Yesterday's post was a strictly factual wrapping up of the Alphabet Supremacy.
Today is the day for opinion. In particular, what my favourites were, and what I hope to be doing next year. (Hint: not the Alphabet Supremacy). If you're interested in more details about the process, I still hold with everything I said in my mid-year reflections on the Supremacy.
Favourites
Out of all my posts, my favourites are:
"Bargain" is probably my favourite.
Out of Bice's, I quite like:
Negotiation being my dead-set favourite. Honorable mentions to Competition (because that's basically how Trivial Pursuit works in my family), and Door.
Future
I started the Alphabet Supremacy with the nebulous aim of "writing more". In that regard, it succeeded admirably, as I've certainly written more this year than I have since high school.
Will I be doing it next year? Absolutely not. Will I be doing any published writing next year? Maybe.
In retrospect, when I said "I want to write more", there were two things I really wanted. One was to see whether I could write entertaining fiction, and the other was to force some rigour on my rants and opinions by extruding them into words that come one after another, unaccompanied by convincing hand gestures.
Fiction
This year, I've been able to try writing some fiction. It's been fun to write, and people have said enough kind things about it that I'm not going to abandon the enterprise completely.
Next year, I'd like to muck about with writing some longer form fiction, as it'd be great to have the room to have more than one character or scene. I imagine I'll discover all sorts of new problems when dealing with the increased scale, and that sounds like a fun challenge.
This fiction would be written pretty much for the pleasure of writing it. I have almost no interest in becoming a professional writer: the money's terrible and I'm not sure I enjoy the work enough. I might try to convince someone else to publish something, but mostly as learning exercise.
Non-fiction
I'd also like to write some more essay-like things. The real challenge with them as part of the Supremacy has been that I've not had the time to do proper research, or to adjust my ideas when I learn new facts, or even figure out exactly what it is that I want to say, still less to shape that thinking into something tolerable and entertaining.
A lot of these are going to be technical. Over the course of the year, my ThoughtStreams unpublished section has been steadily growing as I bang out quick notes for things I want to write about or understand better. I'm looking forward to being able to develop these into full-fledged posts.
Goodbye
Bice captured one of the defining things about the Alphabet Supremacy when he said, "because I need to write a post I don't agonise over quality but because I know people know I need to write a post I don't care about quality". That's been great this year, but next year, I want to be able to care more about quality while still managing to actually publish. Do not expect a post a week in future.
Before I say goodbye to the Alphabet Supremacy for ever, I want to say thank you to the readers, to Bice, and to Joliette. I am grateful for both your patience and for your encouragement.