I’m writing more. I’m not writing as much as I was when I was trying to get and stay sober, but I’m writing a lot these days. I wrote a novel last year called Lisa’s Best Diner about terrible men ruining a small town on the Ohio/Pennsylvania border by using a basketball team to get away with most crimes. I wrote a collection of poetry called The Library Poems about the general misunderstanding of what public libraries do and how they’re constantly under attack. I wrote a kid’s book called Big Blue Black about a child wandering east with a blanket over their head that stretches long enough to keep all their neighbors safe while they hear loud sounds happening over and over again in a place they can’t see. They walk until they reach a river, and then they leave the blanket behind so that they can see what’s happening where the loud sounds are. I wrote a lot. I didn’t know what else to do, I guess. I needed the action. I needed to move things around in my head and in my heart. I needed.
Apparently, so many of you felt the same way this year. The number of submissions we received this year was daunting. The number of incredible submissions we were sent this year made the entire endeavor pretty difficult actually. We needed more time. We needed more people. We needed to rise to meet the tide of creation that had found us needing, and more than delivered.
The Best of the Net Anthology always reminds me that our community of creatives are constant and beautiful. I’ve lost track of what hope actually is, but this kind of energy has to at least be a facsimile of hope. I know I felt more, felt different, felt challenged and engaged, and I felt like you all knew more than I did about this world and the worlds inside you. Everyone is ornery now, hallelujah, everyone is ornery now.
Thank you to the editors that sent their best work our way. Thank you to the writers that wrote the pieces that were nominated, chosen to be finalists, and selected for inclusion in this year’s release. Thank you to the interns, readers, assistant editors, genre coordinators, judges, and our new managing editor and editor-in-chief. All told, that’s thousands of people writing, editing, submitting, reading, selecting, judging, meeting, coding, and building.
So, until next year, remember: we need to pace ourselves. We need shuffle our feet. We need to bob and weave. We need to throw some damn punches. We need to throw a towel over our heads and disassociate. We need to let the world disappear and we need to play in one that doesn’t ask us to be in a constant fight. We need imagine more, deeper, and we need to keep our love through all of it.
I think we’ve all accepted that nothing is simple anymore, but that doesn’t mean we have to lose those parts of ourselves in the hypnosis of these terrible complexities.
-Darren C. Demaree