“A few thrilling moments” is a line I like in “Grosse Pointe Blank” when the hero is asked to summarise his last ten years. I like it enough that I used to use it annually myself, though sometimes I would spare you the details on account of listing what I did all year is clearly a high contender for the most boring thing for anyone else to read.<\/p>\n
I’m not sparing you the details this year.<\/p>\n
Chiefly because 2024 is still too close and still a bit too raw for me to entirely put into words yet, so instead I am reverting to type and putting it all into numbers. When you are incapable of judging the quality of what you do, you can always fall back on how much of it you did. My feeling is that if I get to do something twice, I can’t have been all that bad at it.<\/p>\n
So while I stress that this is really just for me and your time would be vastly better spent scrolling off to anything else, in 2024, I:<\/p>\n
Read 608 scripts
\nRead 37 books
\nProduced 66 YouTube videos
\nProduced 103 podcasts
\nWrote approximately 55 scripts
\nWrote 1,052 articles
\nWrote 52 Self Distract blog posts
\nWrote 52 Two-Minute Tip posts
\nWas interviewed on 17 BBC radio shows
\nWas interviewed on 1 BBC TV show
\nWas the sole guest on 4 podcasts
\nWas visiting author at 3 schools
\nRan 12 in-person workshops
\nRan approximately 45 Zoom writing sprint sessions
\nEdited 6 magazine issues
\nWrote 2 theatre programme articles
\nWrote 705,438 words overall
\nTook 2 weekends off
\nAnd the number of long-dead book projects that came back to life was: 2<\/p>\n
I grant you that none of this is important to anyone in any way, and that all of it is transitory, except that it’s important to me and I need to hold on to it.<\/p>\n
Truly, time passing is forever frightening. My mom died a couple of weeks ago, but now if you ask me, I have to say that she died last year. It’s insane. We get so little time and it goes so fast and I waste so much of it, I need to imagine I’m getting at least some things done.<\/p>\n
And you, you have so much to do yet you read to the end. You are lovely. Thanks for indulging me: sometimes it’s just cathartic to write things down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“A few thrilling moments” is a line I like in “Grosse Pointe Blank” when the hero is asked to summarise … Continue reading