I think Patrick “Pat” “P.T.” “Eric Filler” (etc.) Dilloway is dead.
This will come as a surprise to anyone with a small inkling at how exasperated he made me for a lot of the time I knew him in this blogging community. Don’t worry if you had no clue about that. If he’s dead, it literally can’t possibly matter anymore.
I met Pat during the 2012 Blogging A to Z Challenge. I chose his blog among the listed entrants because he was writing about a superhero book he’d written. For several years afterward I was a regular visitor to his blog, and my biggest blogging claim to fame is arguably successfully participating in his original box office challenge.
As the opening line suggests, Pat used a lot of aliases, and probably most of the people who knew him online or through his many books had no idea.
He went radio silent before the new year. His last post on his blog was at the start of December. There are bloggers who take breaks, but usually they’ll post about it. A lot of bloggers became considerably more sporadic over recent years, and many outright walked away. I didn’t expect Pat to do anything like that, or certainly not anytime soon. I thought he was just slowing down.
A post I saw when I tried to look up any possible activity elsewhere, on a Wordpress blog Pat maintained for Eric Filler, suggests he was battling cancer last year. He never mentioned this on his Dilloway blog.
All considered, if you’re dead, rest in peace, dude.
So New Directions finally announced its shortlist for its novel contest, and The Children’s Crusade wasn’t on it. I’m not overly surprised, but it would’ve been nice. I guess I’ve never pursued real publication seriously, and I’m about as far from the publishing world as you can get. They wouldn’t know what to do with me, y’know? But I love writing. I’ve got a huge backlog of material waiting to upload into new paperbacks, which, lately, I was kind of holding off on in the absurd case it might hurt my chances. While also releasing that twentieth anniversary edition of that one book (the physical copy of which I finally got in the mail!)…
It’s cool. In years past losing out on things like this put me in a terrible funk. I’m going to try not to let that happen. We’ll see!
The reward here was having written it. And knowing I’ve got plenty left in the tank.
Look at me actually keeping up with this in consecutive years! This time it's even more self-serving, as I also want to have content for this blog, which can sometimes seem a little neglected. Anyway!
MOVIES
My favorite movie of 2024 ended up turning out to be A Complete Unknown, which helped explain the rest of why Bob Dylan has been such a fascinating adult discovery for me, a little like if Yesterday really had explored one dude inexplicably writing a bunch of genius songs one after the other with no effort...because that's really what Bob Dylan's done all his life. Also heavily in the mix, Conclave, which pleasantly is another critically-acclaimed movie I also happen to have loved, which doesn't happen overly often these days.
BOOKS
My favorite book of the year was also, coincidentally, a critically acclaimed (read: Nobel Prize for Literature) work, Jon Fosse's Septology, which I read after learning about its dubbing, hoping to find another great work of literature, and I did. That was gratifying!
MUSIC
This one's kind of tough unless I cheat and just pick a song: Billy Joel's "Turn the Lights Back On."
My brother long identified himself as a huge Billy Joe fan, and by extension I listened to a lot of his music and then became a pretty big fan myself, which was immeasurably gratifying (apparently the word of the year) when he dropped this new song at the start of the year, a career statement unlike but similar to what Johnny Cash did with "Hurt." Brilliant video. Among albums from favorite artists, Vampire Weekend's Only God Was Above Us probably proved most satisfying, but I was really spoiled for new additions to my collection.
TV
Ghosts, the CBS version, continues to be my favorite show, but I did finally finished a complete watch for the original BBC version. I also caught up on 1883 and 1923, the Yellowstone prequels, and finally got to watch some of Disenchantment, the Matt Groening Netflix show that came and went, and I think deserves the same kind of cult following as Futurama.
WRITING PROJECTS
I wrote The Children's Crusade at the start of the year, which turned out to be, well, gratifying. I hope to write Collider this year and if I'm really ambitious And A Centaur Died. but certainly next year. It all depends on how things turn out! There were other things I wrote throughout the year, and plenty of things I'll tackle this year, too. 2024 was also a kind of 20th anniversary for my first novel, and I celebrated that by issuing a long-awaited new edition, which I'm still waiting on Amazon to ship the copies I've ordered. Kindle Direct Publishing has had a hardcover option for a couple of years now. I wonder if it's still a bit more complicated than Amazon thinks.
FAMILY
I was fortunate to again have two family vacation experiences in 2024, one once again with the Burrito and her ever-expanding family (new baby sister! new dog!), and then later a whole family reunion, which hadn't happened since 2015 (which, not incidentally, also marks this year as the decade anniversary of my mom's death, which is astonishing), in which I got to catch up with my nephews up in Maine, since I stayed with them for the trip.
WORK
The job was a series of unfortunate complications throughout the year, starting with an awful nasty experience I'm certainly not discussing here (even a personal writer's blog, for me, doesn't have room for such things), but happily, there were plenty of happy babies and other assorted young youth I had the privilege to spend time with, and during one of two rounds of inspections I got singled out for praise, so that was (you guessed it) gratifying.
