That's a Wrap On 2023

Good F*cking Riddance

Today is December 22, and I am ever so done with this year, at least from a work perspective. I’ll be back with an Important Announcement (it’s good news) on January 1.

I’d like to recap a few things prior to signing off until 2024.

It was a busy year that was going fine until September 23. The book deal with Bantam resulted in a lot of money, but also a lot of work. The original version of On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down (which you should buy) was good enough for self-publishing, but not for a big publishing house. That was part of the reason why I wanted to go with a traditional publisher, to make it better.

And did we ever, but it was definitely a “we” project. I didn’t just hand it over and say hey spice this fucker up. It was more my editor said this part is weak, this part is fucked up, this story sucks, fix all of it. She was much nicer about it than that, but you get the idea. Then there was going through the copy edits, and the proofreading, and the design, and finding seven times as many photos that were in the public domain …

And I wasn’t doing a lot of writing of new stuff, because I was reworking the shit out of a book (which you should buy) that was originally published two years earlier. It felt like my life was nothing but editing and promotion. Occasionally, I felt like I’d lost my writing mojo, except for my piece about the discovery of the Titanic wreck. That piece slayed like a carbon fiber submersible at 12,000 feet deep.

Anyway, I was pretty busy right up to the book launch working on and promoting the new and improved version (which you should buy), but I knew that this past fall I had to do a lot of writing to help promote the book. Writing new history pieces was going to be one of the best ways to get people to buy it. I was all set to do so, but then, fuckery.

Health fuckery.

One of the good things about 2023 was my return to running. I’d registered for the Melissa’s half marathon in Banff for September 23, with a goal of sub two hours. I left training to the last minute, but I was in good shape on race day and finished with a time of 1:54. I felt strong at the finish and was pleased with my performance. That night, everything went to shit. Continues below …

Speaking of things going to shit, reach on Facebook has. So please ensure you get my posts when you

The race had nothing to do with it. My plan was to dive into writing lots of new pieces starting on Monday, September 25. Instead, I spent the day in the hospital getting my life saved. If it was a hundred years previous, I would have died. Fuck yeah advanced medical technology.

But the book launch was only two weeks away and I had to suck it up, so my return to writing was delayed by only two days with the publication of a piece about the fall of the Roman Empire.

And despite frequently feeling like a bag of smashed badger asses, I wrote a lot the last few months, and also engaged in relentless promotion of the new book (which you should buy), because I had a responsibility to. An important part of my job as an author is promoting my own work, and people were relying on me to do so. I’m pretty proud of how I persevered through all that, including having a significant surgery on November 10, to keep writing new stuff and promoting the shit out of the book despite regularly feeling rather wretched. Speaking of that surgery, it’s been six weeks and I’m still recovering. I had a post-op infection and had to go through three different antibiotics to nuke it. I’m pretty sure my not taking it easy and pushing myself with work has slowed my recovery, but you gotta do what you gotta do, or some cliché bullshit.

Anyfuckingway, that’s enough. Christmas is three days away and yeah you can still get the book (which you totally should) because if you have Prime or some shit it can still arrive on time.

Yesterday’s post about the historicity of Jesus was a fun one to end the year on. I’d been meaning to write it for several months, since the shitshow about Black Cleopatra last April, but never got around to it. With Jesus’s Probably Not Birthday coming in a few days I figured it was due time, and the solstice seemed like a perfect publication date. Unsurprisingly, quite a few people missed the point. The point wasn’t to prove his existence, as entire books of evidence by people who dedicate their careers to that sort of thing have been written on that subject. The point was to reveal the naysayers as relaying a fringe belief, and that if you don’t want to spend a lot of time digging through research, you can treat it the same way you treat your belief in anthropogenic climate change: by trusting what the vast majority of real experts have to say rather than poring over all the data yourself.

I knew I wasn’t going to convince many, but that’s not why I wrote it. I wrote it because it keeps being an issue. I’ll write something about Jesus, like the humorous tale of the Last Supper, and people will lose their shit in the comments saying Jesus never existed in the first place. I know I’m not going to convince them, but having a piece I can link to can be something the observers of those comments can read to have an alternate understanding, rather than always having to have the same stupid argument over and over.

Because really, it is a pretty stupid thing to argue about. No matter what you believe on the matter, the reality is that Christianity exists, and it has created more than a few problems. Maybe focus on that instead.

When you expose someone’s pet bullshit as being bullshit, they are never grateful. It is a well-known failure of our species. And so, I was quite surprised that rather than lose a bunch of followers / subscribers, I actually gained quite a few after publication.

So, I got that going for me.

Speaking of having cool shit going for me, Jeff Tiedrich recommended my Substack:

And the History Channel (the website is actually pretty good, unlike the TV alien shit) did a thing about seven history Subtacks to follow, and mine was one of them.

I’m not sure what I’ve published here that qualifies as “X-rated” though.

I’ll see you on January 1. Until then, I’m going to try not to think too much about my book On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down.

Which you should buy.

And also don’t forget to