Well, here we are again, my Hordeling. The beginning of another year. Sort of an arbitrary designation of a temporal unit. I mean, really, why do we assign significance to this particular day as the start of a ‘year’? We could start the year on May 5, or July 4, or any other day. I guess we just roll with it for convenience sake.
Anyway, the beginning of the year is when people renew their determination to making their lives better. Most people make resolutions, even though they abandon them by mid-February. I gave up making resolutions some time ago. It takes a lot just to make it through each day so I try not to commit to something I know I’m likely to give up on anyway.
That’s not to say I don’t have things I want to do. I have writing goals, and income goals, and just plain living goals. But I’m also aware of the vagaries of Life and the whims of Fortune. As the saying goes “If you wish to amuse the gods, tell them your plans.” Goals are different than resolutions. Goals have a definite end, something you want to achieve, and steps on how you plan to achieve it. A resolution is a statement of something you want to change. No plan, no steps to get there. That’s why most people abandon them.
I’m just hoping to be able to get back to some semblance of control over my life. I know, control is an illusion, but I’d like to feel in control, instead of feeling like I’m constantly being kicked around by circumstances arising during the day. The mental churn is still going but not as badly as it had been in the past.
In the meantime, I’m participating in two challenges. They both come from the tabletop role-playing game (ttrpg) community. The first challenge is to create a character you want to play, every day, through the month of January. It doesn’t specify a game system, or even sticking with one game system, just as long as you have thirty-one (31) characters at the end of the month. I’m modifying the challenge a bit by trying to come up with a character each day to use in my stories. I figure if I’ve got characters, the Muse will want to play with them.
The other challenge I’m trying is the year-long megadungeon creation challenge. In this challenge, every day you create a room for a dungeon crawl. Each month is a level of the dungeon. So, in January you create the first level of the dungeon, with thirty-one rooms in it. In February you’ll create the second level of the dungeon and it will have twenty-eight (28) rooms in it. At the end of the year you have a twelve level dungeon with a total of three hundred and sixty-five (365) rooms in it. I started one last year and made it through the first week or so of February before the project fell by the wayside.
So my resolutions, if I were to make any, are to stick with the challenges. My goals are to work on these two projects first thing in the morning each day before the day gets all chaotic on me. I’m hoping these amuse the Muse and spur her on to creating more storylines for me.
Whether you make resolutions or set goals or none of the above, I hope Life treats you well over the next three hundred and sixty-five days, my Hordeling.
If you’d like to support my efforts, why not buy me a chocolate chip cookie through my Ko-Fi page? https://ko-fi.com/jhusum