Tomorrow is the first blank page of a 365-page book. Write a good one. -- Brad Paisley

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something. -- Neil Gaiman

I have seldom lapsed in writing this blog as badly as I have this December -- it's been more than three weeks since my last post, and it's supposed to come out once a week. Shameful. On the other hand, this version of Stone Cold Prose is now one of two, and the other, YouTube version, isdropping precisely once a week. Now, when I spoke to you last, that channel had just gotten its 10,000th view and its 100th watch-hour, with 63 subscribers. It now has 362 subscribers, 34,432 views and 1,316 watch hours. One video on Generation X has 13,000 views by itself -- it's not viral, but it's whatever the hobby channel version of viral might be. So perhaps I can be forgiven for pushing where the results are so visible and satisfying. Goodreads got rid of weblog statistics many years ago, so I no longer have the faintest idea how many people read this. Perhaps that shouldn't matter, but it does.

The end of the year makes people naturally thoughtful. They look back on the 364 days previous and think about their triumphs and tragedies and how those things play in the larger drama of their lives. Working on the YouTube channel has reminded me that there are acts we perform out of necessity, things we do for pleasure, and services we do for others, which can, I suppose, be a blend of both. When I started this blog in 2016, I did so out of necessity: I thought I should do it, given I'd just published my debut novel, CAGE LIFE, and now had a Goodreads author page. Later, I continued it because I enjoyed it: it served both a psychological purpose (sweeping out my brain) and a minor public service, in the form of the way the occasional blog actually resonated with a random reader.

The YouTube channel now occupies a similar place in my life. I greatly enjoy it because it provides a creative outlet that writing cannot satisfy, a combination of the emptying of the psychological bucket with the gratification of my admittedly embarrassing desire to be seen, to perform, to be in front of a camera, to ride my hobbyhorses in public. Will this enthusiasm last? I have no idea. Notwithstanding my gross negligence of the last few weeks, I've been pounding away here on Goodreads for eight years, producing probably 350 blogs. So at a certain point -- and hey, I did a video about this! -- motivation ceases to be necessary. Discipline takes over. And that was one of the things I of which was forcibly reminded in 2024: the uselessness of motivation and the utility of discipline.

One of the notable quirks of the age of social media is the way people like to post "the life we lead in 2024" photo collages. I find it interesting because it's usually unreflective. It talks about events, not the lessons learned from them. This would seem to contradict what I wrote above, but actually it simply runs alongside it. We boast in public, showing our pictures of Bali and Bimini, our new cars, our kids' graduation photos, the "after" shots of our weight loss campaign, et cetera and so on; in private we put on mood music, light a fire, pour a stiff drink and brood as we stare into the flames. George Orwell once wrote that any life viewed from the inside was simply a series of defeats; Shelby Foote noted that he'd been in 30 fistfights in his life and the ones he remembered best were the ones he lost. My brain works much the same way. There was a lot about this year that went well, but my thoughts tend to drag in the direction of everything that went wrong -- the engine on my car burned out and had to be replaced; my cat Spike, my familiar for 17 years, died in my arms; a person I regarded as a close friend betrayed me in the most cowardly and cold-blooded manner possible; books I were certain would take top honors down in Miami did not; the plans I had to see three new cities this year came to nothing. All of that stings and gives me a bleak, windblown sort of feeling. On the other hand, when I exert conscious effort, I remember the successes: starting this channel, which had been an ambition of mine literally for years; its unexpected success; SINNERS CROSS being longlisted for the Hemingway Award and netting a Historical Fiction Company Five Stars; CAGE LIFE snagging a bronze at Reader's Favorite despite being eight years from its debut; seeing Patrick Page perform his brilliant one-man show "All The Devils Are Here" live on stage; traveling to the hinterlands of Pennsylvania with old pals to drink beer, build fires, swim and chop wood; and of course the book signings in Greensburg and York, both of which were big hits. And of course I finished DARK TRADE: A CAGE LIFE NOVEL, and although almost all of that feat was accomplished in 2023, it still broke the tape in 2024 and must be credited accordingly. I also made great progress on SOUTH OF HELL: A SINNER'S CROSS NOVEL, albeit not as much as I should have. I do wish, however, that my default state wasn't darkness and anomie and ennui. Then again, if it were composed only of light, I probably wouldn't be half the writer I am. Writers mine pain for a living, usually their own, and the more pain, the more gold. A curious condition. But I wouldn't trade it for anything if it meant losing contact with my Muse.

Speaking of Muses, it was a great pleasure to crush this year's Goodreads Challenge. Granted, I didn't set a particularly high bar for myself, but as I've noted in these blogs, I fell away from reading for pleasure for several years and to my surprise, and horror, when I tried to resume in earnest, I found all those hours watching television and film had blunted my ability to concentrate on books, especially novels. It was accordingly a bit of a process even to hit the modest goal I set for myself. The good news is I've now regained my ability to flop into a chair and relax for hours with a good book of any type, but I'm also aware that this sort of ability can be lost, or at least dulled, by disuse. In any event, I read some good ones this year:

Hell in a Very Small Place by Bernard Fall (history)

The Peace by Ernst Jünger (non-fiction)

Unconditional Surrender by Evelyn Waugh (novel)

Death on a Distant Frontier by Charles Whiting (history)

No Colours or Crest by Peter Kemp (memoir)

Duce! by Robert Collier (biography)

Alms For Oblivion by Peter Kemp (memoir)

Mister B. Gone by Clive Barker (novel)

Raging Bull by Jake La Motta (autobiography)

Execution by Colin McDougall (novel)

The Long March on Rome by Charles Whiting (history)

The Thief of Always by Clive Barker (novel)

Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien (novel)

The Dangerous Summer by Ernest Hemingway (memoir)

The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse (novel)

A Tanker's View of World War Two by C. Windsor Miller (memoir)

A Cat's Cradle by Carly Rheilan (novel)

Showdown by Errol Flynn (novel)

I also reread a number of my favorites. Re-reading books is a pastime many would mock or simply fail to understand entirely, but anyone who has a Goodreads account will understand the pleasure involved without further explanation. I used to reread books as a matter of course, but it was years after I moved back East that I was able to regain even part of my library through the mail -- a dirty, tedious and expensive process that ate up a lot of my vacation time in California, but worth it. In any event, there is nothing more comforting to a bibliophile than opening one of their dearest-loved stories or histories or memoirs, especially when things seem bleak and harsh and hopeless. It's like the glow of firelight, or a sudden and unexpected reunion with old friends -- a welcome antidote to the trevails of living.

This brings me, clumsily, to my main point: the older I get, the more I realize that life is not about learning lessons, but about relearning them. I cannot count the number of life-lessons I've learned in the most painful and humiliating ways, which I held close to my heart and used to navigate around, over or through problems in the future...only to forget them, and have to start the whole ugly process anew at some future time. I sometimes wonder if Sherlock Holmes wasn't correct when he told his Watson, "It is a mistake to think that [the mind] has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before." Perhaps every new fact, theory, book, life experience, etc. I acquire simply shoves an old one out the back door. Still, I'd rather continue the process of living the way I do, however clumsily and randomly and unsystematically, than decide that I've learned enough, done enough, experienced enough, and could now sit back and tend to the furniture in my head, neither adding nor taking away. Orwell, through his character of George "Fatty" Bowling, remarked that a man does not die when his heart stops beating: he dies when he loses the power (or perhaps just the willingness) to absorb new ideas. At that moment he becomes a ghost, resembling his living self in every way save for the fact he exists entirely in the past.

I'm not yet ready to become a ghost, literal or figurative. I like to think that so long as I do live, I will want to learn new skills, have new experiences, travel to new places, and find outlets both old and new for my creative drives. I like to think that he who dares, wins, and that I will never allow my rather active fear-glands (the price of an equally active imagination) to interfere with my desires to be more and do more, each and every year I'm permitted to occupy this body and this planet and this life.

That's the plan, anyway.

Happy New Year.