23 Highlights from 2023
A new video, two viral essays, a weekend in London, friends, family, a toddler, and much more!
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Highlights from 2023
My plan at the beginning of 2023 was to Dream Big and Show Up.
Dreaming big means thinking outside the box, and being creative about what I can make out of my life. Showing up means being where I say I’m going to be, putting in the work, and being thoughtful about it.
My ‘goals’ for 2023 were to meditate more, improve my sleep, exercise more, write on a schedule, and improve in-person relationships. According to my preconceived ideas of what success would look like for these, I failed.
But zooming out a bit, this year was a huge success. I showed up, put in the work, and had a great time. Here are 23 of those highlights in no particular order. Let me know what the highlight of your 2023 was in the comments!
[1] Writing A Pilgrimage for Book People.
As far as writing goes, this is my crowning achievement from this year. I worked on this for months and months. I want to send a thank you again to everyone I mentioned in the essay who helped, everyone who found my blog through this essay, and everyone who read it, commented on it, and shared it. It was my first really viral essay and the one I’m most proud of so far.
A Pilgrimage for Book People
This essay was first published as a featured article on the Write of Passage website. If you like this, I have started a series about my mission to build the used bookstore of the future here at The Bookseller’s Register.
[2] Going to London with my wife.
One of my best friends got married in the English countryside and on the way there my wife and I spent three and a half days in London. London is super interesting and we hope to return. Here is a collage of some of my favorite pictures.
[3] Writing Do the Weirdest Thing that Feels Right.
I wrote this a month after A Pilgrimage for Book People. Unlike that, I wrote this in about forty minutes to clear my head, and it also went viral, this time unexpectedly into the stratosphere. So again, thank you to all who read, shared, and commented on this one.
Do the weirdest thing that feels right.
While agonizing over what to write last week, I tried to reverse engineer my writing wins. In the process, I discovered that the decision which separated my good writing from my bad writing expanded to my whole life, and was the dividing line between my triumphs and my regrets.
[4] Running a 5K.
I wasn’t fit, I wasn’t prepared, and I didn’t want to do it. I even got a flat tire on the day of—but I still Ubered to the race location and did it. It wasn’t a great time—hell, it wasn’t even a good time. But I did it. I plan to do more. Check out the full thread on Twitter here and see the last pictures here below.
[5] Watching Station Eleven (2021).
I read both the book Station Eleven and watched the TV show on HBO. It’s about the Traveling Symphony, a group of artists and musicians who travel around the Great Lakes area twenty years after a great plague has decimated the world population. I read the book first and thought the show was disappointing in the first episode or two, but it blew me away by the end of the ten-episode season.
It was beautiful, imaginative, funny, intriguing, compelling, and suspenseful. Plus it has a lot of my favorite tropes. There are stories within stories within stories. A huge part of the plot revolves around the staging and restaging of Hamlet and trying to figure out the origin of a mysterious graphic novel. There is a lot of implicit ane explicit discussion of the importance of making art in a crazy world.
If you fancy yourself an artist or someone who appreciates beauty, and you ever stop to think, what’s the point of making or appreciating art in such a crazy world? Or, if you like quirky sci-fi and you want something hopeful, then please take the time to watch this show.
[6] Reading A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.
I rediscovered how much I love to read long novels, and how similar fiction is to travel. This is a great novel about a group of people who find themselves thrown together during a trying chapter of India’s history. It inspired my most recent essay on the similarities between travel and fiction.
The Unlikely Link Between Travel and Fiction
Last week I was with a friend, lying next to him in a tent. He was smothered by his perceived failure, crushed by the caste system, falling short in performing his sacred duty, unable to protect his nephew from the ultimate indignity, sweltering in the rural Indian heat. In danger of attack from mosquitos, goondas, and blood infections alike, he sobbed …
[7] Visiting my sister’s family once a month toward the end of the year.
I’ve mentioned getting double-jaw surgery multiple times and I’m lucky that my sister is part of the medical team preparing me for that. So in preparation, I go to visit her and her family once a month. She lives in Kansas City, so it was nice getting out of Texas to somewhere with an actual Fall to play with her and my nephew (below) in the leaf piles.
[8] Shooting off a random tweet that went viral and then made it into James Clear’s newsletter.
This wasn’t something I meant to do but was super cool. I retweeted something I found interesting then 8,000 people liked it and 1,000 people shared it. The original tweet is linked here and pictured below:
Then a couple of weeks later, James Clear, author of Atomic Habits (2023’s #1 selling book on Amazon), included the tweet as a quote in his 3-2-1 Newsletter that goes out to over 2 million people. You can find the full newsletter on his website here, and this is what it looked like:
[9] Visiting New Mexico to see my Mom’s family (and a writer friend).
My family traveled to Albuquerque and Santa Fe to see my Mom’s family and hten I ran into a friend who was a writer there. I love New Mexico because it has such strong Spanish and Native American influences it feels different from anywhere else in the US. Here are four of my favorite photos from the trip.
[10] Visiting the Wakulla Springs State Park in Tallahassee, Florida by myself at the end of my work trip in January.
At the tail end of a trip I took for my day job, I decided to make good use of a few extra hours and visit a Florida state park in the Everglades. I had a blast, learned a lot, and it gave me a lot of ideas about how to organize my weekly newsletter moving forward. (This was also the first issue named “Castles in the Sky.”)
Castles in the Sky 25
Note from Charlie: I am renaming this Substack Castles in the Sky! If you want to see the rationale behind the new name, read it here. I will leave the old issues as is and keep up the numbered weekly issues. If you want to see the other big changes, go to
[11] Planning my buddy’s bachelor party.
This was a pretty chill weekend at a beach house until one pretty chill guy himself took too many mushrooms and it turned into a scene from a Hangover movie. Another guy who’d slept on the couch apparently hid his pistol in his boot next to the couch (we’re in Texas) and then went to smoke a cigarette outside.
The guy on mushrooms was walking around mumbling to himself about the ringing of the universe and we were just kind of laughing at him. Then we kept laughing at him when he sat on the couch and reached into the boot and we were going to keep laughing at him, thinking he would do some kind of funny “boots on his hands” bit or something but he just stood up with the pistol in his hand. We froze and he chambered the pistol and kept talking about the universe.
I moved quickly to disarm him and everything was OK. Needless to say, it was the longest ten seconds of my life, and the adrenaline spike probably shaved my life expectancy down a year or two. Otherwise, it was a great pretty chill weekend full of good food, great friends, music, fishing, and paintball.
[12] Watching Across The Spiderverse in theaters by myself on a random weekday matinee.
I’m including this for three reasons":
This is one of the first movies I’ve seen in a long time where it did something that I felt was new. Like, the animation did things I truly hadn’t seen before.
It was the first movie or show about a multiverse that made me care about the multiverse. For the first time, the stakes were the right size and the multiverse actually made sense and made me care about the characters. It didn’t just feel like a copout or lazy writing.
Finally, it’s one of my goals to get my work, lifestyle, and time management so dialed in that I can go see a movie in theaters alone during the workday once a week—and I finally achieved that once this year and this was the movie I saw.
Check out the trailer below. I strongly recommend both watching this movie and seeing a matinee alone as soon as you can.
[13] Reading All the Wrong Moves by .
This was a fantastic book that got me thinking that I should be a lot more honest and self-revealing in my writing. I bought both of Chapin’s online courses and plan to go through them. You can read the review I wrote of the book here:
Why Write Memoirs | Review of All the Wrong Moves by Sasha Chapin
A good memoir is entertaining, insightful, and relatable. A great memoir changes you because you see yourself in it. All the Wrong Moves by Sasha Chapin is a great memoir. It is nominally a book about a guy who becomes obsessed with chess. But to me, it’s a book about the profound, persistent awareness some people have that we a…
[14] Teaching my first independent online course.
For a few months, I was participating in a community of practice hosted by
on creating and running a cohort-based course. I used it to run a course on reverse outlining. We had a great time and I made a little bit of money. It was a lot of fun, I learned a lot, and it is probably something I’ll do again in the future. Plus, it opened my eyes to making money independently online, which made me start thinking about—[15] Turning on paid subscriptions for Castles in the Sky.
Thanks to some good advice from
I turned on paid subscriptions for Castles in the Sky. Having people sign up was very validating. There is big news coming in the next post on how Castles in the Sky will be evolving but let’s say for now I am grateful for all my subscribers and very thankful for those of you who are now my patrons, sponsoring my thoughts and words to the tune of $8 per month. Which reminds me:[16] Joining a new writer’s group.
I had a lot of small groups in the past that folded due to being too busy but I joined one which has been very supportive and helpful. I just want to shout out those lovely people now:
and . Please check out their stuff, including Oscar’s new short film, I’m Gonna Get You.[17] Launching The Bookseller’s Register.
Even though I took an inadvertent hiatus, the book business is going strong! I am glad I got back into it this year, and please be on the lookout for new and improved issues of The Bookseller’s Register soon, where I “learn the family business, curate news from the book industry, and celebrate books as the pinnacle of art and the foundations of civilization.” Catch up with all three issues so far here:
[18] Making a mast out of my home.
Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast.
-Kahlil Gibran
Originally, this one was “making a badass pot roast this one time,” but I realized that it looked weird and was a bit anti-climactic and small and not actually about the pot roast. You may remember from “Sandcastles and Wanderlust” linked below that one of my big goals in life is to balance my drive to be a a pillar of my community on the one hand and to be a globetrotting adventurer on the other.
Well, I did a few adventurous things so I felt good about that. But at one point over the year one of my Dad’s friends, who’s a lifelong bachelor, came to our house with my parents for our Friday night dinner. (My wife, my daughter, and I have dinner with my folks every Friday either at their place or ours.) That week I happened to make an outrageously good pot roast with roasted carrots and mashed potatoes.
He sent me a thank you card a week later telling me it was so nice to be welcomed into our home and it was the best homecooked meal he’d had in years. A few months later, one of my friends unfortunately got divorced. He is much happier now at the end of the year and has already met someone great for him, but he was able to stay with us for a few days and appreciated the stability.
Multiple times over the year my wife or I had other friends and family members who needed help or had a tough time stop by for a few hours or a day to hang out or regroup. My point is that I am grateful to have that kind of home life—that it is stable enough that it can not only be a haven for myself, but a point of rest and reference for the other loved ones in my life.
Sandcastles and Wanderlust
I hate the beach. I am what you might call fair-skinned. I get a mild sunburn on my fifteen-minute commute to work. To go to the beach, I need to gear up like an astronaut leaving an airlock. I’m also what you might call fastidious. I hate dirtiness. As opposed to messiness, which is when things are not in the right place, dirtiness is when things are u…
[19] Watching The Bear Season 2.
Season 2 of The Bear was even better than Season 1, but Episode 7 of Season 2, “Forks,” might be the most transcendent episode of TV I’ve ever watched. I hope to write an essay at length about this later, but I just want to share the recommendation for now.
[20] Dressing up as a 1920’s gangster for an event my Mom put on.
My Mom is very involved as a citizen historian and worked hard all year to put on an event for the local historical society. As part of it, my wife and I dressed up in costume for a 1920’s theme.
[21] Doubling my fiction output.
OK, so I’d only written two short stories before, but I wrote two more stories that I’m proud of (below). I plan on writing a lot more fiction in the future.
[22] Losing 30 pounds over the holidays.
I was originally scheduled to undergo double-jaw surgery in December 2023. It was unfortunately postponed (again) to Spring or Summer 2024. The surgeon suggested I lose weight in anticipation of the surgery in December but I was . . . ahem . . . less successful than I had hoped.
Intermittently losing and gaining weight is a drama that has been playing out in my life since early adolescence. I decided that since I was so unsuccessful in losing weight my way, I would try to do some new things and try to do some things I’ve dismissed in the past.
I will elaborate on what this means and what I plan to do in my “Looking Forward to 2024” post. But for now, I just want to celebrate that, by deciding to take big measures before the holidays started, six weeks later I’m the leanest I’ve been in ten years and I feel fantastic.
[23] Following my own advice and writing the weirdest thing that feels right.
There were a few times this year where I had some ideas about things to write that felt out of character at the time but were, looking back, some of my favorites. It started with the issue above where I went to Florida, but these are some of the others.
Those are my 23 highlights for 2023!
What were some of your the highlights of your 2023? The best content you came across, your personal wins and biggest lessons?
What were some of your the highlights of your 2023? The best content you came across, your personal wins and biggest lessons?
A few of my honorable mentions are re-reading a few Animorphs books on my phone so that I use social media less, reading books to my daughter, and I Think You Should Leave memes.
“I am grateful to have that kind of home life—that it is stable enough that it can not only be a haven for myself, but a point of rest and reference for the other loved ones in my life.”
That is true wealth. Happy for you my friend! And all the accomplishments you achieved last year.