How has the year 2023 served this cracker’s crooked ambition to earn the title Common Enemy of All Mankind?
Not well, I can predict, before doing the 8 hours of math it will take me to add this litany of failure and disappointment up. Yet let us see.
Just so that the reader knows what it is like, to be this broken down cracker when he confronts the man in the mirror during those increasingly frequent trips to the privy, I have channeled my schoolmaster, the Ghost of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, to rate my work. The ghostly praise from beyond the grave will be in [brackets, like so, below.]
[Do I understand that you have been incorporated, all by yourself, as a writing concern? I understand you keeping company with barristers, thugs, Negroes and bawds, but that an accountant might suffer your dubious literary progress as business? Now I am quite glad to be dead!]
January
Articles/Chapters = 67 [Mind Aesop’s hare, Lad.]
Books = 1
Novels = 1
…
February
Articles/Chapters = 40
Books = 1
Novels = 1
…
March Winter
Articles/Chapters = 28
Books = 1
Novels = 0
…
Winter Writing
Articles/Chapters = 135
Books = 3
Novels = 2
Journals = 1
History = 0 [Ah, a serious man of letters, I see.]
…
March Spring
Articles/Chapters = 21
Novels: -
Books: -
[Near 50 in the month, shades of a faded past?]
…
April
Articles/Chapters = 40
Novels: -
Books: - 1 RPG sourcebook
[A lady’s parlor game? Should we cut out paper dolls? What a worthless endeavor! Forever the boy, I see! Forty lashes, well laid on, less one for Moses’s sake.]
…
May
Articles/Chapters = 30
Books: - 1, Journal
Positively mediocre.
…
[What, no Spring subtotal! Must I do everything!]
Spring
Articles/Chapters: 91
Books: 2
Journals: 1, [Mere pedestrian chaff!]
Game book: 1 [Groan!]
No history, nor a novel to your pulpish illfame!
…
May/June
Articles/Chapters: 16 [! Sot!]
…
[If the plight of Persephone cannot inspire, perhaps Caesar’s hallowed month might awaken a muse or two?]
July
Articles/Chapters = 25
Books = 2 [Ataboy!]
Journal = 1 [Groan.]
Novel = 1, [Yaas, but, really, a talking dog novel—it had been better if had the bus run you over!]
…
[Might we avoid defaming Octavian?]
August
Articles/Chapter = 25
Books = 0 [Ahah, playing the editor I see!]
Journal = 0 [Thank God.]
Novel = [Nibbling at the back matter, lacking confidence, BOY? 14,000 words of end notes for a fawking pulp yarn—guards, guards, yes, you you miserable screw...off to the clink with this turd of literacy!]
History = 0 [Of course not you dwaddle!]
End of Crackpot Summer
Articles/Chapters = 66, all time low
May-June = 16
July = 24
August = 26 [Please, no, do not count it a fourth time.]
Books = 2
Journal = 1
Novel = 1 [Oh, yes, do not remind me, the negro doggy story—a litigious mutt at that!]
[Please, decide to use either a colon or an equal’s symbol.]
September
Articles/chapters: 33
[Good grief, or not!]
Books: 1
Novels: 1 [Quaint—it took you 14,000 words to admit that you can’t keep your roving Irish eyes off the host’s wife—a lass half your age if a day. Forty stripes, well laid on! Moses, who? Oh, you are fatigued? Give it over, and, see, how, work, is, done!]
Journals: 0
Histories: 0
October
Articles/chapters: 29
Books: 0
Novels: 0
Journals: 0
Histories: 0
[Struck out looking, aye, Yank?]
November
Articles/chapters: 27
Books: 1
Novels: 0
Journals: 1
[Oh, has someone’s muse been strangled in the manger of that hayseed dreams?]
[Might I suggest an honorable out—perhaps human mine sweeper in the Dombass—a fitting role for a dumbass!]
[And again, no seasonal subtotal?]
[Oh, no, do not trouble yourself. These totals will be easily tallied.]
Autumn
Articles/chapters: 89
Books: 2
Novels: 1
Journals: 1 [Well, we cannot simply do without journalists, can we? If, only there were a ditch deep enough…]
[And, I can see it there in your shifty eyes—no! It was you who elected to tally your production seasonally. So SPQR will be listed as complete for 2024—God only knows there will be much correcting to be done—so take the rest of the year as an Irish holiday! I do not care if you think you can get it done. Do not think! Write, merely entertain these other tittering souls so they shall not disturb my eternal repose. Surely, there is a special Hell reserved for dime novelists, where you might be admitted to table, if not the podium.]
2023 Total Articles and Chapter [s, Yaas pluralize.]
[Yes, colons, all upon a lark, are now obsolete! Were you never beaten by your school masters?]
Winter = 135
[Oh how the haughty fall.]
Spring = 91
[And fall…]
Summer = 66
Autumn = 89
Year = 381
[That might have been a work of substance if your twiggish soul had the stuff to cut away the fat and drain the dregs.]
2023 Book Completions =9
Journals = 4 [Who exactly cares what you do, or even less, what thoughts pervade that dimly lit cavern of a brain? Sir, and I address you as such in the low ironic, your task is to entertain.]
Novels = 4 [One was an experiment and another actually good…]
Games = 1 [With all seriousness?]
History = 0 [Herodotus seems to have turned His attention elsewhere.]
[I’d call the screw. But there does not seem to be enough man left to wring from you a baby tear...off, off to the grog house—begone!]
By Title, Category and Length
-Out Of the Cookie, journal 50,672 words
-Motherboard, novel at 14,947 words
-American Dog, novel at 30,497 words
-Immediate Post Life, journal at 12,171 words
-Spring Migration Journal, 48,010 words, May
-Cragmouth, RPG sourcebook, 29,500 words, April
-Winter Met, Journal, at 47,772 words, March
-Timejacker, a novel at 40,330 words, February
-Can, a novel at 14,914 words, January
