My bad attitude & a new project - Why Am I Making This? Issue #17
Hello everyone!
It’s Julien! The artist whose newsletter you subscribe to and receive almost every month. The (wonderful) service I use to send my newsletters, Buttondown, recently updated its default archive format, showing a short preview of each newsletter in the archive, kind of like a blog. It’s lovely, and I was looking through my newsletter archives in their new format after sending last month’s brief newsletter. I was a little bit embarrassed, when presented with the first paragraph or two of all my newsletters, that in 2021 I almost invariably started them with something to the effect of “I’m doing bad”, “I’m feeling burned out”.
Have I really been doing so badly this year? Yes, the pandemic is still taking its toll, but all in all there have been periods of my life where I’ve been much less creatively fulfilled, and much more generally emo, than I am right now. I’ve grown a whole lot as a photographer this past year, have sold far more art than any year before, and learned to be a quasi-proficient potter. Not bad. I coexist very happily and peacefully with my partner, and have a regular job I like with people I like. What’s there to feel bad about??
Plenty of things, of course, but nothing major on a personal level. My bad attitude must just be some kind of combination of pandemic fog and the growing pains of becoming a ,,professional artist,, that I’ve talked about here before.
And of course, looking back over the last month with this newsletter in mind, I feel mostly the same as at the beginning of all my other newsletters. A little ragged and frantic, tired, ready to take a break. And I have already been taking a break, in a lot of important ways! I still have a few things to tell you about, but I’ve tried to take the pressure off myself this past month, and just follow wherever my interests took me. It’s been alright. I’ve still been plinking away at pottery, too. I still have shadows of an existential crisis (about nothing) in my mind, but that’s probably just a perennial character trait.
November pursuits
I started the month thinking I might do some more focused writing. It’s national novel writing month, which my partner is partaking in, and I thought I might try to work on something resembling a memoir about my ~personal artistic journey~. It went pretty well! I didn’t write that many words, but I did focus on the project relatively diligently for the first two weeks of the month. (Except when I was designing houses in the new Animal Crossing DLC.) That writing endeavor is what I alluded to at the end of my last newsletter. I don’t have too much to share from it yet - maybe in a little while.
But for the last week and a half, I’ve been doing something else! Something exciting, that I’ve been wanting to do for a long, long time, and occasionally mentioned here.
That’s right... I’ve been making a game!
Unlike other times (this past August and around a year ago, last December) that I’ve included screenshot mock-ups in this newsletter, this one is actually a still from a running game, where you can walk around a train platform as the little bunny character Ceres, and your friend Claudia waves at you. (You can see a video of it on my game-making Twitter here.) That’s all the game is so far. But it’s a lot, I mean a LOT more than I have ever done previously, and I’m excited to see where it goes from here.
And that’s all I have to say, I think! I’ll have more pottery photos to share with you in the next newsletter, the last one of the year. And maybe a few thoughts about the whole year, but probably not too many.
Thanks for following along with me.
Your friend,
Julien