What can you say about an entire year? Nothing terribly tragic or awful happened to me or my family in 2019, which I’m pretty happy about. If I didn’t have politics as a hobby I’d consider it a generally uneventful year in terms of world affairs.
I released two books in 2019: Appalling Stories 3: Escape from Trumplandia, which is a satirical novella I co-wrote with Ray Zacek; and Appalling Stories 4: Even More Appalling Tales of Social Injustice, a short story anthology with several authors. Overall, I’m pleased with how they both came out. Trumplandia is a very funny book that skewers both sides of the political divide, though the left more strongly than the right. Appalling Stories 4 gave me the opportunity to work with a number of different writers and allowed me to expand the mythology of the Bee-pocalypse I wrote about in stories like The Bitterness of Honey and Dear Dad.
I also created the Chirper, a Twitter alternative exclusive only to this site. It’s on the sidebar. Check it daily.
I continue to work on the science fiction adventure series I mentioned in Another Bleeping Podcast. It’s taking longer than I’d expected, but as much as I try, I can’t grind out a novel a month like a number of more successful writers. I envy their success; they’ve found an audience and can serve it. My plan is to write three or four novels and release them, more or less, all at once. The expression “Man plans, God laughs” is apt here. We’ll see how it goes.
For a proper review, let’s take a look at the ten most clicked-on posts of 2019, in reverse order.
10) Sportswomanship: This is a satirical flash fiction piece I wrote for another website that rejected it for being too controversial, so I posted it here. It addresses transgenderism; women’s sports; and Megan Rapinoe, Sports Illustrated‘s 2019 Sportsperson of the Year.
9) Battlestar Galactica 1978 – An Overview: I re-watched the original Battlestar Galactica program and offered my thematic and qualitative analysis. The show brings the huge difference between 1970’s TV and today’s TV into stark relief.
8) Let’s Talk About Blumhouse’s The Hunt: Here I discussed the controversy behind the horror movie The Hunt, which told the story of wealthy progressives hunting deplorables, and how the deplorables fight back. A follow-up post described director Craig Zobel’s reaction to the controversy and my analysis of his reaction.
7) Why Meadow Died – A Review: This is a discussion of Andrew Pollack and Max Eden’s book Why Meadow Died, which describes the run-up, circumstances, and aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in February 2018. Andrew Pollack’s daughter Meadow was murdered by Nikolas Cruz, a mentally ill, intellectually deficient man whom law enforcement was aware of, but did nothing to stop.
6) The Stranger -K-drama Review: I analyzed the South Korean legal drama The Stranger, and talked a little bit about why I’ve eschewed all Hollywood-produced media released in the year 2000 and after.
5) That Time I Became a Real-Life Hollywood Villain: In this post I talked about the dreadful TV movie Deliberate Intent, which dramatized the First Amendment-weakening Hit Man case. My employer was sued by a slip-and-fall lawyer because of a book we published, and Hollywood chose us to be the bad guys instead of the murderer.
4) A Message to the Covington Kids: I wrote this at the height of the Covington Kids controversy, where congresspeople, Hollywood, and the entire news media mobbed and even threatened a group of high schoolers for the crime of being harassed on video by the Black Hebrew Israelites and a stolen valor Indian named Nathan Phillips.
3) News 10-30-2019: An uninspiring title, but the post explained my exit from Twitter and provided news about two books in the Appalling Stories series.
2) Social Media and Politics – The Endgame: In this lengthy post I described what happened to my friend R.M. Huffman when he got doxed by an angry social media mob over a Tweet.
1) Culture War – DC McAllister and Yashar Ali: Further proving that Twitter is a cesspit, I was one of the first and only people to give a fair and honest appraisal of what happened when left-wing journalist Yashar Ali attacked right-wing writer Denise McAllister on Twitter, and the pile-on that resulted from McAllister’s reaction to it. Later, I wrote an analysis of the dust-up that was also well received.
So far, I’ve been successful in posting at least once a week for the entire year, which is a goal I set for myself in the early stages of creating this blog. Let’s see if I can continue the streak throughout 2020. Thank you for reading. God bless.
In 
My award-winning* Kindle Single 
The clumsy, shrill feminist message running throughout the film is undercut by the plot. A female urologist’s husband tells her that he wants a divorce because he finds her vagina hideous to look at. He even uses the term “beef curtains.” (I don’t know if that’s an exact translation; all I can do is read the subtitles.) Later that day, the understandably unsettled doctor with the unappealing genitals insists that a male patient provide a semen sample by masturbating in front of her. After she gets fired for this piece of questionable professional behavior, she becomes a pioneer in vaginal plastic surgery, and even has her own female parts prettified. Today’s woke feminism would, no doubt, have her shouting her pride in her, ah, “beef curtains” instead of having them adjusted according to sexist male standards of attractiveness.
Howe: My South was never intended to be an accurate depiction of life below the Mason-Dixon line. It’s a pop culture South. A Brit’s interpretation of junk ‘Murricana. I’ve never visited the South – wouldn’t want to visit MY South – in fact, I’ve visited the States for all of a weekend, when I met Stephen King in NYC after winning his On Writing contest. When it comes to location, I’m less interested in specifics, than I am in mood and atmosphere, and the American South has that in spades. To me, the South has a mythic quality that suits my hyperreal style. I can write the most outlandish shit, set it in the South, and it becomes borderline plausible. I recently read a ‘weird news’ headline about a meth-head who fought fifteen cops while masturbating. (Presumably he was resisting arrest one-handed.) Now I just read the headline, so I don’t have all the details – but tell me that doesn’t sound like a Southern crime? And that I shouldn’t write about it? And that you wouldn’t read it? I also love the rhythm of the Southern accent, and the Southerner’s colorful turn of phrase. For some reason – too many movies, I guess – this cracker raconteur is the loudest of the voices I hear when I’m writing. It’s getting to the point where I’m losing my British accent.
