2024 Wrap Up

How's the Writing gone?

A year has passed and during that year I managed to write 12 short stories, finished Banished Talent, started SoulDive, wrote 78 chapters of Dungeon's Path, and 104 chapters of NeoRealm. I don't have an exact count, but that means I wrote over a quarter of a million words at least. So as far as writing goes, I did pretty good!

How's my personal life gone?

However, the year has definitely had some downs for me on a personal level. A bunch of stuff went down this year. My car was damaged for one. That was annoying, though thankfully I could get it fixed easily enough.

Besides that though, my doctor had some less than stellar news for me. Multiple times. Early on in the year I had the problem with my ankle. That turned out to be a result of me being flat-footed. Which is apparently one of those biological time bombs? You can go your entire life with flat feet without a problem. Though one thing or another could happen or your body might just decide to hate you and suddenly it is a problem. I've had to get some insoles for it. Insurance wouldn't some proper custom insoles so I'm handling it with more generic, if still pricey, options.

Worse was later on in the year. I hadn't gotten a check up in a while and so my doctor decided to run some bloodwork. Came back that I have high cholesterol and that I'm pre-diabetic. I wrote something about it, but not the specifics. Now, thankfully these are things that can be controlled and reversed. In fact, my follow up bloodwork in December showed that my cholesterol is almost down to where it should be and my blood sugar levels are better. However, I'm still on medicine for my cholesterol and my blood sugar isn't good.

Though my doctor was quite happy with my improvements. It did require a complete rework of my diet, so I understand why they were impressed. That kind of complete re-haul isn't easy. Did you know you can get withdrawal from sugar? I sort of did because of a FoodTheory video, but boy, I wasn't ready for it. Probably going to go through it a little bit again because of eating with the family on the holidays. Everything has added sugar. And it certainly doesn't help that I find the taste of basically all of the sugar alternatives to be nasty for one reason or another.

On top of that, my checkup also had me asking the doctor about the possibility that I have ADHD. The signs were there, but they said that in their opinion I do in fact have it. Of course, being in the US, that doesn't actually mean anything. I still need to go to a professional and get professionally diagnosed. My doctor had referred me to a place nearby, but then found out they wouldn't be accepting new patients until "next year". So they canceled that and gave me a few other places to try. Welp, I've messaged them to put that referral back in because nothing else came up. I do not expect to get anything done early this year, but then again, I personally know some people that ended up taking multiple years to get to the point of anything actually happening.

And how's that Kickstarter going?

Also, in sad news I'm guessing my Kickstarter for Banished Talent will not reach the goal. As of right now, it has raised $118 of $300 and 5 days to go (ending Wed, Jan 8 at 4am EST). To be honest, even to start I somewhat expected this result. After all, it was December and I probably should have waited for another month to run the Kickstarter. Nevermind that I just saw another author I follow run their own Kickstarter for a similar thing and fail. That is actually part of why I set my base goal so low. They were asking thousands to do everything and so I tried breaking it out into the stretch goals. I'm not completely giving up hope as Kickstarters tend to have the most pledges at the start and the end. In fact, here's the link:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2116937393/banished-talent-ebook

Prove my pessimistic prediction wrong. $3 will get you the finished ebook, $12 will have a name of your choice (within limits) on the books Acknowledgement page, and $36 is limited to 10 people and gets you that name at the top of the list with a short message of thanks from me. I'm an honestly surprised as instead of a bunch of people going for the lower option, of the backers, they're actually spread pretty evenly across all the reward tiers.

I will note, even if the Kickstarter fails, that does not mean I won't try similar things in the future. In fact, if it wasn't for my financial problems from everything that happened, I probably wouldn't have run the Kickstarter in the first place and just paid for it myself. A few hundred is a good bit for me, but nothing I can't scrounge together over a few months. Except for the first time I was in the red for 2024. Not that I've ever been too far in the green, but with the car and everything else that happened, I had to sell $1,100 in bonds along with dipping into a few other bits of savings I have.

I'm hopeful though

However, I'm hopeful for the new year! SoulDive if a fun story that I have a plan for and it isn't like I'm going to wrap up NeoRealm or Dungeon's Path this year. Besides that, I've revived the Discord server, which while slow right now, there are people who post there and I do answer questions about my stories. I'm hopeful that we can all find out comforts and what happiness we can in the coming year.