rynling | Entries tagged with resolutions

In 2020...

I read 125 books.
I read 137 graphic novels.
I read 120 manga in English and Japanese.
I read 178 self-published zines, minicomics, and fanzines.
I watched 15 movies.
I finished 13 video games.
I posted 88 new drawings.
I made 136 posts on my personal blog.
I commissioned 32 comics and illustrations.

Most of these numbers are down from the previous year. It turns out that the pandemic did not make me more productive. Imagine that!

Earlier this year I set a goal for myself to be more selective about the media I engage with and not waste my precious time (and money) on things I don’t enjoy, and I guess I succeeded. I’d like to continue that trend and actually consume fewer books, manga, and so on in the coming year.

The one area I experienced growth was the frequency with which I was able to post relatively polished pieces of art. Going from 60 posts in 2019 to 88 posts in 2020 meant that I went from posting one piece a week to posting three pieces every two weeks. I’m going to be honest and admit that this required a lot of work, especially since I’m still teaching myself relatively basic skills.

The way social media operates is that anything you post becomes more or less irrelevant after 12 hours, and the resulting pressure to be constantly productive isn’t healthy or sustainable. Still, at this stage of my artistic development, it’s nice to get immediate feedback and then be able to move on to the next thing quickly.

During the next year, I want to continue to dedicate myself to pushing my skill to the next level while figuring out how to work with better attention and efficiency. If possible, I want to be able to post finished pieces twice a week in 2021. I also want to expand the range of subjects I’m able to draw and spend more time working on backgrounds, landscapes, and interiors.

My resolutions for 2020 were to publish my book about comics, somehow find a way to leave my horrible job at George Mason University, and move to Philadelphia so that I could actually live with my spouse without anyone having to commute across a continental landmass two or three times a week.

I managed to do all of these things! During a pandemic! Nice!!

I had a few other resolutions, but most of them fell by the wayside, mainly due to said pandemic.

Still, my art went from (this) to (this), which is very fucking cool.

I published two zines of horror-themed flash fiction, one in April and one in October, and I ended up selling more than a hundred of copies of each zine on Etsy – with a lot of positive reviews and repeat buyers! I was able to exhibit at the Philly Zine Fest this year, and a few local bookstores in Philadelphia and Baltimore stocked copies of my zines. Sweet!

I also started submitting short fiction to magazines. I haven’t gotten anything published yet, but I’m getting a better sense of the market. I was accepted as a writer to a handful of original and fandom zines, though, so I know my work is good. I just have to keep writing and improving my craft and submitting stories.

Finally – and this is such a big deal to me – I started writing my first original novel!

Because of my success with various projects this year, I’m starting to realize that maybe I don’t need to worry so much about gatekeepers. The work I do is interesting and original, and I’d like to think that it’s only getting sharper and more creative with each passing week.

The most important thing, however, is that I’m enjoying my work for the first time in a long time.

When I think about where I was at the end of last year, I’m honestly like, Bitch I can’t believe you lived like that. The timing of the pandemic could not have been worse for me, and I can’t say that I was able to land on my feet after making such an enormous leap of faith, but I’m in a much better place.

(7) Reprint my zines and sell them for actual money.

I’ve allowed everything on my Etsy store (here) to sell out, and as of this morning I only have two zines and a handful of stickers left. In 2020, I’d like to make a few more edits to my zines and reprint them. When I do, I’m going to keep track of all the expenses and figure out a price point that ensures I’m no longer losing money with each sale. What this probably means is that I’ll charge $5 per zine. I’m also going to start charging for shipping. Etsy doesn’t make this easy, so figuring out how it’s supposed to work is going to be a challenge.

(8) Reprint my business cards.

Somehow, in 2020, I managed to run out of business cards by including one with each zine order from Etsy. I should probably edit them to reflect my creative work and active social media before reprinting them.

(9) Create a section on my website for creative publications.

I need to figure out a good way to do this, since it’s the majority of what I do now. I should probably also update my bio to reflect this.

(10) Start mentioning my Patreon on Twitter.

I have a creator account on Patreon (here) that I use to post short artist’s statements on my writing, comics, and illustrations. With a small number of exceptions (which involve timed releases of the work I’ve submitted to zines), everything is completely free and open and accessible. I’ve been updating this account fairly regularly – usually two or three times a week – during the past year, and I think I’m ready to make it a bit more public.

(3) Switch the web browsers on my phone and iPad to Firefox.

It’s going to be annoying to have to re-enter all my passwords for everything over the next few days, but I went ahead and did this. I’m not paranoid about web security, especially since 95% of what I do online is to double-check dates on Wikipedia and look up Korok seed locations, but fuck Chrome and Safari. You can’t delete the apps, but I cleared all the history and cookies.

(4) Create a page on Linktree and post it on my Instagram bio.

Despite my distaste for anything even remotely related to Facebook, I was surprised by how much engagement my account on IG has gotten during the past year, so why not. Since it takes less than ten minutes, I went ahead and made a Linktree page (here).

(5) Finally play Root Letter.

I’ve heard interesting things about this visual novel, and it’s been at the top of my “games I’ve been meaning to play” list since a North American version was released in 2019. It was recently on sale on the Nintendo Switch store (here), so I went ahead and downloaded it to my console.

(6) Participate in the 2021 Sketchbook Project.

This is another thing that’s discounted right now (here), so I went ahead and ordered my sketchbook for the next series. I think the likelihood of anyone ever looking at my work is slim to none, but having my sketchbooks professionally digitized and catalogued in an actual library makes me feel special and important. I’ll take what I can get.

I get the feeling that everyone is losing their minds right now, and I am no exception. It's difficult to make plans for the future when I have trouble imagining a future even existing in the first place. I'm doing my best, though. This is what I have so far:

(1) Delete Facebook.

I actually just went ahead and did this.

(2) Buy a cute Halloween costume for my dog.

Probably from Hachicorp. I'm thinking of (this one).

And I know what you're thinking, but listen. It's never too early to plan for Halloween.

I just told a friend to "follow their heart" when it comes to real estate. I understand that this seems abstract and overly sentimental, but I was dead serious. In fact, I was so serious that I think I should probably follow my own advice.

My dream is to move to the country and start a combination puppy farm + fungus-based organic body disposal service. If "the country" doesn't work out, then I will settle for Cleveland, where I hear you can buy a house for the price of a VCR. I will use this as a front for my actual work, which will involve writing monster romance and Legend of Zelda fanfiction.

I have written and been rejected for so many grants during the past five years that I think I'd like to write a grant for this. Specially, I'm going to write a grant for the National Endowment for the Humanities.

You may think I'm joking, but let me assure you, I'm absolutely not.

My main goal for this year is to do whatever it takes to get myself to a better place.

I wouldn't consider myself depressed - not by any stretch of the imagination - so this is difficult to explain. I have so much joy and ambition in my life, and I'm surrounded by wonderful and supportive friends. That being said, I'm so tired all the time that every little thing hurts, and I'm actually dealing with a lot of big things, like harassment at work and online hate crimes.

At some point during the past five years, I somehow managed to find myself in a place where I'm not just unrelentingly exhausted but also in such constant pain that any joy or happiness may as well not exist at all. As a result, I've started to have physically debilitating panic attacks as a response to ongoing toxic situations. I've done everything a person is supposed to do in order to cope with chronic anxiety, but I think what I really need to do is be more aggressive about removing myself from toxic situations.

My primary response to harassment has been to make myself as transparent as possible. I feel like, if I don't ask for help or bother anyone or rely on anyone's assistance or make myself noticeable in any way, and if I devote so much of my life to being good at my job that no one can find fault with me, then somehow people will stop being mean to me. This wasn't just the case for my professional life, but for my creative life and friendships as well, and I feel like I'm becoming invisible.

Something I'd like to devote more attention to this year is actually connecting with other people. I'm not yet sure what this will entail, but I'm going to make time to figure it out.

These aren't a set of resolutions, exactly, but this is where I would like to be by the end of the year:

(1) I want to quit my job.
(2) I want to move to Philadelphia.
(3) I want my first book to be in my hands.
(4) I want progress on my second book to be well underway.
(5) I want to be in an MFA program.
(6) I want a corgi.

It might also be nice to change my name, but that's complicated.

Everything else is completely within my reach.

It feels weird to imagine myself being happy, but I think I can get used to it.

Make another zine with short creepy fiction.

And figure out something clever to call it that isn’t “Ghost Stories 2.”

Make another Legend of Comics zine.

And maybe put up pre-orders on Tumblr so that I can take sketch requests?

Write (at least) three pieces of unapologetically horrible smut.

I’m aware that this makes me sound like a dinosaur, but I miss the days when attractive people could just bang each other and it didn’t always have to be political. I just created an alias on AO3 to post my terrible bad wrong smutfic.

Respond to the comments people left on my Zelda meta.

Maybe to the tune of one a week? This seems about my speed these days.

Leave at least two comments on other people’s fic every month.

I know this seems like a low bar, but listen. This will be like twenty more comments than I left last year.

Read one cheap and trashy grocery store romance novel a month.

And do artistic studies of the covers!!

Spend at least twenty minutes playing a (new to me) video game every day.

I hear trying new things and not infinitely replaying Zelda keeps your mind sharp.

Post at least five 2k-word essays to Medium.

Last year I put a lot of work into improving my research, structure, and editing. I still enjoy writing essays, but I’m done with academia. I think good scholarly work should be free, accessible, searchable, and illustrated... and that I should get paid (even if it’s just a token amount) for writing it. I don’t know much about Medium as a venue, but I’ll try to give it my best shot this year.

I wrote creative fiction on a total of 241 days in 2019.

I somehow managed to meet the

getyourwordsout "Journeyman" writing habit challenge (writing on 240 days of the year) despite the fact that I hardly wrote anything creative during the first four months of 2019.

What can I say, I was recovering from a serious suicide attempt while trying to submit both a book manuscript and my tenure file by the end of April. That shit was intense.

Setting those first four months aside, I worked on creative writing an average of 24.25 days a month. Every day would be ideal for me – writing is the part of my day I look forward to the most – but teaching, travel, and conferences take a lot out of me, and sometimes it’s hard to be fully human when I get home at night.

In terms of wordcounts, who even knows, really.

Since AO3 keeps statistics, I can say that I wrote the first 40,000 words of a fanfic novel, plus about 40,000 words of shorter pieces. On top of that, I wrote a lot of original fiction, but that’s difficult to measure in terms of wordcounts since it’s mostly still in drafts. Although it’s academic nonfiction, I also formally published about 30,000 words of writing this year, and my book manuscript is a little less than 70,000 words (which is normal for a first book my field).

And then there’s everything else, including a whole hell of a lot of blog posts across various platforms.

I’m not interested in comparing myself to other people, especially since many people who consider themselves to be writers tend to be on an entirely different level of productivity than I am. Still, I think it’s been a decent year for me, all things considered.

Actually, you know what. Let’s be real: This year was shit, and I’m happy it’s over.

I have high hopes for next year, though. May 2020 bring better health and lots of good creative energy!

And also... May the new year bring with it less of a compulsion to be "productive" and more of a steady satisfaction in work that makes me happy.

I read 149 books.

I read 138 graphic novels.

I read 300 self-published zines, minicomics, and fanzines.

I read 89 manga in English.

I read 44 manga in Japanese.

I read 57 dōjinshi.

I finished 19 video games.

I commissioned 32 comics and illustrations.

I posted 60 new drawings to Tumblr.

I made 84 posts on my professional blog.

I made 6 posts on my book review blog.

.

My reading habits have remained more or less steady, but I managed to channel a bit more of my writing time into professional venues. In the meantime, I’ve started to become more confident with visual art, but it’s still an uphill battle. If nothing else, I was successful in my resolution to commission less art from other people and make more of my own instead.

I want to be a better plant parent.

I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me, but sometimes plants die. At the beginning of the year, I was like, What is happening to my beautiful children?!?!?, completely failing to take into consideration the fact that this is the first time in my entire life that I’ve lived in the same physical location long enough for my plants to mature. I released my geriatric plants into the wild, gave the ones that got too large for me to handle to people who had a more appropriate space to keep them, and repotted the rest.

I want to play more video games!

I sure did spend two hundred hours on another playthrough of Breath of the Wild, not to mention an additional one-hundred-plus hours on Final Fantasy XII. I lost momentum after that and played like maybe the opening hour of a handful of smaller indie games that never succeeded in capturing my attention. Instead of investing time and energy into new games, I compulsively played Ocarina of Time from start to finish four times in a row. I’m not sure this counts as meeting the resolution, but I’ll let it pass.

I'd like to archive all my old Legend of Zelda meta on AO3.

Done.

I want to express appreciation to more writers through Kofi.

I did, but only to the tune of about one donation per month. Not that many writers have Kofi. I wrote a long post about this on Tumblr about a month ago, for what it’s worth.

I am going to start and finish reading House of Leaves.

This pretentious piece of garbage isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, but I read every godawful word of it.

I don’t feel like I accomplished much during the past twelve months in terms of quantifiable objectives, but I do feel like a different person than I was at the beginning of the year. I was in a very dark place for most of 2018, and this year has mostly been about trying to find my way out. I’m not sure what to say, except that I’m getting there.

(1) Draw fan art for three of my favorite manga.

I think it would be cool to draw the art in the style of the manga. The manga I’d like to do fan art for are: Yotsuba&!, xxxHolic, and Witch Hat Atelier.

(2) Draw illustrations based on three of my favorite books from 2019.

I’d like for this to be an opportunity to do more backgrounds, even if they’re simple. The books I’d like to create illustrations for are Woman World, Gideon the Ninth, and The Memory Police.

(3) Draw one “aesthetic object” every month.

The goal is to expand my range and play with different color palettes. The objects I’d like to draw are:

Jan – Tamagotchi device (guess what I just bought myself)
Feb – tea cup with sweet apple tea
Mar – Nintendo Switch Lite
Apr – sakura Kit-Kats
May – Wind Waker baton
Jun – fūrin wind chime
Jul – pig-shaped Citronella incense burner
Aug – Saria’s ocarina
Sep – terrarium
Oct – Chandelure (a ghost-type Pokémon)
Nov – bioluminescent mushrooms
Dec – mistletoe

(4) Draw one “Ganondorf and flowers” picture every two months.

You’d think I’d be tired of this theme, but my bullshit persists. The pairings of flowers and Ganondorfs (Ganondorves?) I’d like to draw are:

a – Ocarina of Time Ganondorf and sunflowers (ambition)
b – Wind Waker Ganondorf and hyacinths (regret)
c – Twilight Princess Ganondorf and ivy (fidelity)
d – Hyrule Warriors Ganondorf and dahlias (manipulation)
e – Cadence of Hyrule Ganondorf and amaryllis (self-confidence)
f – Rehydrated Ganondorf and lotus flowers (transformation)

(5) Make weekly “The Demon King” comics for Instagram.

I am so excited about this! The goal is to get better at inking and figure out how to put down color quickly. I’m probably going to start off slow as I refine the character designs, but the story has been more or less writing itself.

(6) Actually do Inktober this year??

We will see???? I have a few ideas about what this will entail and how it will happen, but let it suffice to say that there will need to be a lot of prep work. Also, I’m going to do a lot of experimenting with gold ink in advance so that I will be 100% ready to shine when the time comes.

ETA: On the day after I posted this, it was announced that "Inktober" has been registered as someone's intellectual property, so scratch that I guess.

> I am going to start and finish reading House of Leaves.

I finished House of Leaves more than a month ago, and I still can't figure out anything nice to say about it. I read every single word, including every single word in every single "citation," and not one of these words was any good.

Honestly, I think I'm kind of done with books written by straight men.

There are a few exceptions, but I'm starting to feel like male authors I haven't whitelisted need to be vetted by an expert panel of at least three people who aren't straight men themselves.

I am going to start and finish reading House of Leaves.

This will be the third time I've attempted to read the damn book, but now I have a game plan:

First, I will read the main text, ignoring everything else.

Second, I will read the footnotes, ignoring everything else.

Third, I won't even look at the appendices until I finish reading everything else, and then I'll only read them if I decide that I want to.

I actually admire the structural concept of House of Leaves. One of the main reasons (tbh probably the only reason) I went to grad school and got a PhD is because I genuinely enjoy reading academic writing, and I wish more people structured their fiction like academic writing - or rather, wrote academic books and articles that are entirely fiction.

(One day I will do this myself. I think about it all the time when I'm writing articles and book chapters. Like, what if I just started making things up and went from there? Also, when someone drags me to a museum, I always get an irrational urge to give a "guided tour" based on facts that I invent on the spot, and one of these days I will find a museum friend who doesn't immediately stop me after they figure out what I'm doing.)

(People don't appreciate this about professors, by the way. I could make up literally any garbage I wanted to, put it on a PowerPoint slideshow, give a lecture about it, and then write an actual exam testing students on it. Now that I'm on the other side of the desk, I'm beginning to suspect that a lot of professors do this without thinking, and no one catches them partially because they're considered to be "experts" but mostly because there's very little oversight in most American universities. I don't teach things things that I make up because I have a healthy sense of professional ethics, but sometimes the temptation is strong.)

Anyway, the problem with House of Leaves is that it takes an interesting concept and runs it into the ground in the most obnoxious way possible. I therefore want to finish the book not just because I want to see how it ends but also because I want to study a cautionary example so I won't fuck up the sort of story I want to write.

I want to express appreciation to more writers through Kofi!

I understand why AO3 doesn't allow mentions of commissions or links to donation websites...

( Elizabeth Minkel, who is an interesting person and a boss writer, has a great piece about this on The Verge, by the way.)

...but I also think the double standard regarding money and fandom labor is stupid. This Tumblr post puts it nicely:

That’s why I write. That’s why, even if I got paid, I would still write with the same inspiration and dedication. Because a) it’s me paying it forward in the universe to bring someone else a second of joy and b) I can’t function without writing.

But I also can’t live on giving away my work for free. A lot of writers are forced to give up fandom entirely if they want to publish anything they’ve written, or they just stop entirely because they become too busy working a real job (or jobs, given the economy) and there’s no time left for the things they enjoy doing.

Erasing the stigma of fanwriters being paid is more important than some notion of “hm, did the writer really enjoy writing this or are they just trying to make some quick cash.”

At the moment I have complicated feelings regarding reading and writing fanfic, and I've always had reservations about giving money to people I'm friends with or share a fandom with. Still, if someone is posting writing that I enjoy, and they seem to be doing it professionally, and I don't know them personally, and I've read, like, their entire blog, then it doesn't feel weird to send some appreciation their way. A good example of what I'm talking about is Livvy Plays Final Fantasy on Tumblr, whose FFXII Zodiac Age playthrough has been making me very happy for the past month or so. I also enjoy POMEmag, and I don't mind occasionally sending love their way either.

I fucking hate Patreon, and that hatred is deep and multifaceted, so a part of this resolution is to try to figure out a chill and easy way of supporting people that doesn't make me uncomfortable. This resolution is partially about supporting fandom writers, but it's also about wading through my own stupid bullshit to figure out why certain types of interactions within fandom feel so weird to me.

I don't think Tumblr is dying or anything, but the site's bungled implementation of its adult content ban scared the hell out of me. I write most of my posts in Word documents before I cut and paste the text onto Tumblr, but I've done all of the subsequent editing on the Tumblr posts, not the original documents, and I'd prefer not to lose my work. The online harassment I've experienced has dimmed my enthusiasm for writing longposts and answering asks, so I haven't really written anything more than a shitpost since 2017, but I'd like to archive all my old meta on AO3.

I'm not sure how this will work. Like, should I have a "story" be a meta topic, and then each "chapter" be a single post? If so, do I post these "chapters" in chronological order, or should I try to edit them into a more cohesive argument? What should I do if I'm responding to a chain of other people's posts, or if the most interesting thing about my post is someone else's response to it? Should I include images; and, if so, where will I host them?

Anyway, I'll figure this out over the summer. I'm planning a trip to London in May that isn't so much a vacation as it is a writing retreat, and I'll probably get started then.

I want to play more video games!

I tend to get obsessed with one game and play it for hundreds of hours. For most of 2017 and 2018, that game was Breath of the Wild, and it’s currently Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age. Since there are only so many hours in the day and only so many days in the year, this means that I don’t play many new games, which is exacerbated by the fact that I really enjoy replaying older games.

This year I’d like to set time aside to play games I’m interested in but don’t play because I feel like I’ve already exceeded my quota of fun by staying up until two in the morning filling in rows of a character’s license grid (or collecting Koroks or, you know, whatever). I also have an irrational compulsion to finish games even if they stop being fun, which means I’m unlikely to pick up a new game unless it’s a #1 Top Tier Indie Classic That Requires No Time Commitment. I’d like to get past this and try new things!

I’m limited by the fact that I refuse to play games on Steam, but I still have a short list of games I’d like to try now that they’re starting to be released on the Nintendo Switch, like Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery and Kentucky Route Zero. During the past year the University of Minnesota Press started putting out fantastic and inexpensive paperback monographs on games and gaming culture that have veered away from the pretentious “Videogames As One Word™: I Am A Straight White Man” genre that currently characterizes the majority of academic writing on games and have instead focused more on broader strands of literary and Media Studies criticism. Aubrey Anable’s Playing with Feelings is a good example of the sort of interesting work that’s coming out in the series, and reading books like this makes me want to sit down and play every single game under discussion. Saying that scholarship has made me want to play games is peak nerd, and I am ashamed of myself, but still.

Video games! Let’s play them in 2019!!

I want to be a better plant parent.

My problem isn't that my plants die. On the contrary, they're all flourishing. Some of them have gotten really big, and I just... *sweats nervously* ...Nobody prepared me for this and I don't know what to do about it?

That's what she said, I know, but listen. Most larger pots are meant to be placed outdoors, meaning that they have drainage holes that leak directly onto the ground. I live in a fifth-floor apartment with parquet floors, so finding appropriate containers to use to repot my plants is an issue. It's also an issue that I don't have anywhere to store gardening equipment and bags of potting soil.

And when I say that some of my plants "have gotten really big," what I mean is that they're giant fucking monsters. Like, I have three stalks of bamboo that I bought at the Murder Kroger on Ponce de Leon in Atlanta in the summer of 2005 that are now growing horizontally because they are taller than my ceiling. I have a pothos plant that I bought at the Methadone CVS on 40th and Pine in West Philadelphia in December 2011 that has gone on to colonize an entire wall of my living room.

I think I've arrived at a point where I need to talk with an expert. Do such people exist? Like, tree coaches? Green consultants? Houseplant whispers?

I read 140 books.

I read 151 graphic novels.

I read 256 self-published comics and fanzines.

I read 114 manga in English.

I read 63 manga in Japanese.

I read 45 dōjinshi.

I finished 15 video games.

I commissioned 52 comics and illustrations.

I posted 30 new drawings to Tumblr.

I made 40 posts on my professional blog.

I made 19 posts on my book review blog.

.

Good job team! I also published A LOT this year, and I made huge leaps forward in terms of my artistic ability. What I did not keep track of is how many toxic people I cut out of my life, how many emails from idiots I made an executive decision to ignore, and how many mean, petty, and ignorant assholes I blocked on social media. This year I reconfirmed my belief that life is too short for stupid bullshit, and I was much happier for it. May there be more joy and positive energy in 2019, and may we all continue stand strong against unfairness and injustice.

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Rynling R&D

Entries tagged with resolutions

2020 Numbers

Re: 2020 Resolutions

2021 Resolutions, Part Three

2021 Resolutions, Part Two

2021 Resolutions, Part One

2021 Goals

2020 Resolutions, Part Three

2020 Resolutions, Part Two

2020 Resolutions, Part One

Get Your Words Out 2019

2019 Numbers

Re: 2019 Resolutions

Art Goals for 2020

Re: 2019 Resolution #5

2019 Resolution #5

2019 Resolution #4

2019 Resolution #3

2019 Resolution #2

2019 Resolution #1

2018 Numbers