Happy New Year everyone! I hope you all made it fine through the holiday season.

(Well, this turned into a long post. And if you can see a wall of text below, it means that I didn't convince myself to delete it. Yay? Still, feel free to skip to the cookies below.)

New Year felt great at first. I made lofty goals for the year, which include the printing of the first part of Soul's Journey and getting a few short stories out into the wild. My enthusiasm, however, kinda died early, didn't even make through one week. It held up for barely a day, truth be told. I've been in a weird headspace lately.

I attribute that one to a) lack of snow (winter without snow sucks), b) spending the sun-up-part of the day in the office and c) the comic.

Before I go a little deeper, let it be said that updates are not in any danger. I love making the comic. Working on it is a highlight of my day (next to playing video games) and I wouldn't want to give it up for the world. I didn't even manage to take a break last week. (As evidenced by me not really taking a break and having all of January's update available on Patreon. winkwink)

There is, however, some frustration that has been building up for a while in regards to everything around the comic. And it probably caused my brain to go haywire with negativity lately. Thing is that the fault is with me entirely, 'cause I don't manage to commit to something and put in the time. The most obvious results are the stagnation of audience growth, lots of unfinished construction zones and less confidence in my abilities (and that one wasn't much, to begin with).

The current construction zones are:

• the front page (want it to better reflect the fact that there's a German version of the comic, but the how escapes me)
• hub website's front page (there's a thing that's been in works for ages, but still is barely begun)
• the blog (which I'm really tempted to just scrap altogether)
• various communities (that I'm not active enough in, if at all)
• my self-esteem (which is currently located between "why should anybody care"-village and "eye-roll"-town)

I've already begun to change some things, but most of the others need a lot more time, which I don't know when I'll have that. (Add that to the frustration pile.)

Changes so far:

• made fresh banners and eliminated the old stuff, a change of scenery can't make it worse
• cleaning out irrelevant tweets on Twitter and making a private Twitter for personal spam (you're welcome to follow, but should by no means feel obligated to tolerate my spam in your timeline), so my introverted side has a harder time to make me feel bad about stuff I tweeted
• made a Twitch profile on which I'll stream the making of a side comic on weekends (it was intended as an anniversary stream, but as I wrote above I'm having commitment issues) - the first page can be seen on my Ko-Fi, once it's finished I'll put up a pay-what-you-want PDF on Gumroad and maybe let it have its own run on the website
• just taking my polygon-horse out into Hyrule without actually accomplishing anything in-game, 'cause I love my polygon horses

The rest is gonna go slowly, and I'll have to learn to live with that. Also, I'll write to Santa before next Christmas, that I'd like some snow for my birthday. I'm sure he can deliver a few days early.

Oh, and before I forget: Soul's Journey turned 3 on Jan 1st. Have a Happy Anrak.

Now I'm gonna run before I backspace this wall of text.

(The cookies were a lie. You may now complain about cookie-baiting in the comments.)