Every Day, We Can Start Again

Strange that I haven’t posted anything about the change from one year to the next. I’m normally committed to checking in at the end of the year about my progress and setting some goals or plans on how to move forward. And this year has been no exception — the only difference was this was a more private exploration.

At the end of December and early January, I worked through The Year Compass, a booklet of questions aimed at helping to close out the previous year and open the next one. The booklet asks about every aspect of your life, from family and relationships to health, spirituality, and career.

I worked through the booklet’s questions in my journal, cutting up the pages to give myself as much room as needed to fully work through my answers. The hands on process allowed me to slow down and really process my feelings, as well as inspiring me to play with collage and artwork alongside my answers.

While working through The Year Compass, I was able to dredge up and recontextualize my feelings over what’s happened this past year and explore my mental health struggles, as well as provide a space to celebrate my wins. It can be hard to remember the good is interwoven with the struggles — and I have had my share of both over this last year. After exploring the past, the, the questions step into the future, providing a sense of focus for the coming year, which I always appreciate.

While I’m not going to share the full breadth of my personal exploration, I will say that The Year Compass is lovely, and I highly recommend it to others.

A Few Things That Made My 2024

1. Necessary Poisons, my new collection of found poetry, was published by Interstellar Flight Press. It’s my most surreal collection of poetry, drawing on imagery of manuscripts, writing, poisonous plants, and bloodshed to explore the narrator’s sense of identity and place in the world.

2. My narrative design work on Monochrome Heights — and even better, seeing scenes I wrote or edited being come to life through art and animation. Working with Patrick Knisely on this project has been (and continues to be) a genuine delight.

3. I actively engaged with creative communities by attending and participating in open mics and going to two major industry events, including:

   • The Game Developers Conference (GDC 2024) in March, where I connected with Game Writing Master Class alumni, attended fascinating presentations on narrative design and game writing, participated in various social events, and played demos for a variety of indie games.

   • The World Fantasy Convention in November, where I was able to listen to panels on writing fiction and poetry, world building, and other narrative techniques and connect with fellow poets and writers to gush about our favorite works.

4. I expanded my skills and knowledge in game writing by taking The Narrative Department’s Game Writing Master Class II, which delves deeper into the process of game writing and narrative design, providing insights into story genre versus game genre, branching narratives, cinematics, quests, and so on. I loved the deep analysis and creative projects involved.

5. I read some really amazing books last year, so much so that it was hard to narrow down my favorites — same with games and media.

Planting Small Daily Seeds in 2025

I’m not really interested in creating a list of goals or resolutions for the year — though I have plenty of those. The to-do lists abound (stored in journals, random pieces of notepaper, and various computer apps), and these lists seem to grow into unending piles as more and more projects get added.

Rather, the change I want to create in my life does not hinge on the symbolic turning of one year to the next. Every day is an opportunity to start again, and I’m trying to keep that in mind as I shift my habits to allow for more balance in my life.

One of the ways I’m attempting to make that shift is to play around with gamification. A few weeks ago, I watched a video on “The Hidden Costs of Gamification.” While the video primarily focused on how gamification can be predatory, it also highlighted the ways it can be productive, such as through Duolingo for language learning.

Another recommended example is the app, Habitica, which attempts to help with positive habit forming by turning the process into a role-playing game (RPG). Since I’ve been struggling to improve my daily routines, I decided to give it a try, mostly as an experiment.

Habitica allows the user to set daily, weekly, and monthly tasks, as well as a to-do list. Right now, my daily tasks include things like my skin care routine, flossing, stretching, meditation, and journalling. All of these are simple things that take no more than 5-15 minutes to complete, but nevertheless make small, important contributions to neglected areas of my life. Any tasks completed by the end of the day provide gold and health and experience points, while failure to complete tasks causes the avatar to loose health.

While app also allows the user to take their character on quests and fight bosses, that is not an aspect that I’ve played around with yet. Presumably, leveling up the character will help the user complete these quests and battles. However, I don’t find myself particularly drawn to this aspect of the app, so this area of the gamification isn’t all that helpful.

What does work for me is the color grading and notification badges. The color grading is used to indicate how often the user is engaging in a task. When first entered in the list, the task is yellow (neutral). As the task is completed, it turns green and the blue. When not completed, it slowly turns orange and then red. It’s a great visual indicator as to what I’ve been neglecting.

The notifications badges are basically the same kind of badges on any of my iPhone apps — a little circle with a number in it. I have an aversion to seeing those little badges and tend to make a concerted effort to clear them (i.e., read the message). For Habitica, this is extremely helpful, since the only way to clear the badges is to complete the task, creating a powerful draw for me to actually do the thing.

After a couple of weeks, I’m enjoying Habitica. It is mostly having the effect I want it to. While I’m not necessarily completing 100% of my daily tasks, I am doing them more often than never, which was where I was at before. So, it’s good enough for now. A friend also told me about Finch, an alternative gamified daily care app, and I’m tempted to download that one as well and compare the two.

What I’ve Been Working On

Patrick Knisely (indie dev of One Frog Games) and I have been working hard on finalizing the narrative for Monochrome Heights. The story is coming together and I’m delighted to see these scenes play out in the actual game. The goal is for the finished game to launch within the next couple of months (if all goes well), and I’m excited to share it with you all. Wishlist an play the demo on Steam.

I’ve also published two poems recently:

• “The Name of the Corpse, Pt. II” in Scuzzbucket

• “Dorothy Gale: Our Lady of Homecoming” in Scribe

Good Reads

Theodora Goss points out that nothing is ever wasted, not even the time watching YouTube videos or scrolling news feeds or reading fashion magazines: