Yesterday I ran over to John Scalzi’s site and read through a collection of posts he noted as his “Best of the Year.” If you’re one of the six people in the world who doesn’t read his site, you should wander over there. It’s good stuff.
Afterward, I scanned through my own posts this year. I wasn’t actually looking for a “best of” kind of thing. Not really. I’ve done a “most popular” posts thread in the past by just stripping data off the server logs and going with that list. Perhaps I’ll do that again at the very end of the year. We shall see. Mostly what I was looking for was a sense of where I’ve been this year–my first as a full-time writer of fiction. What struck me was the raw numbers of times I took on the topic of the art of writing–often, but not always, parsing it against the business aspect of it–or at least what it means to be a writer. (Yes, I hear the pretension in that last phrase … what the hell of it, eh?)
This theme permeated my blogging throughout the year, it seems, and to be honest, it wasn’t what I was expecting.
I come to the blog in a pretty free-form way. I don’t plan what I talk about. I write what I’m thinking about, or about what I’m experiencing, or whatever. So to see this aspect run so heavily through the posts of the past year are interesting. And, yes, I know I’ve touched on those topics throughout my 18 or so years of doing this … but man, 2014 seemed to be All About the Art.
So, in my best Scalzi impersonation (har!), I’ve decided to drop what I considered my 12 most interesting posts about the subject here. (Actually, my top 11 posts about the art of the business, and 1 other that I just liked–I’m persnickety that way).
Here they are:
Project Manager vs. Artist
Make it Mean Something
The Artist’s Career
How to Prove You’re a Man in 5 Easy Steps
Merry Clayton: The Art of a Background Singer
Dictation
Jay Lake
Writing Well
A Sort of Aesthetic Trilogy
Story Geeking
The Writer as Artist
Hard Work & Opportunity