So, 2018 is nearly over, at last. It was an absolute shit-show of a year for numerous reasons. On a personal level, I'll be remembering it primarily as the year I hit a personal wall, flaming out and delivering a novel six months late (for the first time in my career). In reaction to which, I decided to take a six month sabbatical (my first break from writing in a decade) ... then had the sabbatical interrupted by a family medical crisis, of the "an immediate relative spends three months on a stroke ward and will never recover" variety.
In comparison with the global political picture, my personal 2018 was all butterflies and rainbows. 2018 was the year that the global climate change alarm sirens began to sound continuously, with wildfires and heat emergencies and melting icecaps. 2018 was also, by no coincidence whatsoever, the year in which the global neo-Nazi movement made considerable headway, with neo-fascist demagogues grabbing power in Brazil, tightening their stranglehold in India, the Philippines, Turkey, the USA, Italy, and elsewhere. The UK was, for a third consecutive year, paralyzed by the utter shit-show that is Brexit, with the deadline now looming less than 100 days ahead of us. It was the year in which it became glaringly clear that the 2016 US election was rigged by a combination of election fraud and AI-controlled targeting of individual voters by state-level propaganda systems in order to amplify internal hatred and dissent: and that the same people and tools used in the US campaign had also driven the Brexit referendum result, and were in use elsewhere around the world.
I am looking for any silver linings to 2018 and coming up blank.
So, can you help me? What was the good side of 2018, the things we should remember this year for happily rather than with a curse?
