What to say about this year. This year was this and this and sometimes a little of this. This year I made great friends. This year I made an effort to make my life better. This year I think I succeeded.

This year I made resolutions to ask a girl out, publish something, move to Portland. This year I fulfilled all of those resolutions and still wasn't satisfied. This year my heart soared and plummeted, this year my dreams waxed and waned, this year everything sweet came with a little bitter. This year was amazing and beautiful. This year I did things right by myself. This year was pretty amazing.

This year I did my damnedest. Next year won't be different.

I now have a little family of blogs.

The Twilight Rewrite: http://rewriting-twilight.blogspot.com/

My media blog: http://contentaggravation.blogspot.com/

“Fuck you, you mediocre bastard,” she said, and the words echoed like the aftershock of an atom bomb through his whole reality, rearranging on a molecular level what it meant to be human and alive and in love with someone who did not love him back. 40 long mediocre years she'd been his, some 14,600 utterly average kisses every morning, twice that many dull conversations about unimportant things, roughly 7,000 dissatisfying sexual encounters where he thought he had been her everything and she had tolerated – tolerated! - him inside her, while he pretended not to notice like the bastard he was, had to be.

There could be no greater insult. Each syllable cut with the keen edge of truth, maybe not the truth but a truth, one that he could not help but believe. In one great instant of personal triumph a man faded, and flickered, and was no longer a human being. And like that, it was over.

But not for everyone...

Look, it's simple: Fall in love with everyone you meet, including - especially - yourself.

The last time Roland had given his heart to another he dropped it on the sidewalk, where it flopped about like a gasping fish, waiting for someone to pick it up. Nobody did. They just stood there, him and her and the squick, squick squick of a dying love heaving grotesquely on the gravel, both parties studiously ignoring its throes. Minutes passed like eternities.

She broke first - coughed into her hand, cracking the silence like a gunshot. Begrudgingly, he picked the heart up in his right hand, dusted it off on his overcoat. Grimacing at its state, he shook her left hand with his and walked abruptly away, letting the thump, thump thump mark his pace.

They can't all be epic tales.