I keep attempting to write a nice, lofty post about the great things that happened in 2018, but it was a shit year, by any metric. So, I’ll keep this short, with a nice little list of accomplishments and appearances:

• Although published on 12/31/17, my book Help Me Find My Car Keys and We Can Drive Out! was sort of a 2018 thing. It was a fun release and a few people got the joke, although many also didn’t. It was nominated for a Wonderland award in the first round, but I’m not a Bizarro writer and much like high school, I’m not cool or popular, so it didn’t make it to the second round.
• Joshua Citrak had me on the Do Better podcast.
• I wrote an introduction for Jeff O’Brien’s book Butt Stuff. I didn’t get to read the book first, but I wrote an introduction, so there’s that.
• My familiar picture was used as a boss character in a video game called Heckpoint.
• I published Book of Dreams, my 15th book.
• That book put me above one million published words. (Excluding stories and online junk. And this blog.)
• I helped (minimally) John Sheppard publish his book Doug Liberty Presents Bandit the Dancing Raccoon.

For quantifiables: the activity line was pretty close to last year: 2,522,801 steps, 3779 floors, 1,190.62 miles. Weight is up, and I don’t want to get into that. Definitely cannot go into how much money I lost in the stock market this year. (I’m never retiring, it looks like.) I took 2634 photos, which is up from 1914 last year, but I think my highest year was 3900 in 2010. I think 500-some of those were analog though, which is a new record. I always need to exercise more, and take more pictures.

I don’t do resolutions, but I have the usual goals: write more, exercise more, blog more, don’t watch the news, don’t spend money. You?

I’ve been back from Indiana for a few days now. Been slightly sick, working on unpacking, cleaning, resetting, all the usual crap before I get back to work on Wednesday.

The trip was probably my longest visit to Indiana since I left in 1995. I was there from Friday night to the following Saturday morning, with all of it in Indiana (save a quick spin through Edwardsburg and an afternoon in Dowagiac.) I had family stuff pretty much every day, and we tried to find new and neat things to do during the week, museums and other things I’d never seen. But I also had a lot of time by myself, and the heavy nostalgia thing I mentioned in my last post was problematic.

As far as stuff to do, we went to the Studebaker museum, which I’d seen years ago, but has since moved to a new building they share with a South Bend history museum. Spent some time downtown and went to The Griffon, which is an old RPG/D&D game store I last went to in maybe 1990, and it’s great they are still up and running. Went to the old Orbit Records in its new location a few slots over, and the whole vinyl thing has kept them running. Ate at Tippecanoe Place, a giant mansion turned restaurant, which I last visited on the night of my senior prom. Dinner buffet on Christmas night at the new Four Winds casino in South Bend was solid. Didn’t play anything, and then my sister played a slot machine for like two minutes and won $260. Also visited the history museum in Dowagiac. And malls. Lots of malls.

John Sheppard came out for a day, and we did the whole Jon Konrath Reality Tour, visiting every place I lived and shopped and worked and whatever else back in the day. The highlight was stepping into a completely vacant Concord Mall, which was like breaking into a tomb that had been sealed shut a thousand years before.

We started off our day by visiting fellow writer Steve Lowe, who now owns and operates South Bend Brew Werks. Had a great lunch, took the tour of their brewing operations, and saw a great example of how downtown South Bend is on the upswing. At the end of the tour, we hit Bruno’s for a pizza after walking around University Park mall, which seems like it has doubled in size since I left, with almost no vacant stores and every single thing except JCP and Sears replaced by a higher-end chain. It was a stark contrast to Elkhart, where things have closed and not been replaced.

The rest of the trip was me going stir crazy, walking around the mall, wondering what would have happened if I never left Indiana, and wondering what there was to do except eat, watch TV, or spend money. Family stuff, I guess, but I have this conversation with myself every time I go back, and it never goes well. Anyway, I’m back home, away from the snow, so there’s that.

---

End of year crap - don’t really want to get into that. I quit Goodreads, so I can’t tell you how much I read. I did exercise every day, although my total distance walked wasn’t as high, and I ended up gaining almost six pounds over the year. So I need to work on that. All the usual new year new me crap. Stop reading news. Stop obsessing over nostalgia. Write more. Whatever.

This year will be tough on the nostalgia front, because it’s thirty years since I graduated high school. and there are lots of various anniversaries there for me to obsess over. I need to find some writing project to distract me from this crap. Maybe I’ll blog more, although I don’t know what I’ll write about. I have a project that’s maybe 80% done, but stalled. Maybe I’ll take up knitting. I have no idea.

OK, going out to dinner in a minute. I’ll probably be asleep by ten. Hope you all have a good new year.