i dunno if i have any big wrap-up thoughts. 2012 was a calendar year. there were some shifts and trends and stuff. there were some one-offs and some moments. i learned some things about myself and forgot some things. same goes for the world at large. i don't know if i feel like a better person or better version of the person i was this time last year. i feel maybe less vulnerable but also maybe more like i'm getting unavoidably trapped behind all my walls. more than anything i'm starting to feel old, like i'm just not young anymore. just into the big void of 'nothing' that is the mid- to late-twenties. you can't be a child prodigy at anything anymore at this age. if you're good at anything it's like, 'okay, cool' and if you're not then you should feel bad. i realized last post that this blog has quickly become something like 'alex's naked ambition on sad display' and it's doubly sad because it's not even like, big-time naked ambition, it's really provincial, it's all small potatoes. maybe... nah, there isn't quite a resolution there, i don't think. maybe next year.

well what do you know. i did get a johnny nom after all. for illustration. i can't tell whether to be elated or disappointed so i'm settling for bouts of each. more happy than sad i guess. i threw everything at the wall and something stuck. now i can feel bad-ass at the gala. oh, what were you nominated for? nothing? too bad. you should try it sometime. it's nice. anyway, they haven't released the arts writing shortlist yet. i may still be on that. that's what i'm telling myself, anyway. keep trying. fuck.

seems like for the past year my means of personal advancement has been to throw a bunch of lines out all at once and wait for one of them to come in. if at least one of them does then i feel fine. so far i'm two for two, in a sense. at the beginning of 2012 i submitted to soliloquies, the scrivener creative review and the irving layton award. and i somehow got published in both and took home the award. so that was weirdly insane and insanely gratifying. this fall it was headlight, the johnnies, and the gazette and globe internships. i whiffed on the globe and headlight. i assume nothing's going to come of the johnnies even though i'm imagining it a lot. just cause the end of the bookstore cat somehow got a nomination made it feel like, 'who knows, anything could get a nomination' so i submitted in every category. but i'm sure it'll be a bunch of random crap and who knows. it's gonna feel weird this year cause every link piece that gets nominated i'll have copy edited. and for every piece that should have gotten a nom that doesn't, i'll be like, 'but.' i wonder what it'll be like next year. a bit less of that cause there might be content from after my tenure. anyway but the gazette is giving me an interview for the summer internship. so there's my validation. now i just need to set up the next row of pins. irving layton again i guess and then i have to pick some other publications. carte blanche seems obvious but it's not due til march so it'll be further down the road. i need some instant verification. i want to step it up a bit though. emma was telling me i had to quit kicking it small-time and not getting headlight was like, 'ok, why bother anyway. time to ante up.' which is scary cause it feels like it'll lead to more rejection. but if i'm still getting rejections from concordia then i might as well be getting rejections from places that pay or whatever. i'm still feeling kind of salty about headlight. i wish matrix did open calls so at least i could whiff on that. i wrote a french piece that i feel like submitting to the void for their spring issue but who knows what the theme will be. i need to start writing this band story. it's been kicking around in my head for forever. feels like it could be the irving layton submission this year instead of 'on the road' which is still super unfinished probably. i wish i knew where to submit 'you run with the devil' or whatever i'll call it. i'd love to get that published somewhere but all the places that take non-fiction are looking for like 3,500 and under and i don't know if i have the energy/wherewithal to cut it in half and not add anything. this feels like it probably sounds very self-involved and it is. there's a reason i wrote this in furs.

i came across a french blog while stalking someone earlier, which led to some thoughts. one, i've been liking french writing a lot lately, which seems, i don't know, obvious in retrospect. it's like, of course, there are talented people in that language the same as there are in english, i can understand it, too, but i have this whole blind spot for it so, i don't know, everything seems fresh and exciting and exotic and the more so when it's fresh and exciting and exotic writing to begin with. and it was just this shock to my system, like, fuck, why aren't i writing things like this? what the fuck is wrong with me? it was so daunting. not, "i can't write like this," or "i can't write this well" but "i am too much of a lazy bastard coward to do something like this." it's just a question of a groove you get yourself into. and i haven't gotten myself into any good grooves lately, it feels like. i talked to a guy at work yesterday, the guy that i once falsely accused of stealing porn mags. he asked me how the writing was going and i told him i'd hit a bit of a rough patch. he asked why and i told him i didn't know, because that seemed easier than listing all the things i thought probably were holding me back/slowing me down and also because it would expose less of my soft underbelly etc etc. i tried to spin the problem of being a writer whose material isn't coming as something funny, i.e. interesting to people who don't ultimately care about writing, which i assume is this guy, regardless of his continued interest in my writing career. things like that tend to be more about the relationship between you and the stranger than the relationship between the stranger and the act of writing. at least that's the sense that i get in this case. so i compared myself to a farmer waiting for rain to come. in retrospect i think that's kind of ridiculous. but you know.

can i even post things here without anyone i know reading them? i want to start a diary but it seems ridiculous to start an offline diary. but i also don't want any of my friends reading these things. like, i guess i'm ambivalent about strangers knowing details about me, it seems hard to imagine that having an impact on my life in any way. i've been thinking of re-starting this in a sort of high-school-y diary-ish kinda way just so i can have a log of what i was like and what i was thinking at this age later on. because i try to remember what i was like and what my motivations were sometimes and going back two or three years i sort of forget and i unconsciously rewrite my scripts. is that a better system? i don't know that it's worse, necessarily. but i kind of want to just keep track of myself for a bit.