Yes, it’s a month late for Gregorian Calendar New Year, and a week early for Lunar New Year.

This is about the blog posts you didn’t see from me in the second half of 2015. I’ve been a whole lot busier on Twitter; I’m currently learning to Storify so I can feature some of those conversations. Meanwhile, there are drafts for a lot of blog posts on my Evernote folder for blog posts. Some of them you will never see in their original form, including some reviews.

Here’s why.

I look back at those posts and their false cheer makes me sick to my stomach. Last year I dealt with a whole lot of bad-faith people in SFF fandom, even as I saw my mentor through her final passage out of life.

She was a civil rights veteran who died in poverty. I paid her veteran’s pension. That didn’t prevent her dying 20 years early due to years of doing the work of the just, which mostly doesn’t carry health benefits.

There’s a memorial service yet to be held, and I haven’t been able to do that. Because there’s not much I can say to anybody (beyond the small circle of those who actually did show up) besides “Where the fuck were you?” or “Yeah, I know what she’d have to say about your track record.”

I could have done with the help, really. But I had the honor of being her good luck. She had rock-solid faith that when you serve the universe, it comes around and helps you. So I’m making that act of faith myself.

The cool feathered shadow of the Angel of Death is an amazing corrective to fears of merely mortal evil. As my great-aunt memorably put it:

Having been nose-to-lack-of-nose with the Reaper more than a few times in the last years, I am done with humoring people who don’t back up what they say. I am done with people who disappear other folks and then want cookies as “allies.” See #AccessibleCons for just one example. Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has been U.S. law for over two decades, and yet SFF con-runners still think the law doesn’t apply to them. They can’t manage the most basic, 101 accommodations for folks with visible disabilities, let alone those with chronic pain, hidden disabilities, or any of the plethora of conditions that exile people to the outer darkness of Not Really Human.

So a fourth New Year’s resolution:

I will tell the truth. I absolutely will not kiss ass or make nice to people just because they’re in a position of power. Having spent 30 years in Minnesota, I know that Nice frequently masks the abyss.

Ugly things happened in my first forays into SFF fandom, both in the late 1980s and now. Go away for 25 years, come back, and nothing’s different except that the ones on the shit end are now swapping stories thanks to the internet. Those witnesses are getting vicious pushback, because this could be the End Times for the universal rule of whitedude mediocrity.

So I’m going to talk about some of those, because I’m really really REALLY done pretending that we’re all friends here.

This year’s goal: tell the truth.

I’m going to die but I sure as hell don’t want to die a liar.