So 2022 has come and gone, and with it another shitty year. I wasn’t able to get much done on my end, either, aside from what few commissions I received. You may think that, with my eight months of radio silence since the last blog post, I must’ve been up to something huge behind the scenes… but I really wasn’t. Most of the year was spent in complete listlessness, with only the occasional burst of productivity before I immediately burned out again.
Will 2023 be any better, then? I sure hope so. At the very least I’ve been going into it feeling somewhat more optimistic than how I left 2022, thanks to the realization that I’m going to have to give myself a kick in the pants from time to time and stay organized if I want anything to change… Easier said than done, of course, but then again, nothing’s easy to do if you’ve been spending weeks if not months at a time just coasting by with the minimum of effort to stay afloat.
Enough moping around, then. Thinking about everything I could’ve done and didn’t do isn’t gonna make me feel any better about myself, after all. It’d be a much better use of my time and energy to focus on what I can do going forward, and despite my pessimistic tone, I can’t say that I haven’t already gotten started on exactly that.
See, it’s not much, but I’ve started doing daily figure sketches as of a few days ago. Found this video series on YouTube with each video about half an hour long as it starts you off with short sketches before gradually increasing the timer. I’ve only been at it for a few days, but I can already feel the rust slowly starting to come off and my overall skills improving, even if it’s not always a straight line upwards. Maybe I should try something similar with music sometime, challenging myself to compose a full track within one or two hours.
Speaking of music, you may remember me wanting to release a new album in 2022. Well, that obviously didn’t happen, but I do hope I can finally work on one this year. I just need to get started; that’s really the hardest part of it all, and something I have to go through every time I finish a song and want to write another.
At any rate, that’s my resolution for 2023. Working on myself and getting over all those fears that prevent me from doing the things I want to do… and the only way to do so is to follow Nike’s advice and be persistent about it.
Oh, and it also hasn’t eluded me that next month will be Retrograde Road’s 10-year anniversary. Obviously I can’t just not commemorate it.
Gensakudan Blog ― 懐古世紀日誌 