I’m taking an early vacation from 2024.
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m exhausted. I’ve had a good and a bad year at the same time on all fronts, my personal and professional life, world politics life, mental health life and so on. We are barely in December yet, but this is my final newsletter for 2024. Next week I’ll be back in Brazil after a few years, meeting my nephew for the first time and enjoying the sun and beaches – It’s been way too long. After that, I’m taking the last days of the year to rest and get my shit together for 2025.
I’m not the kind of person to make long lists of the best things I read or listened to or whatever else during the year. I’m also not someone to list my accomplishments throughout the year. But I did have a pretty good year overall, at least in my personal sphere. I’ve maintained a fairly good mental health dynamic, managed to go back to writing and did a pretty good amount of learning when it comes to illustrating.
On the drawing front, I kept my first full-time sketchbook (that also doubled as a planner), did a few interesting back-to-basic courses in Skillshare, draw on paper a lot, played with coloured pencils, got intoxicated in alcohol-based markers and tried a few different illustration styles. I also experimented with colours and hues I don’t usually work with, and I think it helped me get a better shape on what I want and don’t want to keep working on.
Recently I’ve updated my online stores with some of the art I’ve been working on the past few months. I’m not very active in promoting them, but I like the feeling of having some of my work available out there in the world. I don’t miss having my own online store, God knows I’m not up to keeping one in which I need to do all the packaging and mailing, but it gives me a sense of accomplishment to see something available. Oh, capitalism. This fucker.
My drawing goals for next year are to keep experimenting, play a little with Feather and maybe try to develop more in background creation and maybe comic book drawing. Mostly, I’ll just let it go with my flow.
Compared to the last 5 years, I had an amazing writing year since I’ve actually written stuff. I re-wrote one of the stories from my first picture book, translating it to English and adapting it to be a stand-alone storybook. It was a wild ride, but it also helped to prove to myself I can actually finish something I started. It had been such a long time since I had actually finished writing one of my stories.
Recently I started working on a novel I plan to release on Tapas.com next year. I’m having a lot of fun writing it and letting it flow as it goes. I’m not really concerning myself with much, just playing around with characters, breaking and playing into genre-specific assumptions and tropes and It’s been a blast. It’s fantasy, isekai and a few other things. I’m currently working on the third episode, and I won’t be doing much editing. I’ll just let the story be what it wants to be and will publish it as it is. Maybe once it’s finished, I’ll hire someone to edit it for me, but I want to see how it does in a cruder state. I’ll probably talk more about it next year.
I also have my graphic novel and comic plans that are still in the gestational stages. I’ll have more to say about them next year, but for now, I’m happy to have reached a good story development plan for them. Some of them I’ve been working on for years and I feel that they are finally in a place where I can sit down and write and actually develop them into something. Now the big challenge is writing comic scripts that are, in my opinion, some of the hardest things to write.
My drawing goals for next year are all related to these projects, from further developing, to creating projects to present them to agents and publishing companies. It’s gonna be hard, and I expect a lot of rejections but hey, we’ll just have to keep pushing.
I’ll see you guys next year. Be well, take care.
See you later. 😉
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