Letter to a New Year 2022

Well, this is Year 3 of the pandemic. My prediction was right. Internally I’m feeling like a skeleton dusty and dessicated from years of waiting to be rescued from the cave I fell into.

I did pretty much the major things I wanted to achieve in 2021

• Read 30-something books, which is paltry compared to the previous year’s 90. But they are all solid reads. Notable books are Braiding Sweetgrass, The House of Spirits, Mary Oliver’s body of work, Garlic and the Vampire, and Love in a Time of Cholera.
• Updated my website. I love having a space online that’s entirely mine. It’s still not finished – that’s an ongoing project I’ll be tinkering with for the next 1 or 2 years.
• Launched Alexander.
• Maintained a newsletter consistently. Now that I’ve made a sort-of habit of it, I’m going to fold my general artist newsletter into Alexander’s.
• Finally got a local accountant. This was a main non-pandemic source of stress. It was like a freaking Odyssey to secure one. I kept emailing and being rejected and bounced off and ghosted left and right, even from the firms that I assumed would have the staff and the expertise to handle my case. Anyway it’s all dandy now… and I am looking forward to doing taxes, as I should be.
• 99% retired my workaholicism. Unfortunately, I didn’t start the process in spring, like I intended, but in autumn. While starting late is better than nothing, the rest of the year was spent in a somewhat catatonic state of recovering physically and creatively. I slept a lot and stared at the ceiling plenty, yet my motivation to write something new from scratch is still dormant. (I’m not worried about that too much, I did juggle 3 projects a year for the past 3 years…)
  Right now, because of the dormancy, I’m struggling with writing Alexander Book 2’s script… and that’s not taking into account the rollercoaster ride I have to construct out of wild materials. It’s a good thing I already did the script/thumbnails for Book 1 a while back, or it wouldn’t be functioning.
  The meh outcome of starting late is that I didn’t have time or the energy at all to work on my craft. I’d rather space out and watch Queer Eye and do anything else other than draw or write.

Anyway I am happily comfortable with my present state of Not Doing Very Much for Anyone Else Except Me. So I will try my best to maintain it as long as possible, or at least, spread future projects out in a way that feels I am not a lot of work at all. At least, not 3 projects a year. Maybe 2*

*1 would be ideal, however I cannot solely be working on Alexander without my tradpub career to back me up. So 2 it is.

Much of what I want to do for 2022 is a continuation of the work I began in 2020 with the Digital Island Project.

It’s the usual roadmap: try to use Twitter less, move away from socmedia platforms as a base for my online career, reorient my relationship to the internet, etc.

Digital Islanding is a glacially slow process, but with the tokenisation of everything and increasing censorship in favour of corporate/ad-friendly sanitisation (on a lot of socmedia, you can’t type or even say the word ‘kill’, ‘dead’ and various other swears), I’m motivated more than ever to get the heck out of platforms.

I am taking each year as it comes. I don’t want to think too far ahead, because anything related to travel (which is the main thing I want to do) is going to be tossed out the window, but I can prepare for the opportunities I desire when things are more stable again.

Here’s to another year in the 20s.