Resolutions and goals 2024!

Welp, it’s that time of year again–time to make tons of new goals that we utterly forget about once we get to February!

Art recap 2023! Mostly it’s comic panels because I drew a ton of comic pages this year.

My goals for 2023 were as follows:

I’d like to play more games with my kids and husband, maybe stream some. I need to get my oldest kid driving (screams in terror), and get this house finally fixed up. I also want to plant a big garden and do some canning this year.

Well, didn’t get my oldest kid driving. We did some work on the house but it needs more. I did plant a big garden, which was more or less murdered by the heat dome we had over the summer (52 days over 100 degrees with an average of 106! And our AC unit died!). Once the heat cooled off in the fall, my garden came alive again and produced tomatoes and peppers for me like crazy until the frost killed it. I have buckets of ripening tomatoes in my kitchen and I’m trying to figure out what to do with them. The problems you love to have, right?

I also played videogames with my kids all summer. Mostly, I wanted to play some older games that passed me by while I was stuck with tiny babies. So I played A Hat In Time, which is a wonderful game as long as your teenagers play the boss fights for you. I played Undertale, which is a great game as long as your teenagers play the boss fights for you. Then I played Final Fantasy 14: Heavensward for my teens, which we did every night like a movie. They were traumatized by the death of a side character and have told me they never, ever want to see that cutscene again. But I got them to start playing the game with me, so we’re almost through the base game at the moment. I really want to take them all the way to Shadowbringers and watch the trauma fill their eyes as they open the window and see the sky ablaze.

Ryan and I had played Destiny 2 faithfully for the past few years, but the last expansion was so bad that we gave it up. He’s dabbling in Warframe and I think I’m almost ready to give that a try. Gotta get my scifi fix somewhere, even if I don’t really care for the Warframe aesthetic and how long you have to grind to unlock literally anything.

Anyway, that’s it for 2023, and I think it wound up being quite nice, the year’s challenges notwithstanding. For next year:

Another garden, bigger, badder, and better mulched than last year!

Actually can stuff from my garden!

Play more games with my kids and husband!

Publish the two books I have in the hopper!

It’s funny, I always have two books that I write over the course of the year and publish the following year. This year, it’s:

The final book of After Atlantis, tentatively titled Tyrona. It’s the big battle the series has been leading up to. It starts with Exile soldiers sneaking through portals and it ends with giant robots and death rays. I’ve been chewing over it for months because I have to get it just right, and my beta readers are holding my feet to the fire over it. It’s the last book, and it has to be the biggest, best one of all.

Heart and Crown. So uh, this book was kind of … well, I wrote it as a challenge from a fellow author. We both wanted to try to write books to get into a particular small press, kind of a publishing competition. So I went and read a bunch of the publisher’s books as I was writing Heart and Crown, and I realized that this publisher will only publish books with on-screen s3xytimes. Every one of their books has it, even books with teenagers (minors!). So I wound up writing this entire fantasy action romance that this publisher will not take because I don’t write bedscenes.

It’s about the son of the captain of the guard who is low-key in love with a princess because they grew up together and went to the same school. She’s going to be married to a wicked prince to end a war … except the prince ends up getting assassinated and it looks like the princess did it. So the hero has to save the princess except there’s some plot twists, and also there are aliens and demons and magic. (Heart and Crown refers to the way the magic system works.) It’s a fantasy story set on an alien planet that humans have colonized, so it has that Pern scifi fantasy flavor. My beta readers say it’s the best book I’ve ever written, so I’m hopeful that other people will like it, too.

Anyway, that’s my 2024 goals, and they seem pretty achievable. I like keeping my goals simple because I tend to forget them pretty fast, so it’s better if it’s stuff I was going to do anyway.