Quinn Blogs

Happy Newest Year, everybody! I tend to resist the urge to reflect on the past year like everybody else does come January 1, because appreciating what you have and learning from your mistakes is a total buzzkill, but this year I couldn’t help it. It was a bit of a strange year for me. I had to deal with a few major personal stresses that I might elaborate on later (suspense!), and in all honesty there weren’t any really major triumphs to offset that (I haven’t updated Quinn Writes a Novel in a while because there’s really nothing to report – still no offers of representation, but the search continues).

But I did feel like this year had a real wealth of more modest pleasures for me, and in some ways that’s actually better. It helped me maintain a low-level positive mood throughout the whole 12 months, regardless of whether I was dealing with unpleasantness or not at the time. Many of these little things were fun nights spent with friends or family, exciting vacations or delicious meals, but a lot of them were simply new geeky bits of pop culture for me to enjoy. I’m a geek not because I play Dungeons and Dragons or spend time seriously considering the exact type of spaceship I’d like to own; I’m a geek because I love to get into things. When I pick up a movie or a novel or anything that looks appealing to me, I’m usually hoping I will love it enough to delve into the rest of the series, or the whole span of its creators’ body of work, until the well runs dry. That doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy disposable, one-hit pop fluff as well as anyone else. But the works I truly love are the ones that draw me inexorably into their world, in whatever form that world might take. Non-geeks want pop culture to be entertainment. Geeks want it to be a job. Yeah, it’s weird, but I’ve come to accept and embrace this part of myself.

So I thought I’d take a look back at the pop culture treasures and guilty pleasures that I discovered in 2010, and where they have me looking in this year ahead.

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