2016 you've been a real kick in the dick

Like it says in the title. Such an enormously tall pile of bullshit was dropped onto the end of the year it skews the years overall worth sharply towards the negative side of things. It's too much to really even start listing without feeling the existential nausea kick in hard, so that's not what I'm gonna do here. I don't want to wallow in the misery of 2016. This is going to be all about making 2017 such a great year that it more than makes up for the events of 2016.

NaNoWriMo was a success. 52,678 words during the month of November. After it was over I lost track of the story. I didn't lose the story itself, but life and the holidays just drew me away from it with a suddenness I hadn't been prepared to handle. I feel like I learned a lot in the process of writing my story. I know the story was far from over or even really begun properly after all the words I put into it. I am hoping to spend some time in the start of this year to write up some of the lessons I learned from it for myself. Not as sage advice to pass on to others, but more to help my own understanding of how the process works for me so I can give it another go. I am gonna with the story I have so far, maybe finish it up if I can, or find a way to trim the size of the story I had in mind down. It snowballs every time I start to work on it though.

I've got a new camera it doesn't have a view screen for you to see the pictures you take with it, but it is digital so it has a massive and easy to access storage. I have always liked small toy digital cameras that take weird pictures I can't be sure will turn out until after I check them on a computer. I never liked the idea of taking 100 pictures for the 1 that you will show the world. That's fine for a professional photographer, but nothing I really need for myself. I'm hoping that I'll be able to use this year as a means to get handy at taking pictures with it. If not it will be fun at least to take pictures from my life for myself.

I've got a trip to central NY planned for the end of January to visit my family. My only thoughts have been on how cold it will be. Long Beach has been very cold lately, but it's still nothing compared to the frozen north country I'll need to trek through to visit my family. All of my colder clothes have slowly been moved out of my wardrobe over the years out here in the Southern California weather. Frost bitten extremities aside, it'll be nice to see my family again. It's been 3 or 4 years. That's the trouble of living with your younger self's life choices. Still trying to fix most of those.

I don't know what sort of plan I have for this blog in the coming year. I guess I'll just take it as it happens and see what I can get out of it. Maybe I should branch out to an easier format. Podcast or youtube channel or something. That'd be a lot easier for me to update and produce content to fill. My brother had mentioned some ideas before, but I don't ever know how serious to take his ideas.

Well here's to hoping 2017 turns out better than it looks.