Somehow, it has already been a year since my previous retrospective.

My intention for this blog was to update it every now and then with what I'm working on, but this year I was so inundated with work and stress that I didn't actually find the time to do that. It's a shame; a lot of the fun stuff I was looking forward to this year fell to the wayside, but that doesn't mean I didn't do some great stuff. I'll cover the good before I get into the bad.

Personal accomplishments

  • I gave my studio a wee makeover! I've been very jealous of some of my friends' studios for a while and wanted to spruce mine up. I had a second desk and huge shelf of Quindrie books and supplies stuffed in here with me, but this year I finally shifted all that out into another room and set up a cosy corner for friends to join me for work hangs, or for my partner to hang out with me while I do admin. I now actually look forward to spending time in here and I love it! Gaze upon my jolteon shelf. I have like 50 jolteons.

  • I picked Japanese back up! This year I booked a big trip to Tokyo with my family and some friends. I lived in Japan for six and a half years when I was younger, but I attended an English-speaking school and could barely speak passably. For this 3 week trip, I wanted to really launch into Japanese study so I could confidently help my fellow travellers navigate. Tokyo is a very English-friendly city to visit if you're trying to find your way around, but it's still pretty important to speak some Japanese if you want more than the barebones tourist experience, so I picked Wanikani* back up and started working my way through some textbooks I've acquired. I also started some one-on-one Japanese lessons with an online tutor which has been really good to build my confidence. I have a pretty good grasp of grammar, it's mostly vocab that I'm missing, though I also definitely struggle with being self-conscious of making mistakes when I speak another language and it's something I really tried to power through when I was in Japan. I'm pleased with what I managed and I'm determined to really build my vocabulary and confidence for my next trip, whenever that is.

  • My fiance moved country to live with me! :)

Creative accomplishments

  • I consistently did figure drawing! I managed 19 figure drawing sessions this year, which I've been doing online with friends every two weeks, and it's been a great way to keep myself focused because if I'm running the session then I have to go. I do all my drawings with a ballpoint pen and use highlighter or marker for undersketches for longer poses, and I can see real progress in my line confidence now compared to the start of the year. It's also been a great excuse to regularly call a bunch of my friends and talk shit. I love my friends!!!

  • We crowdfunded Ruin of the House of the Divine Visage! This is the graphic novel my partner and I had been working on for two years by the time the Kickstarter rolled around and we were incredibly excited to finally show it off to everyone. The campaign went better than we could have imagined; we were asking for £5,000 and my joke goal I wanted to reach was £13,000. I never thought we'd actually reach that £13,000. We were blown away and so touched at the reception for our wee graphic novel. We're still waiting for the physical books to be delivered but if you want to read the comic for yourself you can get a PDF copy over on itch.io. It's also running as a free-to-read webcomic and Part I just ended over on the website!

  • I started drawing Inhibit: Book Three! I will be completely honest with you; there was a point at the start of the year where I was thinking about dropping Inhibit. There are a lot of knots in Book Three that I still need to untangle, which isn't new to me; the whole comic has been a series of knots I've left to sort until the last minute (the outline for the Larner chapter was basically "they go to Larner and get the juice" until a year or so until I started scripting it). But I've been working on this dumb little story since I was 17 and have reworked the beginning so many times that I was very confident about the first book, fairly confident about the second, and have barely touched the third. I was really scared jumping into it that it would be a terrible conclusion to the story and that I'd lost my motivation entirely. I'm still puzzling over certain elements but I'm so glad I bit the bullet and just started, because I'm really happy with how everything is turning out now.

    One of the big things I wanted to work on with this last Inhibit book was backgrounds. To put it bluntly, my backgrounds are shit. They're awful. They're square featureless boxes with very few details because I'm not a backgrounds or environments guy, I just like drawing people freaking out. So for Book Three I finally caved and decided to trace as much as I wanted. This isn't the first time I've done this; a bunch of the Larner backgrounds are sets I built in the Sims and then traced over. One of my favourite details is that any microscope in this scene is actually a little model rocket (check out the comparison on the left). But this time alongside Sims sets, I went out and took reference pics to trace or trawled Google Maps for locations. It's got me actually excited about backgrounds for the first time ever and the pages are coming out killer as a result. Who cares!! Trace if you want!!! And learn how to resize and freely place items in the Sims bc it's a lot of fun to build environments.

Career accomplishments

  • Quindrie Press comics received multiple nominations! My heart is bursting with pride for the 2023 comic collection! Every single comic in that collection won or was nominated for an award this year:
    • Catharsis by Ell J Walker, nominated for Best Short Comic and Best Up & Coming Talent (Selkie Awards 2024)
    • Find a Seat by Faye Stacey, nominated for Outstanding Minicomic (Ignatz Awards 2024)
    • Flesh & Flora by NORRIE, nominated for Best Short Comic and Best Up & Coming Talent (Selkie Awards 2024)
    • Witching Hour by Beth Fuller, winner of Best Colourist (Broken Frontier Awards 2023)
    I was also very pleased that Inhibit: Book Two was nominated for two Selkie Awards as well, Best Graphic Novel and Best Narrative! It feels so good to have your work recognised and I'm over the moon that Scotland has a real comic award again after several years of no SICBAs.

  • I ran two conventions! This year, alongside the second TAGS Fest, Brian and I worked as co-programmers for ECAF, a local artist-favourite convention that I've been tabling at for a long time. The previous programmer is no longer working on the event so the hosts invited us to take over for the year and I'm very grateful for the opportunity. We ran five talks at ECAF 2024, two of which were presentations from solo creators and three of which were discussion panels with two creators and moderated by myself. By some sick twist of fate, ECAF took place on the ONE day that a freak snowstorm hit Edinburgh, but the fair was bustling all day and as far as I could tell there was never a noticeable lull. TAGS Fest also seemed to go great, with higher footfall than last year and great feedback from every vendor I spoke to. Brian and I are working on our report on how TAGS Fest 2024 went with concrete numbers, so that should come out by the start of 2025. We have big plans for TAGS Fest 2025 and I'm excited to see if we can pull it off!

Top books & comics I read this year

Bro I barely read this year. I gotta get off my fucking phone.

  • A Guest in the House by Em Carroll
  • Step by Bloody Step by Si Spurrier & Matias Bergara

Top songs I discovered this year

I really struggled to listen to music this year; another symptom of generally feeling burnt out and stressed, I think. I mostly wanted to listen to ASMR or video essays that could distract me. Here's the new songs I had on repeat:

  • Stop Speaking by Middle Sattre - I heard this song live at SXSW this year and it made me weep.
  • Fighting Fish by Dessa
  • Soap by The Oh Hellos
  • Madeleine by Good Kid
  • EDIT: Haunted by Spanish Love Songs (my partner sent me this song literally as I told him that I finished this blogpost and now I need to add it here)
  • EDIT 2: WE'VE GOT THE MOVES by Electric Callboy (we discovered this song by accident on Christmas Eve and immediately became obsessed???)

And some old gems:

Top things I watched this year

Top games I played this year

  • Chants of Sennaar
  • Balatro
  • The Case of the Golden Idol

Did I achieve what I wanted this year?

As mentioned, I really struggled with burnout and juggling multiple projects this year, one of which was the lengthy, soul-crushing, and expensive process to sort my partner's visa. 2024 was meant to be a year of rest from publishing projects, but I ended up printing The Second Safest Mountain (which fucking RULES and I'm so glad I got to work on a print edition) and Ruin, meaning now 2025 needs to be a bit of a break year. To give myself a bit of a break and more time to work on Inhibit before it returns in the summer, I opened Quindrie Press up for submissions for completed comics, with the intention of crowdfunding them in the second half of the year. As much as I love working alongside artists as they create a comic from scratch, I don't currently have the mental resources to make it viable, let alone the money to pay for an assistant. I need to take a step back from something, and right now that thing is Quindrie, at least for a few months as I finish up other things and um get fucking married.

I had several goals for 2024 that I laid out in my previous retrospective so lemme look at those:

  • Ruin of the House of the Divine Visage: Yep! Printed that! It looks sick!! I just want the rest of the books to arrive already!!!!!
  • Where is Charlie King?: Nope. Spire and I have actually been thinking of reworking this project, but it's still roiling around in the soup of Things I Wanna Do.
  • Build-A-Language zine: Nope. Not even thought about it once this year.
  • Start drawing Inhibit: Book Three: Yep. I've been making great progress.
  • A short comic: hahahahahahaha
  • Improve my site: I've barely touched the site this year other than to update my language catalogue every now and then.
  • Get buff: Nope!
  • Stop scrolling: GOD I WISH

That all being said... whatever. I've been giving myself a hard time for not meeting arbitrary goals, but there's a lot of stuff I did this year that I haven't listed here that I did do, stuff that isn't an "accomplishment". I saw Hadestown live, my favourite musical. I went on two holidays with friends who I adore. My partner and friends conspired to give me an incredible surprise weekend. I went to SXSW for a week of gigs. I made handbound notebooks, I learned to make paper, I drew for fun for the first time in years. I need to stop qualifying how good a year was based on how much I physically managed to accomplish.

Plans for 2025

My goals for this year aren't so much individual projects to work on and tick off on a list, more stuff I think would be cool and fun.

  • Exercise! Okay, so "get buff" maybe was too ambitious. But this year I want to at least exercise more in some way. I just hate working out, it's so painfully boring. We'll see.
  • Successfully pull off Mystery Inhibit Thing! I'm not saying what this one is. But it's happening and it would be cool if it worked out.
  • Read a novel in Japanese! I have a couple of YA short story collections I picked up in Japan, as well as a Minecraft novel lmao, so I'd like to progress enough in my Japanese reading skill that I can finish a book. That would be amazing.
  • Attend ECCC or VanCAF! Alongside TCAF, ECCC and VanCAF have been on my list of North American cons that I'd love to attend some day. I'm hoping that this year I might actually be able to go to one (as a punter, not a tabler).
  • Collaborate with my partner on a non-story/comic thing! He's been getting into embroidery and I want us to make a quilt together :)

That's it for this year. 2025 is the year I get married, and the 10 year anniversary of Inhibit. It's fucking insane that almost everything I have in my life right now is because I started to write an angsty little story in high school.

Have a wonderful end to the year.