Out with the old year, in with the new year! You know what that means...

(Let's pretend last January 1st never happened, hm?)

Since I didn't make any public resolutions in 2015 (or do much of anything, really), we'll do a brief recap of 2014's goals instead:

  • I did in fact finish the first draft of my chapterfic The Best at Second-Best (the one that's basically FRLG from Blue's point of view). Said draft is extremely shaky and pending a lot of revision, but it does feel nice to have that under my belt.
  • I also completed and posted the webcomic recommendations, although I still have yet to update the fic recs. Still, with that plus a few other tiny tidbits, that's a lot more that I got done in 2014 than the shameful silence that was last year.
  • Didn't manage bi-weekly Phoenixdex updates, or even anything close to that. Of course, part of that was because in the second half of the year I was busy revamping the site itself, so I suppose I have a tiny excuse in that case.

All in all, not too shabby, at least given my track record. I'm definitely proud of the fact that I got that draft done, anyway. I don't forsee 2016 being an extremely busy year for AO in particular, but there are most certainly some goodies in the works for this place as well as my other projects.

Here's what I'd like to do this year:

Update the Phoenixdex once per month. I know I've set goals like this in the past and they never seemed to pan out, but a monthly-ish schedule should definitely be manageable. In fact, I actually did update at least once per month in 2015, save for January and February (because, again, I was up to my ears in major site revampage) and April (because I was recovering from said major site revampage). I see absolutely no reason that I can't keep that schedule up. Hopefully there'll be some more region-related updates (characters, locations, etc.) and a few other surprises in addition to new fakemon.

Finish another chapterfic draft. This one doesn't have a title yet, but in a nutshell it's a Canterbury Tales-esque story/collection of short stories set in the big ridiculous Pokémon fantasy worldbuilding project I've been poking at for a while. Those of you who follow me on Tumblr are all too familiar with this nonsense, of course. I had intended to spend the majority of my pseudo-NaNo working on organizing said worldbuilding project, but instead some of that time was accidentally spent getting really excited about this new idea and now I'm looking forward to taking it for a spin. Most of January will probably be dedicated to a different fic and a few other things, but I'm hoping I can get stuck in come February and have a draft ready for revision by the end of December.

Read and review more fanfics. There are several friends' stories that I'm not caught up with because I'm awesome like that, first off, but I do want to get back into the swing of reviewing and of enjoying fanfiction in general. (Feel free to toss any recs my way, by the by.)

Complete the two fancy secret new projects. These are, of course, fancy and secret, and as such I don't want to say too much about them just yet. I will say that I think they'll be pretty handy for those of you with a more creative bent, though. One of these is more complicated than the other; I'd like to have the first version of the simple one up in June or so, and the initial release of the more complex one will hopefully be good to go by Altered Origin's ninth birthday in early December.

A few other vague, miscellaneous things. 721 mini definitely needs to pick up the pace again if I want to put a significant dent in it before Gen 7 happens. Believe it or not I still haven't given up on the idea of interactive fanfiction, and it'd be cool if I could find some time to do some experimenting there. My worldbuilding organization still isn't finished in spite of a successful NaNo, so there's still more to do there, and hopefully even something to show for it all later. I'm also working my way through a big, unwieldy video game backlog, which has no direct bearing on any of my projects but is vaguely fandom-related and, more importantly, may even result in an additional LP or two. We'll see!

I was hoping to keep 2016 relatively low key, but it looks like I'm already going to be busy, busy, busy. I think a lot of these goals are fairly manageable, though! Hopefully those won't be famous last words, and here's looking forward to a productive and entertaining new year!