Carpe Blogiem: 2021 – A Year In Review

Here are how things went for me in 2021:

The Good (What I did well or that went well)

• GURPS Realm Management was published at the beginning of the first quarter. It sold pretty well and I’m looking at doing a follow-up or three.
•  GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Denizens: Thieves was turned in after a good playtest and hopefully we’ll see if first quarter 2022. Really happy with how this one turned out.
• My Patreon continues to provide more than three-quarters of my income. I’m sitting at 99 patrons right now and I continued to try and figure out how to grow my base more. If I can make about 2.5 times more than what I’m currently making it opens up the door for all sorts of possibilities.
• I still have two other GURPS supplements that I’ve outlined and queried on and given tacit permission to write (as soon as I’m contracted for one of them at least).
• Grammar studies remained on the backburner, but I did enough studying each month to put this one in the win column. I just need to find more time is all.
• I wrote a book for the GURPS 2021 PDF Challenge Kickstarter: How to Be a GURPS GM: High-Powered Origins.
• I wrote some more stuff for a Kickstarter I cannot reveal yet.
• My wuxia campaign “Ten Thousand Jade Petals” finished off and the wheel turned to a new campaign “A Thousand Tiny Gods” which has been just as fun and is running 35+ sessions as of this writing.
• I create an “alt campaign” for the month of December thanks to some scheduling issues with players and the holidays. That too has been fun in an entirely different way and given me time to think about the main campaign while still entertaining players.
• I was on three podcasts this year. You can find them here, here, and here.
• I participated in NaNoWriMo2021 and finished it. I also wrote something I genuinely want to publish instead of tossing it in the Vault. More on that later.
• I got new headers for my blog courtesy of the awesome David Fico! They are so shiny. Scroll up and look at the new Carpe Blogiem header. Isn’t it shiny? It’s so shiny.

The Bad (What I could have done better or had no control over)

• I still didn’t publish anything in the fiction market in 2021. I missed my 2021 goal and went about another year without publishing anything. Sigh. BUT next year this should be different.
• My mother had back surgery and ended up having to convalesce up state. I miss her even though I call her every day.
• My entire extended and immediate family was exposed to COVID-19, both types of seasonal flu, and a nasty URI. Mom got it, but she’s recovered pretty well. Everyone else is still recovering because they got multiple infections where mom got only the two.
• They found a mass in my uncle’s brain…he will not be getting better. He will be on hospice soon. Between his heart, the cancer, and the mass on his brain I don’t know how long he’ll last.
• Posting remained at 1-2 entries per week with many weeks seeing none. I’d like to get to posting daily if possible, but that’s not a small amount of work.
• COVID-19 came out with two new variants. It has sucked. Enough said.
• Didn’t familiarize myself enough with Dungeons and Dragons and now it looks like they are doing a new edition…SIGH.
• Mental Health: It has sucked. For all of the above and much more I don’t feel like sharing. It’s been another bad year for me
• Physical Health: My weight continues fluxing badly (swinging 10% to 20% in either direction). My A1C was good. I got a CGM (Continuous Glucose Monitor) and that has helped a LOT.

The Ugly (I don’t know how to categorize this or too early to tell)