My First Ever New Year’s Resolution, and More!

Welcome back, my dear readers! I hope you had the most exquisite Holiday if you celebrate, and if you don’t, I hope life has been treating you well.

I had intended to get back into the blog earlier than mid-January, but I suppose I’m never late, nor am I early. I arrive precisely when I mean to, and that is now.

Between a very busy Holiday season, the battle of my life against what we are pretty sure was a nasty case of norovirus, some very flashy weather on mother nature’s part, a dead mouse, (the computer kind) and trying to get back into the swing of ordinary everyday life, I scarcely had time to write at all, let alone work on content for the blog. I of course become a depressed, insomnia-filled goblin if I can’t write, so my mental health struggled a bit as well.

But it’s not all doom and gloom, dear readers, because it was during my time of clutching my porcelain lifeline and sobbing into the linoleum that I had a burst of inspiration unlike anything I’d ever experienced.

Okay, maybe I’m being a bit dramatic, but crafting stories is literally what I do. The porcelain lifeline and sobbing part is definitely true, but the inspiration came in the aftermath. In my misery and dehydration, languishing on the couch with a thick comforter, sipping on frozen Gatorade, I couldn’t handle the hustle and bustle of regular shows or high octane action sequences or interpersonal drama.

Enter slice of life.

I want to make more content talking about my experience with slice of life media later on, but for now I don’t want to get too far off on a tangent. All you need to know now, dear reader, is that with my inspiration and determination to write renewed, I decided to make New Year’s Resolutions for the very first time.

I still need to write a “year in review” post for the blog as well, but last year I explored another genre for the first time since I started writing exclusively fantasy in my late teens. It was like breathing after being trapped beneath the water for way too long. I’d never had more fun in my entire life. And with another genre explored, and how amazing it felt, I decided to do it again. I decided to do a genre I had never even thought of touching.

I always enjoy writing. Always. There has never been a time where I haven’t loved it, even if I’m complaining. Every facet of the creative process is woven in the tapestry that is my soul, and I can feel my soul sing any time I write.

But this was another type of joy. Standing on the edge of a mountain and breathing in the sweet cold air of winter. Taking a drink from a fresh woodland spring. Breaking off the shackles of my own making that I hadn’t even realized I’d been dragging along for years. I suppose I never wrote down a rule that I couldn’t write anything other than fantasy. But it was unspoken. Sitting on my lips. Crawling around the back of my throat.

You’ve created an entire world. Feiradyr. That’s your home. You’re never allowed to leave. The number of stories to be told outnumber the years you’ll have on this planet, even if you live to be 300.

But I started to question what really mattered to me as a writer. What I wanted.

The simplest answer is, of course, to write. I’ll carve stories into my skin before I never write again.

But I also want to improve. I want to hone my skills. I want to be better than I was a year ago, last month, yesterday.

And to improve is to experience.

Different genres.

Different types of characters.

Different settings.

Different styles.

And so I realized just how imprisoned I really was, and I decided to break free.

Which became my first New Year’s Resolution.

More writing freedom.

This year I want to write whatever I want, whenever I want. Explore different genres, experiment, try different types of characters, and have fun with it. And I’m already off to a great start. I’m hoping to improve my writing skill, but that’s only a secondary goal that I know will come with writing in such different styles. It feels odd making a New Year’s Resolution to “have more fun” but here we are nonetheless. I’ve rarely been this excited to write, nor have I gotten this into a writing project, so much so I’ve been zoning out of the real world on a regular basis during my writing stints.

I of course plan to share more about my new projects and my writing in general, and I won’t be abandoning Feiradyr of course. The knowledge that it will always be there waiting for me is a huge comfort.

As far as content for the blog, I sat down about a week ago and made a list of posts I wanted to work on. I now have 19 drafts in my folder and I am so excited to bring those to you guys.

I’ll be giving my opinion on AI art, doing some critiques of games and books, talking about the impact slice of life media has had on me, and I even have another Quest for Inspiration in the works. I don’t want to spoil too much of course, but weather permitting, that is something I’m pretty excited about.

I want to thank you all for sticking with me through my breaks, and reading the blog when I’m putting out content. I’m putting this up early, on Monday the 20th of January, but going forward we will return to our schedule of me posting at the times the blog gets the most traffic, which is usually Saturday afternoon. So don’t expect another post this week, but they should start coming out starting next Saturday.

I hope you have a wonderful week, and I will see you all next time.

Happy reading!