I. Emails
The best things I wrote this year were emails.
Last March, I started a TinyLetter. At first, it was a weekly, condensed version of Today in Tabs for people in publishing. I got bored of that pretty quickly and started writing short personal essays. They got longer and better and more people started reading them.
I set constraints for myself: I could only write them on my phone, and I had to finish most of it on one leg of my 45-minute commute — either Thursday evening or Friday morning. (I’d give them a quick edit Friday morning while formatting them to send.) As a result, the ideas here are looser than anything else I published — scrappier, sometimes incomplete, and riddled with typos. Writers go on and on about how important it is to have a good editor. This is true! But sometimes it’s nice to express an idea without any care or anxiety over its audience. No one else looked at these emails before I sent them out, and in a strange way, they are the pieces of writing from this year that are dearest to me.
Some of my favorites were about:
Maybe the best one, though, was about Twitter harassment. Matter was kind enough to republish it.
Toward the end of the year, I wrote my newsletter less often. (Once you’re off schedule, it’s hard to get back on.) I’m honestly not sure if I’ll pick it up again in the new year. Some part of me would like to remember 2014 as the year I was figuring some things out, every other Friday.
II. The Beat
Some other favorites from the year:
I continued my monthly book recommendation column at Grantland. My favorite review was of Jeff Hobbs’s The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, which gave me a way to talk about Ferguson without distracting from the more important voices writing about it.
Also related to Ferguson: I also wrote about a videogame that glamorized the militarization of law enforcement for The Paris Review. Also related to The Paris Review: a thing about the influence of Stefan Zweig on Wes Anderson.
For Pacific Standard, I wrote about Lego and The Lego Movie.
I did a “Tell Us More” for The Awl about my family.
I read on an episode of The Catapult.
Last: I wrote about my bot!
III. One Up, One Down
I launched a book publication at Oyster called The Oyster Review, and I could not be more proud of it. The best work we’ve run has been by other writers, but here are a few reviews of mine I’m happy about:
I also stopped editing The Bygone Bureau, and let me tell you, it is weird not doing something after you’ve been doing it for seven years!
Still, it remains my proudest accomplishment, like, ever. The Bygone Bureau never reached anything resembling a broad audience, but it had a readership that mattered to me. And many of those contributors and editors remain some of my closest friends.
The site is still up, but we never closed it in any formal capacity. There’s no goodbye letter from the editors, not even a tweet saying that the site is no longer publishing new material. I know it’s a bit weird to not announce that something I’ve done for so long is over. I’ve sat down to write a note to that effect many times and never made it very far. How do you say something is done without making it feel final?
That is the strange thing about writing for the web. The attention you get is transient — a day, maybe even less of anxious readers who, if you’re lucky, devour and praise your work. And once that wave is gone, it never really comes back to that piece. But your writing lives forever on the internet. It’s a sort of transpermanence. Okay, now I’m just making things up. I always seem to be making things up.
IV. Thanks
I had such a wonderful year. Thank you Anna, thank you Dark Social, thank you Seattle Seahawks. Most of all, I want to thank the group of friends who encouraged me most. You know who you are.
