2020

Wow, that sure was a year, huh.

It’s easy to say the year was a dumpster fire and move on. The pandemic ripped through all of our lives and tossed our carefully laid plans for the year into the air like so much poisonous confetti.

It was a year of grief – of accepting again and again that we wouldn’t be able to see/hug/protect our family and friends for days, weeks, months. Of rescheduling and then canceling plans years in the making. Of losing the small moments like sipping coffee in a busy cafe along with the big moments like dancing at your friend’s wedding. Of losing our loved ones.

Our losses this year were uncountable, which makes it harder to count the good, even as it’s more important than ever to take a moment to celebrate them.

We can’t let 2020 take that from us, too.

It feels surreal that I had a book come out this year. Stranger still that Keena Roberts, Mike Chen, and I ran and funded a Kickstarter for an anthology of scifi & fantasy parenting stories, too. In just the past month, the anthology I was a part of last year was finally released. And, I wrote an essay about parenting that was published by Uncanny Magazine, one of those career goals you’re a little afraid of voicing aloud.

On top of that, we moved cross-country from Michigan to Florida during a pandemic with two months notice and a three-day weekend to find our forever-home. Or at least, forever-enough.

On top of that, we’re expecting another member of the Doore family this February.

Phew. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised I didn’t write a lot of words this year, that the book I’d hoped to finish has been stalled on chapter three for months, that the shorts I’d promised and essays I’d dreamed of fizzled into so much nothing. It’s hard not to stack the what-could-have-beens against the what-weres and despair over the difference, but the weres exist despite so much.

And even if all I did was survive, that’s more than enough. 2020 is almost gone and even though it’s an arbitrary marker of time, a number with only the meaning we ascribe to it, that meaning is important to us.

So let’s give 2021 a better meaning.