I really do try to avoid the new-year stampede of resolutions and bullet journals and whatnot. But I guess I'm not as iconoclastic as I imagine myself, and as I sit down to write a post like this, having just dated a little minimalistic paper daily planner page... welp. This time for sure, Rocky.

My 2024 plans got written and then, for the most part, not referred to again. I could put them on a post-it on the wall above my monitor, but they'd become part of the scenery to my ADHD brain and I would once again be genuinely surprised when I went to write the annual post. At any rate, let's look at whether I randomly achieved my four 2024 goals.

The hard deadline

"[I]f the business isn't making money, or at least on a definite track to make money, by midyear, I'm going to stop pretending it isn't just a hobby."

This one I didn't forget. It sort of hung over my head all year and, well, I have kind of done it? I concluded that selling designs, especially selling designs on a monthly basis, wasn't going to turn into a profitable venture. You can kind of see the track of that in the designs this year. I started out with Big! Plans! Year of the Dragon and all. And then I immediately hit a wall with the Dragon Box in March, which you haven't even seen previews of because I wanted to get the engineering right and just couldn't. (I may have had a breakthrough on it but I don't have time to work on it right now).

No worries, I'll just do the Asian Dragon for Asian New Year and: wall. I teased its clouds at one point.

You can kind of see the the wall in the next three designs: the bee emoji pack, the faux monstera, and the hammerhead shark. Nothing wrong with them, they're serviceable designs, but they're not the headliners my monthly rewards need to be. My "hard" deadline slipped, of course: the instant I decided "close it down at the end of June" my creative block broke free and I revised it to "at the end of the year." And it was great, I had designs I was very proud of. A rapid-response Moo Deng!

None of them took off, either in individual sales or new members. I think I got... one? new member in the last six months? And so that was it.

The newsletter

My sword of Damocles! I have newsletter subscribers, and a draft that has literally been renamed from November Newsletter to December Newsletter and needs renamed January. Because I wanted to wait for the Indicolite Dragon to be finished and it hasn't happened for health reasons. And a little bit of a wall: getting the eyes right on the tiny head has been a whole situation and I think I'm going to scrap the idea and just make a clay head (and feet) at that size. I've been stubbornly insisting on "the embroidery machine means I can do all-fabric and so I MUST do all-fabric" and... no.

Social media blitz

Over the last year I came to the conclusion that I can't make myself do social media "right." I have a personal Bluesky account where I dump my stupid ideas and get-off-my-lawns, and a business Bluesky account where I post WIPs (a link is in the header) and I have basically abandoned FB/IG except when I have something finished to show (so: never, lately). It is what it is.

Linkbacks

I like to think I did a pretty good job of boosting other artists. I curate some pretty neat Bluesky feeds, which help with discovery of machine embroiderers and doll/plushie makers, and if I buy something neat from someone I post about it. If anyone did the same sort of thing for me, I gotta admit it was undetectable. I've got a couple of superfans who regularly cheer me up in Discords, but who aren't big social-media users. Low sales are disheartening, but zero feedback is worse.

2025 in plans