One more page-turn. One more curled finger on the wish monkey's hand. One more dead soldier shattering against the curb.

One more year.

You want every year to be epic. Very few truly are. Some are workhorse years. Some are banner years. Many are low-key. Most will contain events so seemingly benign you won't realize how monumental they were until you’re too old and broken down to do anything with the knowledge.

This year was largely about producing my next novel, LETHAL BORN (or: The One That Is Commercially Viable While Still Retaining My Own Sensibilities, Or Some Shit Like That). A few refinements and explosions aside, it's in the bag, 100k words of thrills and chills set in the modern, present-day world all you people seem to want to keep reading about so much. I'm not happy with how long it took me. I call vagina on the James Joyce epicists of the literary world. But while I'm a working writer, I'm not currently a working novelist. And thusly I busted on a lot of freelance work in the interim. I scripted a new indie feature. I wrote episodes for an animated series based on a retail toy line. I kept pumping out my regular print column.

All of that meant shifting my focus from podfic (that’s podcast fiction, or fiction that is podcast). However, Latter 2009 still gave you the podcast novellas TITLE FIGHT (w/ Scott Sigler) and THE FAILED CITIES: HATH A DARKNESS. You're welcome.

But that's all shit you do to pay bills or promote yourself. It doesn't mean there isn't love. I also started a new podcast called KILL (the) FEED this year that I'm still very jazzed about. It was much more about experimenting with multimedia content and formats than churning out One More Podcast. I made my directorial debut when we shot the first half of WITCH/HUNTER—a new webseries I’ll finish shooting early next year and debut *on* KILL (the) FEED in the first half of 2010—and realized writing/producing/directing my own shit is in fact something I’m interested in after all.

I didn't buy a new iPod. I didn't buy a new cell phone. I did not upgrade to a fucking Blu Ray player. I did not download Google Chrome (calling it "Chrome by Google" does not chic that bullshit up, by the way). I didn't watch a single episode of American Idol. I didn't see Transformers 2. I didn't download a single Lil Wayne, Lady GaGa, Black-Eyed Peas, or All-American Rejects track.

There were things I did ingest and enjoy. Therefore I present the even-more-obligatory-than-the-rest-of-this-blog-post portion of the blog post.

My 2009 Best Of Highlights.

Best Movie-Going Experience: Moon (best science fiction film since Children of Men, written/directed by SON OF BOWIE)

Best & Worst Movie-Going Experience: The Wrestler (you ever see a flick that was simultaneously about who you were, who you wanted to be, and who you were afraid to become? Yeah, me either. Until…)

Best Indie Movie Not Released In A Theater Near Me: Ink (there is a stigma that low-budget independent movies aren't actually movies, but glorified demos. Bullshit. I love this one completely on its own merit)

Best Act I Saw Live: Seether (they were the opener, but it was the best twenty-minute set I've ever seen)

Best Book I Read: The best novels I read this year were unreleased and therefore I am not at liberty to discuss them, beyond pointing out that I'm obviously cooler than you.

Best Published Book I Read: The Red Tree by Caitlin R. Kiernan, Personal Effects: Dark Art by J.C. Hutchins, Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry, The City & The City by China Mieville, Slammer by Allan Guthrie

Best TV Show I Followed With Any Regularity: Sons of Anarchy (talk about putting up one of the best sophomore seasons of any television show ever. Kurt Sutter is the showrunner of the future)

Best Viral Video I Watched Ad Nauseum When I Should Have Been Writing: Freestyle Rap Battle: Translated

Best Music Video Not Found On MTV or iTunes: Metal on Metal’s “Bastard”

Best New Rum I Tried Because The Bottle Looked Fucking Harsh: Kilo Kai

Best Writerly Experience: My first view of "THE END" writing LETHAL BORN.

Best Authorly Experience: Signing a copy of my short story collection The Next Fix for Jonathan Maberry at Hypericon and seeing him tweet that it’s "a hell of a good read."

Best Line I Wrote: "Billions and billions of stars? Carl Sagan fucked them."

There were more highlights, probably many more, but if the point hasn't yet come where you've stopped giving a shit I fear it soon would.

Happy New Year.

Post-script: My decade isn't over yet. And neither is yours. I'm assuming you have both a calendar and a calculator app for your phone. Use them.