Mass.

It's the anniversary of my father passing away, and I was reflecting on a lot of what happened over the last year.  Life looks very different than it did back then.

It got me thinking about things I've been putting off for ages.  Some out of necessity, others out of an illogical fear.  I don't tend to make resolutions just for New Years, but this resolution happened to coincide with the day and I'm now determined to work on writing out the world that I base a lot of my images on.

I realized that I never showed my father the world that I wrote in.  Or much of the art that came from it.  He never put me down for choosing to do art, he encouraged me my whole life, but because I was afraid that he'd see it as such a waste, or silly, I kept it to myself.

That's a huge regret of mine.  I think he would have loved the place.  Not just because he was a 'nerd' who enjoyed fantasy too, but because he'd get to see how far I'd come from when I started doing commission work in 1994.

I'm also not as 'infinite' as I think.  I'm wandering towards my fifth decade on this planet.  I kept putting off working on the things I loved until 'later'.  I kept myself from starting works because I thought they were dumb ideas.

I've learned over the last 365 that this is a narrative.  It's a tale I weave for myself to attack myself, and it's a narrative I can change on a whim.  So I am.

There are challenges with that though.  The first is that I've forgotten so much of what I had mapped out in my head.  I didn't write much of it down (for the aforementioned reasons) and like with everything in time, those ideas and cultures slipped through the gaping holes in my memory like sand.

The second is something that I can resolve much quicker.  Being that I needed to pull an old map I had made in software I don't even use anymore, and completely re-map it all out, making changes and edits where I needed to.

The pic above is the work so far.  I've been doing split days between commission work, and working on re-working on the map of Valhaadrune, the largest continent of Felwroth.  Seeing some of the names of places sparked some memories.  Others are lost.. But something new can be cultivated from that soil.

I'm going through old sketches that I made along the years too.  Some of them are nonsense, the others are cultural things I had hastily scrawled down.  I don't have a scanner that could work on a sketchbook like this, but I might take photos to digitally work over to share on here.  

But this is the year I start to create without fear.  That narrative can sod off once and for all.  I'd like to show the space where all of those images spawn from.

Never feed a guilt narrative.  They eat voraciously and endlessly.

-T.J.