I made some progress on some essays I hope to finish this year, wrote a few poems, and… I think that was it???? I was very academically focused in 2024 though, so it makes sense. I did do lots of academic writing, created some didactic/informational texts, and wrote some more informal stuff on this blog, so maybe in terms of pure wordcount I wrote more than I do most years. So I guess I still wrote, but the form and content of what I was writing shifted.

So I’ve been rereading this book called Range (by David Epstein), and I’ve come across some interesting ideas that didn’t really stick with me on my first reading. For example, one concept I’m finding intriguing is the idea of “match quality”, which is basically a measure of fit between a person and their job/occupation.

The idea presented in the book is essentially that improving match quality only comes through exploration – you don’t figure out who you are by locking yourself in a room and thinking about it, but by trying out different things.