I’ve officially deleted my TwitterX account! It’s a total shitshow over there, and I don’t intend to go back; Bluesky all the way for now.
While the day job tends to slow down somewhat in December, it doesn’t halt completely, and I can only devote so much time during the work day to stuff that I’d rather be doing instead. To keep it low energy, I’ve primarily been doodling, but also working on getting some writing done; if I want to leap into the thick of it in the new year, it’ll help to have some scripts ready. I’ve laid out a bunch of things that I want to accomplish in 2024 in terms of art, and a lot of them are comics (naturally). The Fifth Ace Showcase will of course be making a return, and I’m also aiming to work on a few one-shot greyscale zines that I can print for cheap; there are conventions on the horizon, and I’d like to have a few small things to sell, even if I don’t have a table of my own.
How much of anything I’ll get done also depends on what kind of schedule I’ll be able to construct; it’s always the same thing with New Year’s resolutions: you hold up the life-changing schedule for two or three weeks and then it all collapses. In my case, I’m going to be taking into account a bunch of things that will arise with the new living space. For a start, with my longer commute, I’ll have to leave the house earlier in the morning, and I’ll be getting home later, so that will chew up a potential extra hour of my time (at least until I find a new job closer to home). On the other hand, I tend to be waking up at around 4am these days, so that leaves a little extra time to do stuff in the morning; the cats have trained me well. It’ll be a chance to potentially try some exercise challenges again, maybe get a little bit of extra artwork or writing done before breakfast; the only reason I’m not doing it now is because of lack of space. Once I have my own desk again and some room to move, the possibilities are endless.
Additionally, I’ve been looking into meal preparation strategies to cut down on time spent making food; we don’t have the biggest fridge/freezer, but with some proper stackable containers we could store quite a few ready-made meals, so I may start taking Sundays to whip up a few large meals that I can divvy up and pick from throughout the week. I don’t have any major meal plans in mind yet, but the main reason for doing this would be to discourage impulse snacking and take-aways; a lot of nights I come home and just don’t feel like cooking, so having something ready and waiting in the fridge would prevent me from spending money that I don’t have. I found a great instructional video for homemade tortilla wraps that would provide me with a week’s worth of lunches; I also learned that I’ve been folding my wraps completely wrong for years, it was a full blown epiphany! Plus, with less time and energy taken up by cooking, I can (hopefully) find it in me to spend my evenings more creatively and get more art done.
All of this is just planning, of course; no plan survives first contact with procrastination, so we’ll see how long I’ll be able to hold to it come January. In the meantime, we still have to move into the new space before all this can happen. Some team of ours won a Sportsball trophy of some kind, so in recognition of that, we have the day off tomorrow; we’ll be using the long weekend to get some cleaning done and start moving the non-essentials out of our current space. We’ve been slowly emptying out our cupboards and freezer of long-forgotten foodstuffs so that we’ll have less perishables to cart away, and once some of the stored furniture is in place, we can clear out the rest of our hoard, starting with the board games and ending with the cats. With any luck, we should be home by Christmas… nothing bad ever came of anyone saying that, right?
Anywho, wish us luck; next Thursday will likely be the last blog post for the year, as I’m planning on using the week between Christmas and New Year’s to spend time with family and not think too hard about anything else while I still can.
Ciao for now.