Well I’m sitting in bed with my laptop, two sleeping dogs, and a cat who thinks she’s a dog, waiting on Covid test results to pop up in my e-mail to let me know whether or not I’ll be going to work tonight. It’s 2021, but not for very much longer.
What to say about 2021? It wasn’t 2020. It was weirder than that. Somehow this year has managed to be both better and worse. We have vaccines now, but a lot of people don’t want them. Some of the people who do want them yell very loudly that no one should want them.
I did some work on the Florida Man vs. the Elder Gods project this year, but it’s a hard slog. Satire is very difficult in these times. Just look to all the critics saying Don’t Look Up is a terrible, smug failure instead of, like, a perfect satirical encapsulation of our sad fucking reality. Even if you can somehow manage to satirize this modern world, well…
I also got about halfway through the first draft of Voidstrider vol 4. Had some pitfalls there too. Particularly when I got to the scene, which I had first planned for back in 2018, in which a bunch of misinformed Martians storm the Martian capitol building. Yeah, that became very difficult to write.
I went back to work at the bar in May, fully vaccinated and full of optimism. And in September, I married the most wonderful person I’ve ever known. Sydney and I joke that, after last year’s lockdown, we’d already been married a decade. We’d only moved in together two months before our jobs shut down and we had to stay home. If we could make it through that…
We even managed to take a trip, in the summer when it looked like things might be OK. We had a very strange AirBnB experience in Chicago, but it was lovely in the end and oh man did it make me realize how much I miss living in a proper city.
So I’ll take some good memories of 2021 with me going forward, and I hope you will as well. It’s another year soon, and despite the cynicism with which many of us have come to view the turning of the calendar, perhaps it will indeed be a better future.
As always: be excellent to each other.
John A. Underwood 