51

I decided about a year ago to make sending a weekly newsletter my 2021 resolution. I'm generally anti-resolution, for everything they represent: dieting, subtraction, thinking we're bad and need to be better. But I do like an additive change: more writing, more vegetables, more walks alongside whatever else has been helping us feel okay. And so I added, to writing my book, to editing for Future Tense, to everything else: a weekly newsletter. Sometimes an essay, sometimes a link, sometimes a "see you next week."

A sidebar that will loop back: When I was 15, for probably lots of unhealthy food-control reasons, I decided to try being a vegetarian. I lasted one week, then two, and then I felt very "well why quit now," and it lasted more than a decade. Then I ate meat again for a few years, and then, again, mostly stopped. But a decade of "well why quit now," the better reasoning tacked on after the fact like that Eddie Izzard joke about morals and the Church of England. It's a dangerous sort of persistence, I think, the pure fear of streak-breaking. So, in deference to healthier habits and my skepticism of resolutions, in honor of imperfection, this will be my last newsletter for the year.

So now I can reflect on 51 weeks. (When I write it like that it sounds like an extremely drawn-out pregnancy.) I'm grateful to have had the space to do sort of the opposite kind of writing as writing a book: fast, mostly unedited, personal, with the occasional near-instant gratification of your replies.

I did get to do a tiny bit of other writing this year, between the newsletter (instant garbage) and the book (the slowest is-it-garbage-tbd, keep an eye out in early 2023! which now, alarmingly, doesn't sound infinitely far away), writing a pair of spacey pieces for Slate. The second one came out today, about the anxiety permeating the astronomy community in anticipation of the JWST launch on Christmas Eve: Why Astronomers Are “Crying and Throwing Up Everywhere” Over the Upcoming Telescope Launch

And meanwhile, I'm still working on revisions and edits of my book, I'm hoping to freelance more next year, and I'm going to keep this newsletter going. I'm honestly curious how often I'll write without the arbitrary goals of the resolution. We'll see! Thank you for reading, and if you have thoughts about what you want more of here, I would love to hear them. It's something of a void, invisible audience, but I think you're out there, so really: thank you.

Jaime