Work & Achievement · A Decembers list
Everything you wrote and got out into the world
The term paper that came back with a comment you still remember. The newsletter piece nobody asked you to write. The manuscript that sat in a drawer for two years before you sent it anywhere.
This is the list for the things you finished and let go of. One line each, or more when a piece earned it.
Free to start. Private from the first word.
Where this list lives
This is a list in Decembers — the place a life gets written down one question at a time.
Decembers asks the questions no one thought to ask, keeps the answers in one permanent Chronicle, and holds them on one Timeline that reads in order. You answer. Decembers does the writing.
- Lists
- A list for every kind of life, and every turn one takes. Pick one and start answering.
- Timeline
- Your answers arrange themselves in order. Seeing a whole life laid out this way is something else.
- Inner Circle
- Not social media. The few people you name are the only ones it is ever shared with.
Begin with one list. The rest follows.
One line is enough
You remember the exact table where you wrote the last line. Put that down and the whole thing comes back — the deadline, the rejections, the person who read it first.
A finished piece leaves a record: a title, a date, a masthead, maybe a copy on a shelf. What it doesn't hold is the two years of Sundays it took, the editor who cut your favorite paragraph, the letter from a stranger who said it meant something to them. Those live only in you, and they fade faster than the ink does.
Nobody writes the story behind everything they published — that's a second book, and it never gets written. But one line does get written. The name of the piece, where you finished it, the thing you're still proud of. Add them as they come back to you, and over time you've kept the account of a working writer's life that no library catalog ever will.
How it works
- 01
Pick this list
It’s waiting, already written. There is no blank page to face.
- 02
Fill in what comes
A year, a line, a photograph. Five minutes or an hour.
- 03
Invite who was there
They add what you forgot. You decide what stays.
- 04
Share it, or don’t
One quiet page for your Inner Circle. No link, no feed.
What ends up on this list
The ones with your name on the cover
The book, the pamphlet, the report that went out under your name alone. These carry the most weight and the most memory — the years of drafts, the moment you held the first physical copy, the dedication page you agonized over. Give these room. One line won't cover a book you spent three years on.
The bylines and small pieces
The op-ed, the column, the article in a trade journal or church bulletin. Small in the record but sharp in memory — the first time a stranger recognized your name, the letter to the editor that argued with you. These are the pieces that taught you you could do it.
The work-for-hire and the buried credits
The grant proposal that got funded, the manual you wrote for the company, the chapter credited to a committee. Nobody remembers these were yours except you. Write them down before that knowledge goes with you — the sentence you slipped in that nobody caught, the deadline you beat by an hour.
By the kind of writing it was
- Academic
- Theses, dissertations, journal articles, and conference papers — the writing done under a discipline, with footnotes and a committee waiting.
- Journalism
- Bylines in newspapers and magazines, columns, and the piece that ran with your photo at the top for the first time.
- Books
- The novel, the memoir, the local history, the how-to — anything with a spine, whether a house printed it or you did.
- Trade & technical
- Manuals, textbook chapters, white papers, and industry articles read by the people who needed them and no one else.
- Occasional
- The eulogy printed in the program, the wedding toast someone asked for a copy of, the poem in the anthology.
- Work-for-hire
- Grant proposals, reports, speeches, and ghostwritten pieces that carried someone else's name or none at all.
Other lists you may like
Start with any one of them. Every answer lands on the same Timeline.
Begin
A record of everything you made that outlived the making of it
Every writer forgets more than they remember. Start with the one piece you'd want read at your table tonight, and put down where you finished it.