Shelf Life December Roundup
Everything That Was Unfit to Print in December 2020
Welcome to your December monthly roundup from Shelf Life, which also contains year-end stats for 2020 now that the year has wrapped! Just dropping some newsletter metrics, past-month highlights, and upcoming-month events of interest on you. This feature will appear in the newsletter archive on the first of each month (or thereabouts) but will not deliver to your inbox (housekeeping posts will never be emailed).
2020 Top Ten
Lots of top-ten lists making the internet rounds right now so why not Shelf Life? I’ve put together this list of the top ten Shelf Life articles from 2020. I chose the top 10 based on a formula that took into consideration likes, views, shares, and comments (comments not made by me!) to come up with this list. I gave the highest weighting to shares, followed by hearts and comments (equal weighting), and finally factored in views without weighting (1 view = 1 point).
Guide to Writing Respectfully, Part I: Writing Respectfully on Race and Ethnicity
Enjoying Problematic Authors: Ethical Content Consumerism for Conscientious Readers
Guide to Writing Respectfully, Part III: Writing Respectfully With Person-First Language
Choosing to Be a Great Writer: Five Choices to Make Today for Writing Success
Toward Kindness Equilibrium: Three Steps to Take Today to Cultivate a Kinder Planet
I’m really proud of all of those articles, and I was really happy to see that To Do Something Well, an early article and one of my favorites, made the list. I think my personal favorite article to write (and one of the earliest) was Beauty and Marketability. If you’re looking to check out the Shelf Life back catalog, any of the articles linked here would be a great starting point.
December Highlights
December had ten natural publication dates so it was the biggest Shelf Life month yet. January has only eight, so I will take that as an opportunity to relax just a bit.
Your favorite December article was The Blind Mind. I genuinely thought readers would feel I was phoning in my articles the last two weeks of the year as the last four were from and about personal experience rather than professional. I’m so glad you enjoyed it. I’ll be thinking about the topic and will revisit it in later articles, since it was of interest.
January News and Events
White Feminism by Koa Beck launches on January 5. I’m bookmarking this examination of the history of feminism by the former Jezebel EIC to check out as soon as I have an open spot for some nonfiction.
On January 6, Reedsy is offering a free course on Pacing: How to Write an Addictive Page Turner from editor, MFA, and former literary agent Anna Bierhaus. I think this will be a great class—and you can’t beat the price.
So this writing course is a little outside the Shelf Life wheelhouse, but I’m terribly interested in How to UX Your Writing, led by Sarah Stephens and hosted by IxDA Cincinnati. I want to learn more about UX writing and also on optimizing any digital content that I write for UX, so this is can’t miss programming for me.
On January 19, The Mask of Mirrors by M.A. Carrick is launching. I have been following this book closely for quite awhile and I’m excited to finally be thisclose to reading.
Speaking of M.A. Carrick, they’ll be in conversation with Eragon author Christopher Paolini at Mysterious Galaxy (virtually) on January 19 to talk about their new book! The event is free, and personalized signed books are available from Mysterious Galaxy.
On January 26, Samantha Shannon’s news book, The Mask Falling, launches. This is the fourth book in the Scion series that began with The Bone Season. Shannon is also author of The Priory of the Orange Tree, which I have been trying to start reading for approximately 8 million years.