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Welcome (belatedly) to 2015, folks. And welcome back to Matt-Wallace.com, which you may have noticed has been down for the past two weeks or so. You may also notice that while the site is now back on-line (minus a few features that will return soon), there is but a single post live on this blog at the moment.
That post being the one you’re reading right now.
It seems to have become a tradition here at Matt-Wallace.com that at the beginning of every year we wipe clean the blog and start from scratch. This was never meant to be a tradition, of course, nor was it ever intentional. Erasing your blog and starting over every year is brand and audience building suicide, isn’t it? You want continuity. You want new folks to feel like they’re joining a raging party.
And yet.
In 2012 the theme of this blog was “The End of the World.” It turned out to be prophetic. The blog and website were also, throughout that year, under constant attack by spam-toting hackers. We tried everything to secure and purge the unending waves of malicious code. In the end we had to nuke the entire site form orbit. It was the only way to be sure.
We began again.
A year later, at the end of 2013, we redesigned the murky aesthetic and functionality of the site top-to-bottom. The new version was fantastic. I was extremely pleased, and it was a big improvement. However, due to an unforeseen glitch, it scrubbed all of my posts from the previous year again when we relaunched it.
2014 was a kick-ass year for me creatively and professionally. It was a big year for this blog, too. We received more hits and I believe I wrote better and more posts than any year previous. Then a few weeks back it became necessary to move everything over to a new account. While transferring the domain and all its files over to that new account there was a disastrous exporting mishap and all of my posts from the last fourteen months were lost.
I have many of them saved in other files and formats, of course. But I am a chronic and notoriously gonzo 2:00 a.m. riffer given to typing directly into WordPress and dispatching things haphazardly. I am also a terribly inconsistent blogger to begin with (I wrote a bit about that here).
So, there are many things I wrote for this blog in the moment and with little foresight or forethought over 2014 that are irretrievably gone. My anti-end-of-the-year post from several weeks ago that moved so many folks? Gone. My popular list of rules for futurists in fiction quoted so thoughtfully in this Luna Station Quarterly article on political engagement in near-future fiction? Gone. My dissection of that infamous Amazon propaganda email calling us all to arms against Hachette, a post that garnered the attention of i09 and saw me mentioned alongside literary blogging heavyweights Chuck Wendig and John Scalzi? Gone.
It’s sad, but by no means tragic. I’m not a big believer in posterity, let alone “legacy.” Eventually the sun is going to explode and none of this bullshit we all deem so important to preserve and record will matter. Neither do I feel every word I set down is so brilliant nor precious it needs to be cast in bronze and hung from the neck of nubile houseboys for all my guests to admire (the words, not the houseboys).
Besides, most of the time all of us blogging authors are just writing and posting in hopes of eventually getting you to buy shit from us or talk about us.
Yes, even that blogging author.
Yes, that one too.
We’re all marketing to you, all the time.
Marketing does not need to go in the time capsule.
So, here we are, back to absolute zero. I may repost some of that old shit, but I’m not going to make it a priority. We’re just going to keep rolling.
I hope you’ll roll with me.
If you’ve been on this ride with me for years already, you know why you’re here and what to expect. If you’re new to the dance, I write a lot about indie and author-publishing (because that’s what I do with a good amount of my time). I keep you abreast of my projects from book releases to podcasts to miscellany. I write about things that piss me off, and generally in a mocking vein.
I include the word “fuck” a lot.
Like, a lot.
Also for you new people, I recommend checking out my Medium for a flavor of what this blog is and what I’m given to write about more often than not. In particular, this essay here was one of my more popular non-writing-related pieces. This post here sums up a lot of what I’m doing with my fiction and author-publishing. This post here covers screenwriting and writing for a living in general, which is a big focus of this blog.
You can also thumb through my Tumblr and check out some briefer posts on any old damn thing I think about or see out in the world. I am also co-hosting a new podcast with my longtime friend, contemporary, and collaborator, Mur Lafferty. It’s called Ditch Diggers, and it’s about writing as a job. You can check out our latest episode by clicking here. It is as raw, real, and no-holds-barred as it gets on the subject.
Finally, I write fiction. That’s kind of the whole, ultimate point of all of this. I write books. I write for the screen. I release and sell a lot of my fiction myself, directly to the reader. So, if you haven’t, please do visit the Slingers Saga page of this site and check out my latest ebook series.
I’m just a working hack. I am often angrier than I need to be and more honest than I should be. I love what I do. I loathe most of the other people who do it. I want us all to be better. I doubt we ever will be. I try to reconcile those things by arranging words in different sequences.
Finally and most importantly for this year, next year, any year, every year—I want you all to understand and appreciate one fundamental and immutable thing, not only about me and this blog, but about life, the order of the universe, and your place in it.
This bunny has a pancake on its head.