I love to do yearly retrospectives / top 10s and this year I’ve done one using my own proprietary formula! (Not all that proprietary, really. Substack has its own idea of which are the “top posts,” but it strongly favors paywalled posts, doesn’t integrate with Wordpress - necessary when my Autistic Book Party posts, for backwards compatibility reasons, are still posted there - and doesn’t automatically separate the posts by year, so I just ran my own numbers for the visible stats on each of my 2022 posts and guessed wildly at how to weight things like hits vs comments vs likes.)
So what were the best posts on Everything Is True this past year? Let’s count them down!
#10. Firsts of the Year
Very appropriate for this week, it’s a post with a New Year theme! I explained why I like these kinds of calendrical celebrations and it resonated with a lot of you.
A paywalled post which nonetheless made a big impact. I guess everyone needs to hear that they deserve some of these!
One of my posts about the science of fiction. There’s so much to say about this topic, the research, the intersections it reaches and those that it fails to reach; I feel like I only managed to scratch the surface.
#7. Chekhov’s 21-Gun Salute: Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Battle Scenes
The beginning of a series on the bespoke little system I developed for THE INFINITE’s climactic chapters; or, in other words, on how to structure big action scenes when you more naturally think in terms of character.
#6. The Autistic Community Is Actually Many Communities
What it says on the tin! Sometimes I just get hung up on something in the discourse that annoys me, and sometimes it resonates with a lot of you.
#5. Ways of Escaping
On “escapism” in fiction; why it doesn’t only apply to light, happy stories; how it can be a healthy thing to do; and why the escape is never absolute.
#4. Marie Kondo and Neurodivergent Space
The very most popular paywalled post! People like it when I talk about animism, which is cool but awkward, because I’m drawn to the idea but really don’t understand what I’m talking about most of the time. Anyway, this post talks about things in Marie Kondo’s book - which is absolutely a book about animism, in addition to being a book about tidying - that resonated for me as an autistic person.
This post was so fiddly to write but people loved it! And it uses two different analysis to arrive at a really surprising conclusion: in the world of current SFF books, autistic representation is not overwhelmingly white, cishet, and male! Instead it’s predominantly white, female, and substantially queer. (We do need to work on that “white” part.)
#2. Autistic Book Party, Episode 68: The Unbalancing
The only book review that made the Top 10 this year! I adore RB Lemberg, their Birdverse series, and this book in particular, so I’m thrilled that so many of you are on the fan train with me as well.
#1. Autism Acceptance: Words Are Not Enough
By far the most popular post of the whole year - this one hit a nerve of communal frustration right at the most frustrating time of year for an autistic activist. We don’t just need to be called the right words - we also need people to stop trying to kill us!!
What was your favorite post this year? Did it make the list?
ICYMI: The Best of Everything Is True
I really liked Healthy Connections!
My favourite was the 21-gun salute. I plan to come back to it when I get to each of the few combat scenes in my WIP.