I must now face the wrath of the Dark Lord Char’Nagh, for I have failed him this year. I set a bunch of goals for myself at the start of 2017 and I not completed them all in time. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised about that, considering that I apparently labelled last year’s End of Year post as the “2017 Ender” so, as far as this site knows, the year was over before I even started on those goals. I doomed myself!

Realistically though, I did alright. Only three goals on my list were not completed. The sad thing is that two of them were the biggest projects I set for myself:

Obviously, one of those is Secret Government Robots. My webcomic is now several years past the time it was supposed to end. I swear I have worked on it. I’ve even got pages fully completed and ready to go up, but it remains incomplete. One obstacle I’ve got here is that I’ve finished the story in my head and in my notes, so all that is left is the drawing. The drawing is my least favourite part of doing a webcomic. I am a reluctant artist. And I don’t really have an audience here. This is a story I told for myself, and myself knows the ending. But I’ll get it done.

The other of my largest projects this year was to read the Decameron. I didn’t even get halfway through. Other reading-based goals included just “Read Ten Novels” and “Read Two Collections of Short Stories” and I beat those easily enough, then exceeded them. I spent lots of time reading extra books when I ought to have been reading the Decameron, because it was a written goal of mine. This is a symptom of my second obstacle toward getting these goals done, they were both pretty daunting. I put them off as long as possible, to focus on other things, and then as the end of the year drew close, I knew I wasn’t going to get them done, so I just didn’t do them.

Clearly I need to find another way to focus on large projects. Perhaps the best thing about setting those goals is that it’ll train me to recognize how I focus on things and I’ll be able to plan accordingly in the future. Perhaps.

(I mean, also I was sick for three months of 2017. The kind of sick where even reading was hard for me to focus on. I didn’t want to use that as an excuse, but I have to admit, it did happen. Let’s hope I won’t have that in 2018.)

As I said, there was a third project I did not complete. It’s just a minor little thing (though it got more complicated as I went on), and is about half done. I don’t feel as guilty about not finishing, and still intend to do so this year and put it on the site. I will say no more at this juncture.

So this year, I’ve set fewer goals of some kinds, and more goals of other kinds (expect more Beekeeper Reviews this year than last, for example), but I still feel like I’ve got two big projects (and one small one) hanging over my head. Let’s try this again…