2024: A Look Back
I did a lot of great interviews. But I'm still not over that whole Q Magazine thing.
What a long, strange, and often highly depressing year it’s been...
Indeed, it’s been such an emotionally traumatic year that it’s taken me until the very last day of it to finally post my year-end list of my favorite pieces.
Needless to say, the biggest reason that it was such a shit year is the fact that Q Magazine abruptly closed its virtual doors in May, capping what had - up to that point - been one of the greatest experiences of my career in journalism. And while I’ve certainly experienced some wonderful moments in the months since that happened, I would be lying if I said that I’m not still reeling from the effects of the magazine’s closure.
Hand to heart, as I sit here writing this, I find that I’m on the cusp of crumpling just because I know that I have to dig through the material that I did for Q. I know damned well that the work I did for the magazine was solid, as was the work that my comrades in arms did, but the task of revisiting it... Well, it’s a reminder of everything I had, everything I lost, and all of the struggling I’ve done since it all fell apart.
Worse, as I sit here in the post-Q era, it literally feels as though it never happened, since I really can’t say that anything that’s happened for me since then happened as a result of my having worked there.
Yes, I was extremely fortunate to be able to more or less pick back up with virtually all of my freelance publications as if I’d never stopped. I quickly found myself back in the saddle with Decider, EW, and Industry Magazine.
IndieWire, to which I hadn’t contributed in several years, was kind enough to accept a pitch for an interview that I’d secured for Q but hadn’t been able to complete before the sudden shuttering.
The A.V. Club found its former pop culture footing against after being acquired by Paste, and if anything made my year this year, it was being able to return to the Random Roles beat again.
I started writing for LateNighter – it proved quite fortuitous that they’d reached out while I was in the midst of my tenure with Q and were still willing to let me start contributing to the site when things went belly up – and only a few weeks ago, thanks to my former Decider cohort Brett White, I made my debut with PopHeist, a new site that I hope we’ll all be seeing great things from as we enter 2025.
But I’ll admit, I did have at least a slight hope that walking away with the title “Senior Editor & Writer, Q Magazine” on my resume might result in at least half a glance from some other outlets. At the same time, though, I know it’s hard out there for everyone who decided to choose journalism as a career, so I’m well aware that I’m far from the only one who’s looking for gainful full-time employment.
My problem, I suppose, is that I hadn’t had full-time employment in so fucking long, and when I finally got it with Q Magazine, it was at precisely the right moment: just as my daughter was going off to college. So I worked my ass off, and I did everything in my power to make sure that the job I was doing for Q was the best possible job I could do. Even better, we had a staff of people who all felt the same way, and we proved it every single day that we worked for the magazine.
That’s why it was so heartbreaking when it all came crashing down with no warning, no severance pay, no payment for accrued vacation time, nothing. I had it all, and I lost it all, and I didn’t know why, nor did anyone else with whom I’d worked, from our editor-in-chief on down.
So now here I am, 54 years old, back to living the freelance life at a time when it’s worse than it’s ever been, feeling more lost than I’ve ever felt.
It’s not great.
Frankly, there are moments when it kind of feels like the worst.
But I’m not giving up.
Mind you, I’ve definitely hit a point where, for the first time in as long as I can remember, I’m actually looking for non-journalism jobs. I mean, what the fuck else am I going to do? I’ve got a wife who’s an ABA therapist and is literally helping to change children’s lives with her work. I’ve got a daughter in college who’s kicking ass. They both need me. I’m never not going to be there for them. I just need to figure out how to change course enough to either find more work as a writer/editor or find work somewhere else while I’m continuing to do the limited amount of writing and editing that I’m able to do.
Would I like to write more for this Substack newsletter? You bet I would. I will admit that I’ve been so depressed and beaten down in recent months that it’s been hard to deliver too much in the way of material here, but I hope you’ve at least enjoyed the playlists I’ve been serving up, because music is one way that I’ve been able to keep going. I’d love to be able to serve you folks by taking your commissions, if there are people you’d like for me to try and interview or oral histories you’d like for me to try and compile. I mean, the world wouldn’t have my oral history of Misfits of Science if it wasn’t for my buddy Jeff Giles commissioning it, so it’s clear that I’ll take the most insane ideas and run with them if given a paycheck.
Anyway, I’m clearly just running off at the mouth and venting, so I’ll go ahead and wrap things up, but I just wanted you to understand that, even though it’s had its up sides in the past few months, 2024 really, really sucked for me, and while I really want to get over it, I clearly haven’t gotten over it. But I’m trying. I really am. And even though it’s been rough to put this piece together, I guess it’s also been a little bit cathartic as well, since it’s served to remind me of the good stuff that happened in 2024, too...
Q Magazine:
IndieWire:
Decider:
A.V. Club:
That Thing They Did:
LateNighter:
PopHeist:
Oh man, I could relate to this to a painful degree, particularly the part about returning triumphantly to The A.V. Club. I was hoping that 2024 would be a big year for me. Instead, it's the writing equivalent of a rebuilding year, in which I put things in place to do better- hopefully- in the future. If I were you, I would still be riding high off the success of the Airplane book. That's everywhere. I always experience a surge of pride for you whenever I see it. Being a freelance writer is a difficult way of making a living (I'm coming on a full decade of full-time struggling!) that somehow never seems to get easier, but you've got to claim your victories along the way. I have between one and seventy-three books that will be published in 2025 (hopefully!), and I will be overjoyed if any of them get a small fraction of the attention your book did. I know I've got great stuff to look forward to in the year ahead, but it can be hard to be positive when life is full of unpleasant surprises. But onward and upward! 2025 hopefully will be better. I remain cautiously optimistic.
I am belated in serving up my gratitude and admiration for discussing Young Guns II with Mortensen. I effing love that movie.