Happy New Year!
I’ve spent the morning going over my 2022 in a mild fashion. I feel a deep dive would only leave me a bit disgruntled on many levels. This was a year of confusion, of covid hangovers, so to speak and general state of affairs overall that bled into our personal lives, and I don’t think anyone was left unaffected. Post-corona and war are of course on top of that list.
The start of my year was a bit bleak with the kid getting corona pretty badly in November and December of the year before. It was a mellow and a bleak start. I started a new job at a facility for the elderly and did quite a bit of translations for different companies that left little time to write, which in hindsight has been the bane of 2022. I did manage to pump out 22 short stories that are either on my patreon.com/eyglo or sitting, waiting, on my hard drive. I did sell some stories that will be published sometime in 2023. The three novels, and two novellas I had waiting at the start of the year are still waiting and on top of that I now have two different projects that are moulding in my mind.
I’ve had a dream of collaborating on a real writing project for a long time and that came to pass in a project I won’t go into details about yet but it opened my views in many ways and was as much (if not more) fun as I expected it would be. More on that in 2023!
As I was thinking about what I’d watched, played and read in the year I really don’t know what I’ve been doing with my time. I can only conclude that I’ve spent too much time on TikTok even though I only properly joined that in the latter half of the year. I neglected my Twitch channel entirely, due to time, and I still, though I miss streaming, don’t see I’ll have time for that in the future. I did play a lot of Elden Ring, a game that left me thinking that I never need to play another game ever. This is the end station, the best of the best. Incredible game, though I still keep Bloodborne on top of my Best Game Ever list. I played quite a bit of Unpacking, a nice easy going game that’s good when you just need to empty your mind and I enjoyed digging into Darkest Dungeon II which was in beta as I played it. I really enjoyed that.
When it comes to watching television I’ve been quite a good girl but I did enjoy the Stranger Things season that dropped and fell over flat for Eddie Munson like so many others. I’m sure there are other things I’ve forgotten about, but I really haven’t watched much television at all and when I do watch TV it’s usually Twitch and gamers like Excessive Profanity, Ainrun or MANvsGAME.
I read a bit and variedly. Some things I read I can’t talk about but some favorites were STAINLESS by Todd Grimson, THE FISHERMAN by John Langan, NOTHING BUT BLACKENED TEETH by Cassandra Khaw, THE SCIENCE OF STORYTELLING by Will Storr and basically everything I read by Ashley Stokes, GIGANTIC, SYLLABUS OF ERRORS and TOUCHING THE STARFISH. If you haven’t read Stokes yet you should, maybe start with his short stories.
A highlight of the year was going to Scarborough to attend the much-anticipated StokerCon, that due to covid had turned into ChillerCon. I had my first two panels there, met old friends and met some new and very interesting people. Scarborough is a beautiful town and I really loved it there.
In September it was time for the British FantasyCon that was held at Heathrow and though that wasn’t quite as good a venue as the one in Scarborough I really enjoyed hanging out with people and attending panels.
This was a soft year. A slow year. A covid hangover year. A year of quite a few changes for me, not all of which are positive, though they were necessary, but it was also a year of new thinking, bursting out of the shell and the year I met new people and I am eternally glad for that.
If there is one thing I need to focus more on in 2023 it is my writing. I need to refocus, with all the new tasks I have on my plate it's more difficult but not impossible, and I need to find more time to write, and write, and write some more.
May 2023 be full of new GOOD things for me and for you. Thank you to my readers, to my friends, and to all the people that helped me make good memories in 2022.
-Eygló
