Although I technically launched this blog in November 2020, I didn’t seriously start writing here until March of this year. I’m not sure why I was here so little (I was probably on Twitter), but starting in March I tried to have at least one post a month, and more often than not, one a week. Sometimes it’s even multiple posts a week! Generally that’s a pretty good pace for me, since I often struggle to come up with ideas.
Anyway, this year I covered a lot here at Milner on Music. I wrote up several new novels, often mixing in my personal reflections in a way I’ve previously tried to avoid, and a few personal essays about my anxieties around getting surgery. I shared some fiction, something I generally kept private before, and yes, I wrote up about music a lot, too.
What follows isn’t everything I wrote, but just some of the stuff I think still works. After all, I don’t really write for the future, more for the moment: a new book, a new record or a reaction to whatever’s happening in the moment. I’ve always approached this like I have a newspaper column, and let’s be real, nobody re-reads those a month later.