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End-of-Year Post 2021
🕑 Added 2021-12-27 16:46:47 +0000 UTCHappy end-of-year, everyone. I hope your holidays were pleasant and restful if you have been celebrating.
We're in the final days of 2021.
It's been a long, strange, sometimes very tough year.
Violent attempted coups, boats stuck sideways in the Suez Canal, two brand new variants of everyone's least favourite respiratory virus have rolled across the globe, every industry seems to have gone on strike at least once - and some of them won their battles! - half the world seemed to catch fire, flood, get struck with severe snowstorms or devastating droughts at any given time, Reddit made stock-brokers collectively panic, NASA put another robot on Mars and launched a space telescope on Christmas, the US abandoned Afghanistan to the Taliban, some absurdly rich people spent 10 pointless minutes in space, Sweden managed to have two separate government crises in the span of a few months.
Every artist you know has been stuck in an exhausting struggle against art-thieves and corporations jumping aboard the NFT-craze or deciding to invest in blockchain technology that they insist is "carbon negative", even though we all know carbon offsets are a pointless exercise in blame-shifting that still results in environmental devastation.
While I have personally been spared from the worst parts of the pandemic, and COVID has not touched me or my immediate family, I have had my own health issues. My grandmother passed away in January. I have left the tiny village I live in four times in two years. The second shot of the vaccine had me sleeping for 24 hours straight. I've had several bouts of insomnia.
It's been weird, folks.
But despite it all, we made it all the way here.
In 2021, I drew some cat-and-fish goblins and invented more characters than you can shake a stick at. I finished GMing a 'short' campaign of Legacy: Life Among the Ruins that ended up lasting two years. I brought Grassblades back from hiatus - though with a changed update schedule. I wrote a small guide on how comic panels work (you can also grab it here, if you're on the $3 tier] I added two more NPCs to the Tome of Friends. I spent 5 months working on a weird west artbook and figured out a bunch of art-technique things in the process. I made three sword-tember paintings. I was gifted several thousand colourful post-its and used them recklessly.
I released three new ttrpgs - two of them entirely on my own, one of them co-created with a friend. I filled my notebooks with ideas for several more.
There were months this year when getting out of bed was a challenge I could barely overcome. There were months when I couldn't write or draw fast enough to keep up with my brain.
You stuck around for all of it, and I am immensely grateful for that.
So what lies ahead in 2022?
Well. Provided Patreon does not jump feet-first into the craze for environmentally-destructive clown coins and soulless monkey jpegs, I have a few things in mind.
I will be throwing my portfolio at a couple of Swedish publishers, to see if I can find some more freelance work. I'll be aiming for Swedish publishers specifically, because boy oh boy is it easier and more straightforward to just have people deposit my pay directly in my bank account rather than taking a detour through Paypal. However - I will be keeping my eyes open for any opportunity, and if someone outside of Sweden wants to offer me a job, my inbox is open. I promise to bring an adorable, friendly cat to every Zoom meeting.
Submissions for the Creators 4 Creators-grant are open until the end of March - and I'm hoping to apply. I'll be spending some of the upcoming months putting together a pitch for that, so expect to see concept art and page-WIPs for some graphic novel ideas in the future. And if I don't get the grant.... well. I'll have solid plans for a graphic novel, and can either pitch it elsewhere, or just make it on my own. Either way, you are in for Arthurian romance. Or strange adventures about a young girl lost on the shores of a nightmare sea. Or the story of an ancient guardian awakened from centuries of sleep to defend a shrine already gone to ruin.
Or maybe something else entirely. It's barely January: I have time to figure it out.
There will be more entries in the Tome of Friends, and more character-design polls. One of these days, the buff cat boys-option will win out.
I have several ttrpg ideas in various stage of completion - some of them bigger than others. Hopefully, 2022 is the year when I bring one of the bigger ones to a stage where they can be playtested. Maybe in a handful of months, you will sail strange seas, or run through the streets of a dreaming city, or take back lost things and rebuild your home in a world claimed by darkness.
Some of the ideas that poured out of my brain this year were visual-novel shaped, so maybe 2022 is the year when I finally figure out how Ren'py works, and bring you murder-mystery romances, or stories of a city sinking into the sea.
(for the curious, I threw some moodboards for these various projects up on Twitter a while ago)
As Pandemic Year 3 looms ahead of us, I know better than to set too many things in stone, because who knows what strange mire we'll find ourselves in a few months from now. But I am willing to wade into the coming year with a little bit of hope and a whole suitcase of ideas.
I hope to see you on the other side.
Comments
Anna Landin
I would love to do a physical artbook, but printing and shipping is *expensive* - and with Kickstarter taking a flying leap into blockchain-technology garbage, crowdfunding it would be tricky. So unless you've got a publisher you'd like to bribe, for now, digital artbooks will have to do! https://annalandin.gumroad.com/
StLOrca
I would pay CASH MONEY for an Anna Landin artbook. CASH. MONEY.
