Goodbye 2022, Hello 2023!

Salutations fellow passengers! I sincerely hope that you had an amazing 2022.

Wishing everyone a glorious year ahead — where all your hopes and dreams manifest and bring to you the warmest gifts that magic and wonder can create.

Speaking of which, as we reach the end of another planetary revolution I sit here pondering if it was worth it; and though there were certain hits and misses; worth it, it was. With strange twists. And many, many lessons uncovered.

To claim a few

I got to work with people I had literally dreamt of working with. I have never been more grateful for the opportunities that come my way. Truly. It’s absolutely mental!

Thanks to Hugo and Makan — some of my work with AGORAVERSE got presented at Octobre Numérique – Faire Monde, France.

Finished testing the supply chain and product testing pipelines for Bandar Chhaap — The shiny new merchandise store.

Setup the website and blogs, and went from 0 to a 1,000 visitors. Which is not much in numbers, but I feel the quality of the interaction was much better than the random Insta count that I was keeping before. In total I posted a total of 80 posts spread across Kacchi Drawings, Stories & Signals which were meant to be a testing ground for creating a content engine of sorts.

Finished the first draft of ‘The Thousand Arms’ at 1,20,000 words. To my mind this is insane. Never thought I would reach this draft even. Like all projects it would get buried in the pile of client work. But no Sir! Not this time.

I submitted my fiction to a few magazines and competitions and got rejected. And the funniest was when one of the rejections came on the back of my name being in the file name 🙂 Always a learning.

On a personal note, I had been dealing with severe back and wrist pain in 2020-2021 (and even before) but last year I took deliberate steps to fix these problems and the emotional roller coaster I was riding because of that. I started with a regular Yoga practice, alternating it with running and I have no pains now. Barring the occasional thing here and there because I chose to forget how bad it is to sit long uninterrupted hours.

2023 – Creation, Consistency & #buildinpublic

The primary focus this year will be on creation and consistency for my indie projects. Learning to manage running a website, a blog, a freelance business, a life, social media, accounts, etc and still moving forward with my goals will take precedence over everything else.

As The Thousand Arms evolves, my plan is to release an smaller zine of about 20 chapters to get feedback from my friends and family. (If you would like to be part of this list, please email me and I will add you to the list of eventual victims.)

I have also begun designing the characters and the world with the aim of putting together the bible, storyboard and illustrations. And in the mix I also hope a pitch document will emerge as the idea matures.

I also plan to share the development process in its entirety (In video form, if my laptop allows). Will #buildinpublic with the hashtag #thethousandarms on Twitter & of course on monkeyverse (dot) in on the page Thousand Arms, and livestream on Twitch and archive it on YouTube. It’s a bit disorganised at the moment, but it should fall into place organically over the next few months.

I have turned off my Instagram for now but am aware that there is potential for reaching people for such a project on the platform so I will get back to it eventually. Just that for now Instagram was not working for me.

Bandar Chhaap also needs a lot more attention and love for this year since the website is in its infancy. It also requires a marketing strategy and product roadmap which I am working on.

Looking forward to all the excitement. And will see you all on the other side dear humans.

— Keep on keeping on.