2021 in Review

2021 has gone by both quickly and very slowly. This was a pretty…severely mixed year for me. Extreme lows, and pretty good highs. I would say that I’m very happy that 2021 is soon to be over. There were some good things that happened during it, though. Here’s a list of the top seven Spine related ones…

#7 Tarot Minor Arcana Assignment

This was a continuation of last year’s work on mapping characters/things to Tarot card concepts. I did Major Arcana in 2020 and in 2021 I finished it by doing all the Minor Arcana.

When I get to it, one day, I could actually make a Tarot deck. One day…

#6 Website Redesign

This is a big one. In came in two waves. The first was getting help from a designer friend to do a major facelift and then, recently, redoing the actual blog page to include a sidebar with ways to filter the blog posts. All the design changes together make the site feel so much better and coherent. There’s more I want to tweak and iterate on, but it’s already light years beyond what it was. I feel so much prouder about the Spine.

As a side note, I changed how blog post links are structured, which, in theory, will be better for SEO. It was something I knew I ought to do, but never got around to…but I just knocked it out so we’ll see if it makes a difference in 2022.

#5 More Commissions!

Not as many commissions this year as last year, but some major characters were done. King, Cyclone, Dien, and Hequera. Not only that, the Malcolm Zfnoc artwork by Erika Hollice is maybe my favorite.

I don’t think I’ll be doing getting new commissions done for awhile. It’s not in my 2022 plans, anyway.

#4 Ghost of the Spine

I did another short story this year: Ghost of the Spine. I tried writing horror and it went in an interesting direction and I’m pleased with it. It felt like a fruitful experiment that expanded the world.

#3 Uploading Old Stuff

There was a lot of work done this year on uploading ancient documents, short stories, and poems to the Spine and Database.

A few examples:

The galaxy maps and the Creation are probably the most important ones of the lot…the galaxy maps I was shocked I hadn’t shared in the past already since they are pretty canon.

#2 Actually Intending to Finish The Lost

As I finished Amethyst Shards (which takes the #1 slot) and wasn’t going to start on an Adventures sequel just yet, I decided to actually finish the Lost, which I started probably like five years ago, got decently far, and then never finished. I mention it randomly, mainly griping that I’ll never finish it.

But now I’m going to finish it, hell or high water. Currently, as of writing this post, I’m still going through what I had (which was like 20k words) written from way back when, editing it, and figuring out how to finish it. I have a strong plan and end in mind, and am eager to wrap it up. I hope to get this done in … early 2022, optimistically.

#1 Amethyst Shards Published!

At long last, Amethyst Shards was published. It took awhile, but it came together brilliantly and it feels good to have all ten books sitting on my shelf. I’m proud of it. It took the majority of my focus this year, and it’s DONE!

I’m super happy about it. There’s more I need to unpack and discuss about it, which I imagine will come out in 2022.

Conclusion

Weird selection of things done this year, somewhat a continuation from 2020, and somewhat breaking new ground. Things feel like they’re in a much better place at the end of 2021 than in 2020, mostly by merit of the website/archiving work and AS being finally published.

I’m not sure what 2022 will be…but it feels like it’s wide open.

🗓 23 Dec 2021

📁 Personal

🏷 year-in-review

Related/Recent Posts

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