Well, nothing about last year's journal has aged well, huh? :y

All things considered, 2020 was a pretty screwy year (to put it lightly). It seemed like it started fairly well for most people I know, and it started well for me, too - I was getting out of the house and doing things just for fun more often (after my school semesters in 2019 put my anxiety into crunch-mode), I was getting into some new hobbies, and I had some really neat games to look forward to. Not only that, but I was motivating to keep going on Melemele ke Ola, and had managed to make decent headway into chapter 12 during February.

Then the pandemic happened and the entire world was basically upended. I actually felt pretty okay at first, mostly because getting to stay home and do Zoom sessions for class instead of driving to and from campus was way, way more relaxing than it might sound. Bonding with friends and classmates over New Horizons helped too, and slowly growing my island in-game gave me the inspiration to start on an Animal Crossing fic I posted to my AO3 and FF.net accounts, the first purely-SFW story I've written in a long while. Once the semester ended, though, I started to feel the cabin fever. It's a little ironic: I spend all of 2019 worrying about my finances and feeling like I can't take time off or go out to do something fun because I've got work to do, and then in 2020 I feel ready to get out and live life but end up having to coop myself up for safety's sake.

It also meant that my creative block from last year didn't quite go away as much as I'd like, which is why I haven't doodled a lot of stuff and why I haven't written many lewdfics or anything. It has, on the other hand, been a pretty okay year as far as worldbuilding goes, though I'm still having trouble figuring out how I want to post it and present it. Tumblr was very good for making little pages for worldbuilding and organizing it in a straightforward way; I'm less inclined to upload what amounts to a long Notepad file to FA without any images or anything to go with it. I may post some of the stuff I've worldbuilt later on in 2021, but we'll have to see. Either way, I actually rounded out and expanded on the whole "horny sex-positive anthro Pokemon world" thing a lot, and I really do want to share it with folks.

I also think the pandemic helped me put less pressure on myself as far as creative stuff goes. I have a hard time of worrying and nagging myself to write this or that and get overwhelmed by my own planning, which then ends up manifesting as undue self-criticism. With the way the world was this year, though, it was much easier for me to consider how crazy everything was and to tell myself "it's alright to put things off, just try your best to get through things". On some level it might have just been laziness, but again, maybe that's just the self-critical part of me speaking. Hard to say. :u

I can't really promise anything super-major as far as lewdfics or doodles go in 2021, but I have had a bit more creative energy since the winter semester ended, and I have made progress on both Melemele ke Ola, a couple of doodles, and a tiny bit of progress on the New Horizons story. But given how precarious things still are, I'm going to continue taking it easy and just doing things whenever I have the energy and drive to do them. The stuff that I have worked on I've enjoyed working on a lot, and as long as I can keep my anxiety in check, I'm sure I'll improve more and more. So here's hoping that my 2021 goes well, and I hope everyone else's 2021 goes well too! :3