Hey, now that we’ve begun the last chapter of the story, I might as well reveal that I have completely finished Secret Government Robots. And it’s only about five years late and about four years after I lost interest.

The fact is, I enjoyed writing SecGov a heckuva lot more than I ever enjoyed drawing it, so once I had plotted out the end of things, I barely wanted to put the effort into finishing the art. This is especially true because my limited artistic skills I often had to cut things that I would have liked in there, but which I simply didn’t have the skill to draw. Things were simply a lot better in my head and it was disheartening to see the final product.

Not that it went the way I expected while writing either. The very original concept for the strip was just a gag strip through which I’d secretly build up a bit of lore for the fictional universe that is home to other story ideas I have. That quickly morphed into an idea focused around SecGov City, where I originally planned to tell different stories related only in that they were set in the same Robot city. Instead, I came up with an overarching plot and ruined that plan. Typical PDR. I did build up some of that lore I originally aimed for, though more clumsily than intended, because I had to drop big ideas without spoiling the stuff I want for those other stories.

Still, I don’t fully hate it or anything. I’m glad I got the thing concluded. There are characters in there I would absolutely like to revisit. I even have an idea for a spinoff that would be more focused, but there is no way I could draw it, so it will likely never manifest.

Anyway, SecGov is basically over and that’s good. Maybe someday someone will read it.

Since January 2013, I’ve been doing those posts on Sundays where I put up sketches of characters and describe them and such. It’s been fun. It was mostly an attempt to keep me doing something every week, while also expanding on the fictional universes I enjoy creating so much.

Since July 2015, I have also, not in the “public” view that is this website, been creating a tabletop RPG that takes place in my fictional universe(s). It’s a lot of work because, for some reason, I decided to build it from scratch, and I have pretty minimal experience with such RPGs to begin with. But I’ve greatly enjoyed doing it.

But these two projects, pretty time consuming as they are, have had an unintended result. While I have now a lot of raw material about my universes, I haven’t gained all that much new actual story content set in those universes. So now I’m gonna stop doing the Super Sunday sketches regularly (they will still pop up on occasion when I can’t think of anything else or what have you), and will try to use Sundays for actual story content, or perhaps discussion of the PDR RPG. I haven’t decided just yet.

Let’s see how this goes.

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…

Since I’ve been free of illness, I have had less of a need to do updates, but I’ve got some time so I will do so right now:

The big thing this week was a minor, but expensive, car problem. I am used to one big car problem every winter, except for last winter when the car did not break down, but I did. So, I don’t know if the recent problems are a leftover from last winter, or if this is the first and only problem that I will have until this time next year. Let’s hope for that one. Anyway, it was just a case of replacing the rotors. Cost me about seven hundred bucks. Coulda been worse.

Apart from that, little to report. I am trying to work my way through the goals I set for myself to accomplish in 2017. I am almost done goals related to reading and have been making progress on goals related to writing. One goal that I have really been slacking at is Secret Government Robots. It’s as if I have this mental block where I want to get all the other goals done so I can focus on it, but that just leads to me not working on it. And 2017 is nearing completion, so I had better get going.

The year of 2016 is coming to a close and the Dark Lord Char’Nagh is here to demolish what came before and hopefully replace it with something better. Hail the Darkness of Char’Nagh!

“This is definitely the year that Secret Government Robots will be ending,” I wrote last year. Oops. I am afraid that after the monetary issues that started my year, I fell out of the habit of doing the comic, and never really got back into it. It’s been a rough year in many ways and I haven’t been as productive as I would have liked. The only real upside, if it can be called that, is that it seems like it has been a rough year for a lot of people, so if nothing else, I am kind of in the zeitgeist. That counts for something, right? Right?

Anyway, I’m going to hopefully get SecGov done for real this year. I’ve actually got about fifty pages pencilled that I “just” need to scan, ink, color, and letter. But that fifty is, I estimate, only about half of what is left. But once I start getting them online, they’ll all follow. Otherwise, what creative energies I did expend in 2016 have been on projects that don’t really have any immediate payoff (as well as the creation of a host of alien species that nobody but me has any interest in). Ideally, in 2017 I will get SecGov done so that, if nothing else, I can feel less guilty when I work on other things. I’ve said it before, but it is a good thing I don’t have an audience craving this stuff or I’d feel even more pressure.

Haiku!

Potatoes for sale!
Get your fresh potatoes here!
But them, you morons!

In other news, the little add-on thing that was putting my Twitter posts onto this site seems to have ceased to function and I have no idea how to replace it. Without those little blurbs, this site seems to have even less content than I can condone. I guess I will have to start to try doing little post here now and then too. Geez. So much work.

Anyway, 2017. Let’s go.