2018 Retrospective

A little late, but what do you want, it feels like it’s still a week ago. Let me start by looking at the 2017 retrospective, specifically what I’d hoped to complete this year:

• Released Darmenzi, as I’d planned. It’s available as an ebook on Smashwords and, as I’d wanted to, I looked into a different physical copy publishing site than Createspace because I wanted to leave Amazon entirely, which I have, I haven’t gone to Amazon at all probably all year! So I made the paperback of Darmenzi through Lulu.com, and I think it worked out well. I’ll probably use it for Wandering Fortunes in about 47 years when I finish it.
• I started Odemon, as I’d planned, and though it was daily the first half of the year, for certain reasons I gave up on that and made it three times weekly–usually. Still, I’ve kept up on it, and did a look back at the Odemon of this year on social media recently.
• I’ve kept up on my Mastodon account and basically have written stuff on Mastodon then copied and pasted it over on Twitter. I actually abandoned the Cloudy Cuckoo Cosmos Twitter account because I wanted to leave Twitter, but the way Mastodon works with sharing kind of made it harder to do it there and I eventually abandoned the Mastodon Cloudy Cuckoo Cosmos account. Maybe someday if I’m popular enough for people to pay attention, but probably not.
• I got a Ko-fi. I pay attention to it less than Patreon but I try to keep both updated. This lets me use Ko-fi for rewards that would be a one-time thing instead of a monthly thing, like mailing copies of books.
• Posted stories, wrote stories, didn’t really submit stories too much to publications because I didn’t have any for it but near the end of the year I did and I’ve started doing that again.
• I did continue Wandering Fortunes! Things are moving along at a steady pace with it. The Pokecomic… not so much. Apparently in 2017 I did about 50 comics, 2018… barely over ten. That doesn’t mean it’s abandoned, in fact I have a comic I’ve held onto for several months now and just have been waiting until I get back into it, but the problem is I have several projects and it’s more or less the least-important one. That said replaying Pokemon Moon made me want to get back to the comic so we’ll see how it goes this year.
• Wait what? Recording on the Darmenzi audiobook had been done before 2018 even started??? That’s depressing because NO recording has been done since. Various reasons have resulted in it being hard to get it started on, but things are clearing up so hopefully something can be ready to show off before the year anniversary of the book’s release.
• I got a freelance job! I was doing some organizing of levels for a mobile word game which I started around May, did that for a couple months and when it was done they had a new job for me to do. That lasted all the way until December; since then things changed and I’m no longer doing it, so I’m back to looking for a new job. Now that I’ve done something maybe I won’t feel so panicky about it.

Other accomplishments include the yb_ebooks project, which has consisted of me dumping a huge amount of text from the half-decade or so of writing my friends and I did in the old Yoshi Bodyguards fan universe we accidentally created. The bot was set up by my friend, while I’ve been going through all the text and stuff and putting it in place for the bot to access. It’s ranged from fun to mind-numbing, especially when I go through stuff I wrote over ten years ago. It’s weird to call it an accomplishment though because it’s kinda pointless. That said, I also started planning a secret project with some old friends. Will it go anywhere? We’ll find out!

So what do I want to accomplish in 2019?

• Continue work on Wandering Fortunes. In terms of posting it online I should get to around the three-quarters part of the story, so 2020 should see the completion of it. I actually hope to finish editing it before the year’s end, though, and if I can do that, begin writing the fourth novel. Considering I wrote Wandering Fortunes like 5 or 6 years ago, I’m kind of excited to start a new novel.
• Continue Odemon; at the rate of 3 a week I should get through about 150 more. As Pokemon gen 8 may release next year I may find a lot more to go through before I’m done. I also do want to continue the Pokecomic, though ten comics might be about what I finish.
• It would be really nice to get all my novel notes transferred to wiki format this year! I don’t know if that’s likely but I’ll keep chipping away until it’s all in there, at which point I can finally start writing new notes again.
• I mentioned the audiobook, right? I really hope work on it can get started for real, before it’s been so long since Darmenzi released that it feels weird to release an audiobook version. Experience on that should help for if an audiobook of Wandering Fortunes is created.
• Get another freelance job so I don’t go broke halfway through the year!
• Finish a few more short stories that I’d be willing to submit to a publication, and maybe get one of these actually accepted! That’d be awesome! There’s also at least one short story I’ll be posting on this website in 2019, but that’s for later.

I think that’s about it. Let’s all make 2019 the most adequate year on record!

EDIT: OH FIG I FORGOT ONE MORE GOAL FOR 2019! I actually want to start writing articles on this website. I know, I know, it’s something I’ve said a lot before. But what I’m thinking is just, each week I’ll think about the writing-related stuff I’ve done and come up with some little article to talk about it. I kind of did that without meaning to a little while ago–I have an article idea from when I was working on some novel notes. I’m a bit behind on work right now so it might be a bit before I get to that but that at least will come; the rest, well, we’ll see. No promises.