The Year’s First Fortnight

So we’re now half a month into 2023, and things were going really really well with my resolutions… until they suddenly weren’t! But it’s not been all bad though, I’ve still got writing news to share…

In the first week of January, after making a resolution to continue with my hobbies and projects, I started thinking about which one I was going to tackle first. I quickly realised there was a clear winner, one that had a fast approaching deadline already.

Since I’ve been watching so many movies as part of last year’s resolutions, I’ve wanted to start doing reviews of them for a long time. I dabbled in it over the Halloween period, and it was a lot of fun.

I decided I wanted to take it a bit further though, and make video reviews. And what better time to start than with a big mega compilation review of all 30 movies I saw that came out in 2022?

Well, that would be great… if I didn’t just come up with the idea mere days before 2023 started!

In January, a lot of people are still talking about the past year, since it’s only just ended, and even February at a push would probably still be OK. But I think by the time March comes, people have moved onto the current year, and talking about 2022 would be a bit less relevant, so March is my goal, giving me a month and a half now.

That might not be so bad if I was just recording myself talking about each film, but with 30 of them to talk about, the video could end up pretty long, and nobody needs to look at my face for that length of time.

Plus, another one of my resolutions was to get back into art again, so I thought, why not combine the two? I’ll draw a picture representing each film, while I do the review in a voice-over.

I was really happy with that idea, and so I spent the first week of January preparing. I did some research on how people usually film themselves drawing for art videos, and fashioned a setup out of a pile of books and weights.

I was going to rank the list from least favourite to most favourite, so I thought I’d do the drawings in that order too. Starting from the absolute worst thing I saw in 2022 (Netflix’s animated abomination Marmaduke), I prepared the sketched outlines for all 30 drawings on little sheets of A5 card.

With that done, I thought I was making great time. Only a week in, and already finished the base for each picture? Wow, this’ll be great! I thought.

The next step was to actually start and film the drawings. And so I did. I drew a grand total of…

2.

Yep. 2 whole drawings out of 30, before I woke up the next day with the worst chilblains I’ve ever had, swelling my fingers up so much that I couldn’t close them around a pencil or paintbrush. A swollen spanner in the works indeed.

I get chilblains most winters, but they’ve always just been on my toes, which doesn’t bother me too much. This year though I was unlucky enough for them to appear on my fingers too, and of course they were on my left hand, which I use to draw!

I was undeniably quite displeased with this, as it’s set me back a bit, but I think they’re starting to heal a bit now, so I’m hoping and praying that by next week the swelling and stiffness will have eased enough that I can get back to work.

However, despite the setback, I’m not giving up yet. I might not be able to draw at the moment, but that doesn’t mean I can’t type out the script for the video on my phone or record the voice-over! There’s still a chance I can make that March deadline after all.

Anyway, there’s also been a silver lining to not being able to draw; it’s given me time to think about my other projects. And it seems my mind has taken full advantage of that fact, because it spewed out 3 separate new book ideas within the one day. I was seeing plot points and scenes almost faster than I could type them out, but I did get them all noted eventually, taking my total number of upcoming book plots to 14, I think, which is a little bit mad, but hey, the more the merrier!

Well, I didn’t expect it, but I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth! Overall I’ve been enjoying my January, (apart from the itchy fingers) and I hope you’re enjoying yours too. Thank you very much for reading!