Happy New Year!

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Another year begun. A bit has happened since my last post. I went to North Carolina to meet Dylan’s family, finished my goal of reading 52 books this year, and got COVID (oops). I did do NaNoWriMo again this year, but didn’t finish. Got closer than previous attempts though, at around 30,000 words. It was strangely easier too, I felt like I had a grasp on what I was doing, and probably would have finished if I hadn’t had to leave the sanctuary of my apartment for thanksgiving (every year this trip messes me up). Dylan came home with me for Christmas, but the most recent variant, omicron, has been making big waves, so we promptly came back to New York as soon as family time was over.

It wasn’t until I was reflecting on the year, and what I had accomplished that I realized something about my earlier manifestation, or whatever you want to call them, about my Saturn’s return. I had a very reflective and meaningful birthday with my mom and my close friends, and within two weeks I met the love of my life! And in fact, the whole rest of the year had an undertone of setting that reality into place. Looking back, the timing is really incredible, and not something I was even really hoping for or expecting—it just happened. When I realized it, a new theme entered my mind unprovoked, love, money, success, in that order. The themes I take on as drivers of my life often come naturally, at times I’m not thinking about what they should be, and this one was particularly interesting to me. One because the order seemed odd—money first? And also I’ve never been particularly focused on money as a thing in and of itself, more as a marker of success or a thing that enables the other things I want out of life. The other thing that is interesting is that it is a theme is threes. Three objectives, three years of my self proclaimed period of return and reflection. I always figured this would be the time in my life for setting the basis of the rest of my life, not the most prolific or successful time, so I’m still not sure what to think of this as a theme, or whether I should seriously adopt it. But on thinking of it, I guess this might be a year of good fortune, literally, if I can commit to that.

I came here to work out my intentions for the year. I learned a lot by maintaining my reading goal, and definitely benefitted from the mental exercise. I didn’t think I’d want to start writing more frequently just yet but why not? Looking at my Ulysses app statistics, I have 400,000 words written in total. Almost half a million. I think that might be about 30-40k of duplicates as I had made copies of some of my drafts so I could edit them without altering the originals, but still, I only started using this as my primary writing tool two years ago, and this total doesn’t include anything I have written elsewhere, on emacs, world anvil, or the notes app. And that got me thinking, why not double it? If I attempt to write myself to a million words here, by the end of the year, that comes out to about 1600 words a day—almost exactly the daily writing goal for NaNoWriMo. Of course, that would limit my ability to consume media, including books, as well as limiting my social life. . . Maybe keep to 1,000 a day, 365,000 words this year. Doable? I have other goals. Matt and I wanted to prototype a game this winter, and I want to continue with game dev as well, and of course there is the possibility of moving, or switching jobs. I feel myself wondering, which of these goals is more likely to lead to money? Maybe I shouldn’t worry about that theme after all. It could get in the way. Too early to tell, I think.

Heres what I think. This year, I will:

• Each month, write 1,000 words for each day in that month
• Make a working prototype for a board game
• make a PoC for a video game, with a detailed pitch
• read 100,000 pages of books
• watch 100 movies
• set budgets
• start a Sunday ritual of reflection and tallying the debts I owe myself
• post here once a month :)

There, I think I can do that. I will make a page on Ulysses to keep up with these goals, and provide journal updates here when I can.

To the new year!

P.S. this post is 800 words long, and wasn’t too bad, I think I can do it

P.S.S is there a P.S. equivalent for blog posts?