Looking back on a past year can be a great way to assess what went right or wrong, and to help make plans for the future. As with any year, there were things I was happy about, and areas where I felt like I fell down or just failed to meet my goals. I like to start with the bad and end with the good, so here goes!

Goals I didn’t meet:
I had lofty goals in 2015 of finishing up to four different comic chapters. I had hoped to complete chapters 4 and 5 of Ellie Connelly, as well as at least one or two chapters of what was going to be the rebooted Circle Weave minicomic. As it stands, I haven’t quite finished one chapter of Ellie Connelly, though I did begin the substantial process of rewriting and revising The Circle Weave into what I think will be a more efficient format: Heavily-illustrated prose. I’m excited about the possibilities with this format, and will talk about it more at length soon.

Did you know I have a newsletter? I keep forgetting. Self-promotion is a sisyphean task, and it’s challenging enough to remember to post to the blog and the facebook and the tumblr (and cross-posting the same content feels ridiculously redundant), but remembering to update the newsletter is just, ugh! Enough already! I think I only sent out one or two newsletters this year, which only reinforces how useless it is. But, I know it’s the only way that some people want to interact with what I do on a regular basis, so I need to get better about putting them out.

Much as I want to finish telling the story of The Eye of the Vortex, I’m really anxious to get the first two chapters into a printed format that can join the newer chapters in stores and at conventions. My original plan was to be working on those chapters on the side as I continued working on new pages, but my progress has been so painfully slow on new pages this year that I haven’t felt like I could justify working on redrawing the older pages.

Game projects I’d hoped to complete included my space-racing table-top game Starspeed, which has been languishing for at least a couple years now, needing a complete rewrite of the rules; and a full-on reconcepting of my years-old 2-player abstract strategy game Dol-Dai. I’ve barely had time to play any games this year, let alone play-testing unfinished ones.

Things I accomplished or learned:
This August I marked my first year over at Patreon! Since I started that campaign I’ve completed two ‘comics chapters’, and am THIS CLOSE to completing my third. It’s really gratifying to see there’s even a handful of people interested in seeing my work continue, and I couldn’t be more grateful for your support over the year. I’m looking to increase my output in 2016, with more comics, games, and illustrations; so get ready to see a lot more new work through my Patrons-only process feed.

I completed the first War of the Worlds folio! Born of the ashes of a similar project that was killed by outside forces, the War of the Worlds is a fun project that I hope to continue for at least a few more years. It got a great response as I was working on them, and people really seemed to dig the final printed folios. I’m looking forward to doing the next one!

Following the War of the Worlds, Ellie Connelly and the Eye of the Vortex chapter 4 has been dominating my year. Begun way back in February, I’ve been making slow but steady progress through its 16 pages. There were a couple of fun scenes, and I’m really happy so far with how well the old script has translated to the new style, even if it’s meant rewriting almost every page for more interesting layout options.

In the absence of being able to post redrawn versions of the first 32 pages of the Eye of the Vortex, I went ahead and posted the older colored versions. At least this way, new readers can get up to speed easily without having to wait for me. I’ll be replacing these with the redrawn pages when it’s appropriate (I won’t post just half a scene, for example, since the rewrites may chop dialog in weird ways).

I finished a new minicomic: Pac-Man the Barbarian! A simple 8-pager, this one was just too much fun. Hoping to do more minicomics soon. I also completed a couple studies in ‘Cosmic Chaos’, which is a much more time-consuming technique than I ever imagined. I look forward to getting more efficient at it, as I plan to start using it all over the place!

My full-size Super 8-Bit Tarot deck continues to be a reliable seller over at TheGameCrafter, which I couldn’t be happier about. There were a lot of people who sadly missed out on the original hand-assembled run of mini-decks, and I’m really happy to have these still available in such a convenient format. I’d like to put more games of this type up there, and have already started concept work on a couple decks of standard playing cards.

This past holiday season I took part in my first post-thanksgiving sale (ever? I think?). It’s something I’d always meant to try to do, but when you don’t have much merchandise, it’s hard to figure out what to put on sale. This year, I lowered the price on my Super 8-Bit Tarot for a week, and also took part in the Storenvy Black Friday sale pricing. I linked LunarBistro up with a bunch of other webcomics-publishers who were doing a cross-promotional thing for Small Business Saturday. Between all of those promotional efforts, I didn’t see much of a boost in sales, but I did see traffic at my site jump up quite a bit for that week, which was really nice. It’s great to see there’s still value in cross-promoting with other folks.

I also redesigned the homepage of LunarBistro, which has been a long time in coming. I enjoyed having the comic be front-and-center for so long, but the new integrated slideshow allows me to mix up the primary content more easily. This will be super-handy when I release any non-comic-related news or products, like announcing upcoming appearances, or new games or merchandise, while still allowing me to keep the latest comics prominent on the homepage.

Goals for next year:
The biggest thing I want to do is simply getting into the habit of drawing every day. I think the biggest reason I missed so many of my goals this year was that my output was so low compared to what I know it can be. I can realistically complete a page of Ellie Connelly in about 8 hours, so the only reason it should take me more than a week (or a month!) to post a new page is if I’m not drawing every day. Developing this habit might be a slow process, but I’m going to work hard to overcome the doubts that keep me from sitting down for even just one hour every night to throw down some ink.

Project goals include finishing another chapter of Ellie Connelly (probably chapter 1 at this point, more on that later); making some serious progress on these decks of playing cards and other game projects; completing the second folio of War of the Worlds illustrations, with an eye toward a small gallery showing of them at the end of the year; continuing to develop the first few installments of The Circle Weave; and as always, making more mini-comics!

Speaking of The Circle Weave, I’m having a lot of fun developing this new rewrite of the series. I spent most of November revisiting the story as it stood and updating it to avoid some of the genre-trappings I wrote about that month. For this project I’m using a great world-building project template called The Leviathan, which I want to talk more about soon. This project was originally going to be a comic, but in the interest of actually seeing it completed within my lifetime, I’ve decided to experiment with publishing it as heavily-illustrated prose, released in a serialized chap-book format. I’ve got a couple other projects I’ve started in this format, and I’ll complete and release the first of those shortly after the current chapter of Ellie Connelly is released. I’m excited to test the format and see what you all think!

More fan-art! Posting fan-art for Fan-Art Friday was a lot of fun, and was a great way to keep busy with new stuff. I enjoy things, so why not share that? Ideally I’d pick themes and do a couple each week, really dive into my own particular fandoms. Also, I need to be updating the blog more frequently, with notes about my thought process in developing projects. These both might help with my next goal:

Continue to work toward increasing my readership. I told myself when I started back in on this whole thing that I was only doing it for myself, and that it didn’t matter if nobody else really got into it, but I’d be lying if I said that the complete lack of growth on the readership end wasn’t a bit demoralizing. I’m still enjoying the process of creating, but I’d also like to be sharing the work with more people, both here at Lunarbistro and over at the Patreon. Joining up with more high-profile initiatives like the cross-promotional Holiday Sale event this year will help boost that a bit. So will:

Exhibit at more small conventions. I had a great time at the Artist Alley Comics Fest here in Portland this year, and would love to do some more shows in 2016. I’m currently on the waitlist for space at Emerald City Comicon, and still need to submit an application for Rose City Comicon. Those would be my Big Two shows this year, but I’m also looking to do some smaller regional shows. I’ll keep an eye out and see what shows are coming up, and if you know of any within driving distance of PDX, let me know! I’d love to come out and meet you all!

On a personal note:
2016 is going to be a year of change for me, I can tell already. Earlier this month I proposed to my long-term girlfriend, so we’re in the early planning stages of what I can only hope will be the most fantastically geeky wedding this side of Hobbiton. We’re not sure where or when it’ll be, it might not even happen in 2016, but it’ll be great. Also, our landlords are raising our rent again this year, which will effectively price us out of our apartment (thanks, Portland!). We’ll need to move by April 1, so that’s going to take a lot of my time and attention until then. And I continue to look for a better job, one which I hope will both give me more time off, and also be giving me work experience toward a career I actually would enjoy, in either design or brewing.

That all said, I feel like it was a pretty good year for my more creative endeavors. I’m looking forward to continuing to work toward completion on a lot of these projects, and maybe even building up a bit of increased momentum in 2016! See you then!