It took me quite some time to get used to writing out 2010, and let’s not even talk about the complications of the 19 to 20 conversion ten years prior. Here we are on the dawn of a decade, getting ready to break muscle memory and set our sights forward to a new era.
At least, that’s what we culturally tell ourselves. That these sets of ten we’ve assigned in the concept of recording the time our rock successfully orbits that big ball of plasma herald new periods on our society’s existence. But change is never quite that fast, is it? As if great change comes with the coin flip of the new year. Changes to culture comes as a patient hunter, a slow-moving glacier that grinds against our sense of identity and self.
This isn’t to say we can’t use these moments to mark milestones in our lives, our cultures, to take a step back and look at where we stand and see what direction we’re going. Our years, our seasons, our months mark the rhythm of our lives. Bills, the phases of our moon, pay checks, biological cycles, how long it’s been since we took care of that bedroom closet and making yet another plan to clean that sucker out; we mark ourselves by these spokes on the wheel, and the year and decade changes are a wider view of those patterns.
So, as has become my tradition, I mark the start of these months with an introspective view of the month in review. With it being January, the herald of the new year, we are tempted to look back at the year and see where we’ve come and gone. And with it being a year ending in that lovely null zero, we fulfill the promise of the greater spiral and look at where the years have brought us.
Let’s talk about here first. A decade ago, we weren’t here. Originally The Hiddennode was my blog, and until 2014 I kept my thoughts, updates and public writing on that site. In 2012 I started using The Hiddennode as a podcast/audio journal and once the written blog fell out of favor, the podcast took over. During my reconstruction phase in 2016, the blog officially moved over to J Samuel Diehl and we’ve intermediately used it as our update/journaling site. Since then we’ve created fifty-three posts offering updates to my writing, podcasting, and creative efforts.
Speaking of writing, the decade saw the greatest two milestones of my writing career to date: In 2013 for the first time I finished a novel, and in 2018 I published my first novel. That first novel, still unpublished, was a challenge to my hand wriggling, start a new project every three months, and never get things done mindset. Writing about Rebin, his challenges, and his growth, was a wonderful experience and let me know I could manage that dream. 2018 saw the publishing of Draco Artifactium: Doppelganger, and let me present the world with my ideas of dreaming worlds. It let me explore Micara’s fight, present shades of grey in a world of good and evil, and to envision some rather dark dragons. Five years was a long time between novels, but it was growth. The next one won’t have such wide spacing.
Podcasting, as a part of my life, rose and fell over the span. I started out as a fan going back to 2007, and stepped into the world of podcasting at the start of the decade. Hiddennode, Five Things We Like, Five Sentence Fiction, and Trans-dimensional Café were all projects I started, and have mostly sunsetted. Hiddengrid became mine during those years, and after three wonderful seasons of The Sixth World Chronicles, it was set to rest. I’m still a cohost on Seize the GM, but that seems to be my last consistent bastion of being a podcaster. Instead, I find my sights set on video and streaming. I don’t have as large of an audience yet as I did with Hiddengrid, but there has been growth since the middle of 2019. Even as a listener, podcasting’s presence has dropped heavily from my life and I find live streams and VOD’s as my choice of entertainment. This came from a change in lifestyle, but I’ve gone from listening to twenty to forty hours’ worth of podcasting a week to maybe less than a dozen in a month. The two are likely tied to one another.
While my health has shifted much in the years of my late twenties and through my thirties, no greater change of health came than in 2017, when I lost useful bioptic vision. The second retina detachment took me by surprise in the summer, and by the start of 2018 I knew I had permeant irreparable vision damage. Now I see the world with a shroud of darkness and blur in that eye. But all is not lost. I still have a “good” eye, and with it I am more appreciative of the beauty I see.
I’ve had family come see me in those years. I’ve become closer to my brothers and talk to them near nightly as we game together. I have plans to stream with one of them this coming month.
I’ve been to lovely Asheville, and fell in love with the place my wife dreams of living.
I’ve been to conventions big and small, and have become closer to my tribe of nerdiness.
I’ve found strength in the serenity of knowing who I am in my gender identity.
I’m the most me I’ve been, a me I never dreamed I could be ten years ago.
The 20’s, these new 20’s, do not come with the promise of ease. It comes with the promise of a fight. It comes with a promise of new dangers; social, political, technological. There’s been dark times this past decade; struggles, fights, losses, and hurts. New terrors are visible on the horizon, and perhaps more shadows ahead. But shadow comes with light, and with it comes the chance to grow and temper ourselves.
To strengthen myself.
To know myself.
Ten years have gone behind me.
I look forward to the challenge of the ten to come.
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.
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Shit, wasn’t I supposed to review the year?
Uhm, *checks notes*
*paper shuffling sounds*
*deep sigh*
Yeah, I think we sort of did that up there, didn’t we? Kind of covered the highlights worth mentioning. Guess we move onto the month.
It is January, and thus the start of a new month. The two big projects currently underway are the short story for Patreon, chugging along, and the streaming. The rest of December’s works took collateral damage in the holiday season. Teaches me a lesson about promises in the holiday season and I know to prep December’s offering earlier in the year. Other projects mentioned last month had work done but not to the degree I’d hoped.
The core of the month is going to be a schedule. I’ve done well with keeping to it for the streaming, but now I need to make sure to stay on top of other projects. It’s not done yet but as I develop it, I will hold myself to posting about it. Let’s say the 20th. Mark the day. That gives me two weeks to develop and get it written up for sharing.
That sounds right.
Alright, back to work on the short.
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