Wait a minute honey, I'm gonna add it up.

I am so ready for 2018 to end. 

I've had a really good year, in many ways. I sold a novel, I sold a novella, I sold a lot of stories. I traveled all over and got to do a job that I absolutely adore. I fell in love, I made new friends, I got to perform with brilliant people and be proud of who I am and what I do. 

However, I am ending this year sick and exhausted and so very ready for that feeling of turning a new page and seeing the blank of 2019 stretched out before me. 

Over a period of nine days in November, I went home to write a book. I stayed with my mom, who is wonderful and tolerant and loving. She fed me and made me coffee in the mornings and asked me about this project (the one you see up top). It's the fastest thing I've ever written. I hid out in the library of my community college, in coffee shops, and at a museum where I could see the mountain that stands over the town where I went to high school.I put together a rough draft of 81k words in nine days. My best day in that stretch netted me 15k words. Every day, my brain felt liquefied. I don't know if this was the best way to write a book about the town that I had to die to escape, but it did get the job done. Now, that book is sitting in a dark dark vault that I won't look at for at least a month. I'll see about shining it up in 2019, when that blank-page feeling hits. 

I've gotten to publish some things this year that I'm really proud of. I wrote about what dating is good for, and all the women I've loved in my life in an essay on Catapult. I wrote a Gilbert and Sullivan parody for McSweeney's that went out into the world like a note in a bottle. That bottle came back and a light opera company in Minneapolis wrote to tell me they'd like to perform it. That was a feeling like no other, and I'm grateful that I got to live it. I wrote about my complicated relationship with Gone With the Wind and whiteness, and so many people reached out to tell me their stories with that book that I was absolutely floored. I've felt heard this year. I hope you have, too. 

I wrote one of the best short stories I have ever produced and got it into Shimmer before they shut their doors for good. If you only read one of my pieces this year, make it this one. It's about love and death and what I hope comes after. 

Hope is the thing with feathers, you know. But she also has hollow bones and a short life span. Luckily, she lays eggs. Some of them will hatch and grow feathers of their own. This is the season to wait with the egg and keep it warm.

I'm lighting every candle in my house and waiting out the darkness. I'm trying to gather all the eggs from this year and know that not all of them will hatch, but at least there will be omelettes in the mean time. Trying not to count them as future feathers, but it all adds up one way or the other. 

Day after day, 

Meg