Flops

My Megalopolis year.

By most metrics 2024 was not my year.

For starters, the two industries that have allowed me to make work and pay rent over the last decade simultaneously imploded. I had long considered myself resourceful for creating projects across many different mediums, but clever workarounds prove futile when we’re living through what has been dubbed a “media apocalypse.”

My bad year can’t only be attributed to macro economic trends, though. In February, when a production company expressed interest in hiring me to adapt a book into a screenplay, I threw myself into deep research for weeks. I finessed my pitch, solicited notes from friends, then, finally, presented my take. The production company liked it. “We’ll gather notes and circle back,” they said excitedly as we ended our Zoom. I never heard from them again. Around the same time, a documentary I’d been eager to make went stale when the subject, who I’d been chasing for the better part of a year, totally ghosted. I spent a whole month interviewing for a job I didn’t end up getting and got rejection letters from almost every place I submitted my work. I could go on, but it’s probably best for my confidence that I don’t.

After enduring this year of professional misfires, it can be humbling to read the annual “Best Of” lists that have been coming out in the last few weeks.

These are the round-ups that praise Anora as “sure-handed,” Say Nothing as “propulsive,” and tell me how Charli xcx’s brat is “oozing self-possession and confidence.” I’ve read how Tony Tulathimutte’s book Rejection “cleverly satirizes a heartless world” and Jess Shane’s podcast Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative is “dizzying and dazzling.”

To be clear, I’ve watched, read, and listened to all of the above projects and heartily agree. Big congrats to all involved. :)

But this year my attention has been drifting toward those other lists. The “Worst-Of” lists. The ones where you can find Madame Web and Joker: Folie a Deux. Sausage Party: Foodtopia and The Girls on the Bus.

On such lists, projects are “misbegotten,” “bizarrely dour,” and “totally devoid of any ability to justify its own existence.” (I’m neither linking these quotes nor identifying the projects to which they’re attributed as an act of love.)

Art is subjective. We know this, but we refuse to accept it. Instead we’ve trained ourselves to rank creative work on lists and have grown accustomed to assigning metric value to artistic products. Sonic The Hedgehog 3 has a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim has a 45%. What does this mean? That the former is twice as good as the latter?

Audiences—and I’m very much including myself here—have become capricious kings, lounging in our thrones as art lives and dies by the direction of our thumbs.

The way we gleefully jeer artistic flops is nothing new. But while seeing this has never felt good, this year it felt personal.

I’m sure The Brutalist is as transcendent as everyone says it is, but my 2024 felt way more Megalopolis.

Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project lost over $100 million

The irony is that I’ve never worked harder than I have this year.

I fastidiously prepped for meetings that ended up going nowhere. I woke up every day to write projects that could be years away from being seen—if they’re ever seen at all. All the while, furiously attempting to structure my days by obsessively attending midday classes at my local gym.

And still, my business manager recently sent me a worried email asking to discuss my job prospects for 2025.

I’m sure that a lot of love and care went into this year’s high profile misfires. I hope that their creators are still finding ways to be proud of themselves for making them—despite their inclusion on “Worst Of” lists and their scores on Rotten Tomatoes, Letterboxd, Goodreads, or any other platform that offers a numerical value for creative work.

I’m trying to see my year the same way.

Those meetings that went nowhere? Who knows what’ll happen down the road. Those writing projects I’ve been working on? I finished a screenplay and wrote the first draft of YA book. I wrote a few stories that I got to read at shows. My midday gym classes? I can now hold a plank for sixty seconds. (Jock!!)

In a world that can feel like a gladiator arena full of people that are happy to see us win but elated to see us fail, making any kind of creative work—on any scale—is one of the most subversive things we can do.

So, yes, if you measure my year by metrics like “money” and “jobs” and “returned emails,” my 2024 was a massive flop.

But if the metrics are “waking up” and “making work anyway” then maybe it wasn’t so bad.

Happy 2025, friends.

What I wrote this year.