A New Year’s Update
Welcome to the new year, beautiful watchers! It’s that time of year again when we discuss the future as the dawn of another twelve months comes upon us. Have you got any New Year’s resolutions? Here’s mine:
-Start doing sit-ups every day. I feel like I should be exercising more, considering I usually spend 70% of my days sitting in front of a computer or reading a book. Besides, I’m curious to see how far the number I can do in one sitting goes up by the end of the year.
-Get a driver’s license. I flunked the first driving course I took in high school, and another one I took during college ended up getting cut short because of what I assume was a bureaucratic foul-up. This isn’t to say that I’m totally blameless: I tend to get easily distracted, which certainly isn’t an ideal quality in a potential driver. However, I feel like I would be less of a burden on my parents if I could drive myself to wherever I needed to go.
-Learn how to play the guitar. It feels weird being as obsessed with music as I am and yet unable to play an instrument. The problem is that the instruments I have available to play on hand are... less than satisfactory. One is a classical guitar made by Hohner with a body so big that I can barely wrap my arms around it. The other is a much smaller children’s beginner guitar made by First Act that is much easier to handle but is missing its lower E string. Of course, assuming that I manage to surmount those obstacles, there’s still the matter of whether or not I have the patience to actually master the riffs. Still, there are plenty of easy ones to start with. Pantera’s “Walk” might be a good place to start.
Full disclosure, though: these were the exact same resolutions I had in 2022 when I last made this kind of post on WordPress. Granted, things have changed since then. I’ve been laid off from my job at the local hardware store since Halloween 2022, which has given me more free time, and my learner’s permit expires on my birthday in May this year, so I feel an extra sense of urgency to at least try for a license before the deadline runs out. Of course, the feeling that I’m stuck in one place with family members I can no longer relate to is also fueling a strong desire for some degree of independence from them (see my article on Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” for more details as to why).
But you probably don’t care about that. You’re here to see what I’m writing for you guys this year. I’m pleased to say I have several good ideas for the new year, such as:
-Several new debunking lists in the same vein as my articles debunking conservative myths about climate change and 9/11 Truther myths, this time dealing with several other subjects where reactionaries have muddied the waters with fake news and conspiracy theories, like “voter fraud” in the 2020 election, the January 6th insurrection, and myths about the LGBTQ+ community broadly and the transgender community specifically.
-My ongoing series like “P.J.’s Ultimate Playlist” and “Monsters of North America” will continue normally. “The Complete Noob’s Guide to the Left” may need some reworking, however. I want to focus not just on political and economic ideologies in the future but also on concepts and movements like Land Back, Stop Cop City, and Palestinian liberation. We’ll see how that goes, I suppose.
-Another idea I’ve been flirting with is going into more detail on some more esoteric ideas I outlined in the article I did about religions and spiritualities that have influenced my spiritual outlooks, like Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Daoism, and others that can maybe shine a light on alternatives to the hegemony that Christianity has on America and the world.
-I’ve also been flirting with the idea of making an ongoing series dedicated to exploring Native American and First Nation Canadian tribes and explaining what distinguishes the Mayans from the Aztecs, for instance, or the Abenaki from the Wampanoag, the Iroquois from the Cherokee, the Navajo from the Nez Perce, etc. There are two significant reasons for this. The first is simply that it’s one of my current autistic special interests. The other is that the “Monsters Guide to North America” will inevitably cover subjects from indigenous legends like the Wendigo and Skinwalker that many Natives may feel uncomfortable with their colonizers knowing about. I figured that covering some of their culture’s more historical and “mundane” parts might make up for that.
-Finally, I plan to watch several animated films from 2023 and discuss my favorites. I felt this might be the best way to expand on my interest in animation. I might also make a list of my favorite animated series of 2023, depending on whether I feel motivated enough to do so since catching up on series will undoubtedly be more time-consuming. When I finish that, I think I’ll start working my way backward and list my favorites from 2022, 2021, 2020, etc. That should be an adventure.
On top of that, I want to focus more attention on The Divine Conspiracy on DeviantArt this year. I find it hard to muster up the courage to actually work on my “magnum opus,” though, mainly because I find the amount of ambition I’ve invested into the concept intimidating. I have so many things that I want this series to be. I want to explore ideas from the esoteric sides of religion and spirituality that I barely understand. I want to convincingly show the weight of the cosmic horror elements pressing down on the Banks family. I want it to be an accurate portrait of the world as I see it, with the dark supernatural forces battling the Banks’ constantly exacerbating reactionary and regressive forces tearing both America and the world apart. I want to be sure I can make my characters actual characters and not just one-note stereotypes and stock archetypes. Above all else, though, I want it to be a good fantasy series that makes people laugh, cry, grip their seats in terror, and hits the same emotions as any of the great fantasy epics of our time.
Indeed, anyone who’s been paying attention over the last several months will know that writing the new Divine Conspiracy story involving Ireland and the Paris catacombs has been a struggle, as it seems that’s when the perpetual dread of writer’s block really decided to assert itself and conspire to strangle the spark of inspiration in its cradle.
I may have a way out, though. I haven’t published the Divine Conspiracy pilot on SquareSpace yet. This will be my biggest project of the year, as it won’t be just a simple case of copy-pasting from DeviantArt. I’ve had some new ideas that will have to constitute a new draft. You’ll find out which ones as we go along. I’ll keep the current draft up on DeviantArt as a reference for comparison, so anyone who’s favorited that on DeviantArt won’t have to worry. I can’t guarantee that it will decrease my writer’s block or my feelings of inadequacy in the task. But still, there’s also that quote attributed to Winston Churchill which states, “Never give up on something that you can’t go a day without thinking about,” and there’s hardly a day that doesn’t go by without certain vignettes from the story I want to tell popping in and out of my head.
But above all else, I hope you will all have the patience to put up with my dithering about as I try to get myself back on track. That’s all from me for now. Join me next time when I republish the last of the WordPress articles, this time doing a mini-retrospective on an underrated heavy metal band that I enjoy very much. Until then, beautiful watchers!
