
By Howard Fielding. Offered under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
With a year of blogging and accounting for myself under my belt, the producer renewed me for another season.
Although ubiquitous today, thinking in terms of years and seasons is a relatively new concept. It probably dates back to the 1960s and ’70s, when I was an avid television viewer. The four TV networks — CBS, NBC, ABC, and PBS — would license studios like Paramount, Desilu, and United Artists to produce a pilot, and if it worked, then a series for a whole season.
Sometimes a series would be such a bomb that the network would pull it after the pilot or first episode and would replace it with another one. That happened with a couple of shows that I was planning to write about for TV Guide in 1979 — but that’s a story I’ll tell from my journals in the coming weeks.
A short season would last about 13 weeks (typical of a summer substitute like Patrick McGoohan’s “The Prisoner”). A full season was about 26 weeks, which would last from September to around March before entering reruns. With today’s multiplicity of media and independent producers, a season could be any number of episodes. Even Kindle Vella serial authors are publishing in terms of seasons.
For these weekly sessions where I review my blogging and writing seasons and episodes seem a logical model. So, after last week’s Year in Review, will I continue my “Prospectives” and look ahead at the year to come? Better yet, will I make resolutions as I did in the past?

I don’t think so. Not this time around.
For one thing, resolutions are pointless. They’re either something you can keep, and you’re probably doing them already, or something that you can’t. That means you set yourself up for disappointment and failure by making them.
In the spirit of seasons and episodes, here’s a sneak preview of some things that I hope will come about in 2023:
- Retro blog posts from 1979 will continue to explore my early life as a writer, including my first published short story, my first spiked assignment, and my first job in newspapers.
- “Harry Houdini and the Witch of Beacon Hill” will be sent off to a hybrid publisher and may be available by the end of the year.
- Another short nonfiction book on a different subject will be self-published by year-end to establish my credibility as an expert in that field.
- I’ll become a serial humorist by releasing a series of short fiction based on previously published material]=.
Will any of this actually happen? Or will our hero once again be dashed against the rocks as real life intervenes? Tune in every weekend for Season 2!
In case you missed it …
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Journeyman Journalist, 1979: A little gossip
Reading Time: 2 minutes Opportunity knocked once, then knocked a little harder. And then it just shrugged and walked away. Was it more than just gossip?
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Journeyman Journalist, 1979: A pain in the a**
Reading Time: 2 minutes Procrastination is seldom fatal, but that’s not a certainty. A heart condition, cancer, a serious infection — can be deadly.
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Journeyman Journalist, 1979: Giving thanks
Reading Time: 2 minutes One thing that’s still unchanged: My worries are really blessings. That’s good advice from a 24-year-old to himself a half-century later.
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Journeyman Journalist, 1979: Breathing easier
Reading Time: 2 minutes Smoke-free workplaces are far more common, even public policy, thanks to 50 years of the American Cancer Society’s Great American Smokeout.