The Unexpected Antick Musings Twentieth Anniversary Post

Twenty years ago today, I set up a blog on Blogger, using a random bookish template (which I'm still using today; if I tried to change it now, it would either break everything or require massive amounts of work) and put up a quick test post.

And, though it surprises me to realize it, I'm still here, using that same template, with a grotty old blogroll in the left rail that I really should just delete one of these days. (There's a lot of aspects of this blog I keep thinking I should modernize and update and clean up, and then I remember this is a hobby that brings in no income, and so I'm only going to do the bits that I actually enjoy.)

Every year on October 4th, the Glorious Blogiversary, I intend to post a long retrospective post, with lots of of links and pointless numbers and suchlike.

But, because of a flaw in my character, I have botched or entirely missed all of the previous "big" anniversaries so far - fifth, tenth, and fifteenth. (I'm as astonished as you are that anyone's flaw could be that precise, but it did happen.)

On the other hand, I'm getting older, and I keep hoping that means I'll change in some way, maybe even develop different, exciting new flaws in my character. And so, this year, I'm thinking I will have an anniversary post (this very thing you're reading now), and break the weird pattern I've set.

It will still be massively self-indulgent, and quite likely not all that interesting to a random reader. But - and this is the point I will focus on - it will be a thing I planned to do, and I will have done it.

History of the Blog: Links to Links

First, though, let me link to the past installments of this annual post: first, second, third, fourth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth (published two months late and substantially shorter than the others), eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth (a quick list of number of posts, done because I'd completely forgotten the blogiversary was coming up), seventeenth and nineteenth.

(You will note there are no links to the fifth, sixteenth, or eighteenth anniversary posts. Those are the ones I missed entirely.)

Each of those is itself mostly a list of links to posts from that year of the blog; I don't expect anyone to actually trace that backwards. It's mostly a signpost, to say this is a thing I do, and these are the times I did it.

I then typically explain what I grandly call The Myth of Antick Musings. I started this blog as practice, since the book-club company I worked for at the time was going to start up a bunch of blogs, and I would be tasked to write the one for the SFBC. That corporate blog was scrubbed from the Internet long ago, and the company has changed hands several times  - I think it still exists in some form, but that is a much attenuated and sad form that I try not to think about. So the fact that my half-assed practice blog is still running while the SFBC itself seems to have died, well, that's a sign of something in the world, I guess, though I don't count it as a win.

After I was cast out of the SFBC (and, though I didn't realize it at the time, editorial work and the SFF field in general), this blog turned into exactly what I thought it never could, should, or would be: a book blog. Oh, well.

I used to watch moves and write about them here. I used to post notes and links to random things actually happening in the real world, too! We truly are living in the worst possible timeline.

History of the Blog: Easily Manipulated Metrics

At this point in the annual post, I have a table with the number of blog posts each year. Why? Would any reader care? I doubt it, but, somewhere deep in my psyche, I suppose I see it as a measure of my productivity, and so I must track it.

• 2024-2025 -- 407 posts
• 2023-2024 -- 405 posts
• 2022-2023 -- 410 posts
• 2021-2022 -- 279 posts
• 2020-2021 -- 265 posts
• 2019-2020 -- 55 posts
• 2018-2019 -- 178 posts
• 2017-2018 -- 368 posts
• 2016-2017 -- 263 posts
• 2015-2016 -- 144 posts
• 2014-2015 -- 258 posts
• 2013-2014 -- 434 posts
• 2012-2013 -- 285 posts
• 2011-2012 -- 332 posts
• 2010-2011 -- 445 posts
• 2009-2010 -- 711 posts
• 2008-2009 -- 880 posts
• 2007-2008 -- 834 posts
• 2006-2007 -- 841 posts
• 2005-2006 -- 809 posts

If post-count means anything, it's clear I soured on blogging - or ignored it, or got busy with other things; take your pick - several times over these two decades, most strongly in 2019-2020. I also posted nearly twice as actively the first four years as any time afterward; lots of us were posting random thoughts into the ether in those days, in ways that have mostly migrated to social media owned by megacorporations harvesting our attention for megabucks in more recent years. (Again: worst timeline, hands down.)

I had another blog for a couple of years about a decade ago - Editorial Explanations, where I made fun of editorial cartoons at pretty much exactly the point when they began their own extinction event. I enjoyed doing it until I didn't, and then I stopped. It was a long time ago, and it doesn't matter now, so I've stopped adding them in to the blog-post totals. That blog itself is still available for anyone with an interest in decade-old political bullshit. (I will note that bullshit of that era feels almost quaint and homey these days.)

The Inevitable Links: Posts About Books

Antick Musings did turn into a book blog, first slowly after I left the SFBC (and thought I might have a chance to get another editorial job) and then more comprehensively (once it was clear that I'd fallen off the horse and the horse had run away, never to be seen again).

Most of the posts here, for the last decade or more, are about books. So the bulk of this anniversary post, every year, is links to those posts, using sentences I wrote that I'm still inordinately fond of. Yes, this is a hugely self-indulgent thing - I do it every year, and I'm going to do it again.

I'm tempted to write a bit about each story, but that urge drags me back to 1992, trying to capture every genre book I read on those fussy little pieces of paper for the SFBC (those who know, know) with a single log-line at the top for genre, a long plot description with all of the names clear and spelled correctly, and a short, separate editorial opinion at the end. 

Books by writers about how they work almost always turn into advice. I understand that: the audience for work about how novels get written is mostly people who desperately want to write novels themselves.

I am perhaps not as invested in the idea of two half-naked guys whacking each other for three minute intervals until one of them falls over as he was, but I can appreciate his knowledge and enthusiasm even as many of the technical details are lost on me.

There's a difference between formula and genre. I don't know if I can explain it, clearly enough, but it's real. A formula is a cheap shortcut, a template for a kind of story to make it easier to knock off, while a genre is a territory, with clear boundaries and sometimes required landmarks, which a story is free to navigate in its own way.

But I often find myself wishing books were different than they are, and it's not a useful wish.

We all are not reading millions of books, every second of every day. It's the default state of humanity.

When you discover a creator, there's always that question: is this work typical? If and when I come back for more, is it going to be the same sort of thing?

It's also got one of Wodehouse's most amusing impostor plots, with Jimmy Crocker pretending not to be Jimmy Crocker to woo the girl he loves but then posing as Jimmy Crocker to infiltrate her house.

Back when I was a wee lad, cartoon collections like this just shoveled the cartoons in willy-nilly, and didn't show any evidence of organization. You got two hundred Charles Addams cartoons, in whatever order they were in after the editor dropped the file three or four times, and you liked it.

There's something comforting about seeing books you fully intend to read sitting on your shelves year after year.

That and $12.95 will get you a ham sandwich at a deli, but I like to mention random things like that. It makes me relatable as a blogger and helps pad out the word count, neither of which is an actual concern for me.

The three talk in the ways that people who smoked an awful lot of pot for an awful lot of years talk, and similarly believe themselves to be profound.

So I did the names-in-Russian-novels thing and mostly hummed through the cricket matches, which are roughly 40% of the novel by weight.

What I'm saying is: I feel like I used to be smart and connected and in charge.

I don't want to pretend to give advice to someone dead for forty years. That's the temptation with anyone's memoirs: it's so easy to see other people's mistakes, and point them out in clever or cruel ways, to show how they could have had much better, more fulfilling lives, if only they'd known to do...whatever.

We can note that '60s Marvel comics were a major advance over the competition, with more realistic motivations and characters that spoke more clearly to the teen and young adult audience of the time,  and that they were popular and a welcome surge of energy for the field, while still pointing out that they were not very good, and that the things that came afterward in the same style were not even as good as that.

Comics are about sex less often than most artforms. Call it a lingering prudishness, the hangover from long decades seen as a medium just for kids, or just the fact that drawn sex is inherently a bit more fleshy than the written kind.

Unfortunately, the most important thing about modern superhero comics - more than the costumes, more than the secret identities, more than the endless "who would win" arguments, more than the catchphrases and shocking reverses and Never Agains - is that you must take them seriously at all times. Superhero comics are serious and deep and important, telling stories about guys in funny costumes punching each other imbued with the power of ancient myth, and anyone who doesn't accept this basic, fundamental truth will be wished into the cornfield.

The Inevitable Links: Everything Else

I have posts about other things - not as many, and not as much as in the early days of the blog. In 2025, for the third year in a row, I had a series of posts about songs on Mondays. I think I'm not as good at writing about music as I am about books - some of you may have unkind thoughts, wondering if that is even possible, but I will ignore you - but I do it because I like these songs and I want to surface things I like here.

I post lists of new books - only physical books, but however and whenever I get them - I post a list here, under the overall title Reviewing the Mail (which I stole from Chuck Klosterman, who doesn't seem to be using it anymore). I've called those posts different things occasionally, too - mostly by mistake.

I also do quotes from the books I read - every Saturday as Quote of the Week, and twice a year in a closet-cleaning exercise. (Also available from that link, in big clumps on New Year's Eve and the Sunday closest to Independence Day.)

I don't post about much of anything else, these days. I did rant about gerrymandering this past summer, not that it did any good.

That was pretty much it for Antick Musings in Year Twenty. It bores me to say it; I can only image how it seems to you folks.

Whither Antick Musings?

So that was Year Twenty: big round number. Scary to think this has been going for more than a third of my life already. But I am massively a creature of habit, so I think I'm going to keep doing the same things, in mostly the same ways, in the next year.

But I could always be hit by a bus. I've also been under the care of a heart doctor for even longer than I've run this blog - since 2002 and an episode of heart failure - which is probably more likely than J. Random Bus to suddenly cause massive problems in my life. Who knows.

Antick Musings is deeply self-indulgent, I know. There will likely be more of it, in the same style and the same place. over the next year. I just hope the self-indulgent things that you do are equally fulfilling to you.