Another Year in Non-Existence

everyone accomplished everything except you again

It’s the most wonderful time of the year to feel extra shitty. Maybe next year all your troubles will be far away, but most likely they will only continue to stagger towards you with an alarming gait. Look how death is approaching much faster than all of your dreams coming true! And now all the writers are sharing their end of year recaps and greatest hits on social media while you are staring down another year in non-existence.

You’re doing fine. The experience of being a writer isn’t one of generating constant success. It’s more like one of generating constant trash and then setting it on fire, hoping something will burn as fuel. Being a writer isn’t a feeling of propulsion, of moving forward, a well-oiled engine humming on bylines and book deals and good news. It’s a feeling of stasis, your entire being clashing against it, making any attempt to move forward in any meaningful way.

I’m turning 42 in a few days. My general end of year reflection always comes with the hyper awareness I have aged another year towards my death. I’ve been writing for two decades now and my body of work is not exactly a body. It’s more of a floating head calling itself a writer with a haunted look in its eyes. I haven’t sucessfully written a book. I’ve only clobbered together attempts with varying amounts of deft and skill and hot glue that never held together. My bylines and accomplishments were so pretend-sounding in my thirties that someone once gently gave me advice that I didn’t even have to include them in queries to agents. It was not about hits and successes and “some personal news” for me. Instead it was some kind of bullshit Live Laugh Love journey of learning to write for myself anyway, and acting like that didn’t feel like a type of grief every single day.

My end of year recap is this: I had no reason to expect TBQ to blow up this year. At the beginning of the year, I was depressed as shit. My recent book proposal had gone on submission and failed. Bylines-wise, the handful of editors I had finally stumblefucked my way into developing warm connections over the prior year lost their jobs and now my pitches were going into the discouraging black holes again. The excitement of TBQ3 hadn’t carried over into TBQ4, the website traffic had crashed back to earth, and now I was dumbly spending money on a fifth issue, all because I had been feeling misguidedly optimistic. I stopped writing. I was out of ideas and could only think of ways to insult myself.

I began tweeting in this voice, this internal monologue of doom. It became a kind of character, the voice of the Taco Bell Quarterly. Years ago in a workshop, a writer was describing their process of writing fiction, and how they knew they had something worth exploring when the characters began talking on their own. Finally, I understood it. Likewise, this voice began talking on its own — this fictional character began living outside of my floating head, finally freed of the stasis, gnashing, spitting, ready to do anything to manifest a body for itself.

TBQ began reaching an even wider audience, surpassing the social media presences of lit mags that have shaped creative writing over the last century. TBQ5 came out in the spring in front of its largest audience yet: the entire literary world. The prose, poems, and art in TBQ5 were so strong and so well-recieved that this single issue of a lit mag generated buzz online for nearly the entire year. I gave several well-regarded media interviews, including to Eater and the Take Out. The submission call for TBQ6 was the most overwhelmingly successful yet, with the writing that came in the strongest yet. In 2023, the website will surpass one million unique page views.

To your absolute horror, you will have to learn to Live Laugh Love and dance like no one is watching. Get your cringe on. We need to drop the masks of coolness and auras of prestige in the lit world, which is dying. Even the lit mags backed by billionaires are folding one by one. Eventually everyone will be forced to slog through the magical journey of learning to write for themselves, except for the most wealthy and most evil who will always have the platforms and red carpets rolled out for them.

You’re a writer even if it didn’t look like it to you this year. Embrace the free floating horror of longing to be percieved. Come warm your phantom limbs by our dumpster fire of Taco Bell wrappers. Let’s pretend these toxic plumes of smoke are clouds as we search for shapes among them and daydream. I have fully expected TBQ to die with each issue. 2022 was the first time I knew it would live a while longer, raising enough cash to pay our contributors through the next four issues. Fuel to burn. It never burns long. Let’s generate more trash.