I hope you’re having very happy holidays! My wife Amanda and I are hosting family this week, and seeing everyone laughing and smiling under one roof is truly the greatest gift of all.
So… what’s the second greatest gift of all? Frankie Freako on Blu-Ray! With bonus features! Including full audio commentary!!! If you haven’t seen my pick for best movie of the year in the History of the Cinema… you know, I could describe the plot, but I’m gonna let the trailer do the work for me. Shabadoo!
Now that Christmas is over, my thoughts are turning to 2025. I think the greatest gift I could get myself next year – which is a whole separate list than “greatest gift of all,” with its own editorial criteria – is time. My gig on Clone Drone in the Hyperdome was a full-time job, but I still took on client work, because I have a feast or famine mindset that naturally develops from many years of freelancing. Here’s how that mindset works…
- A client offers me work.
- I ask myself, “Do I have time to take on this work?”
- I tell myself, “You’d better find time, bucko, because in three months you might be unemployed again and you’ll WISH you crammed in more paid writing on Sunday morning at 5 am!”
- I accept the client’s work.
My New Year’s Resolution for 2025 is to give myself the gift of not over exerting myself. If my work schedule is full, I will not take on more client work. I won’t assume that unemployment is lurking maliciously around every corner, like a gang of interdimensional puppet monsters in a yuppie’s home. (This is a sly reference to the 2024 feature film Frankie Freako, now playing on a Blu-Ray DVD in my house. Thank you, Amanda!)
The same resolution applies to my personal projects. Another part of being a freelancer is pitching project ideas at every opportunity. It’s pretty reflexive at this point. I’ll be at a bar with a friend and he’ll be talking how his apartment has ants and then I’ll say, “Hey, what if we turned lemons into lemonade and turned your apartment into an ant circus together?” Three months later, I don’t have time for the six other projects I’m working on because no one in LA has an appropriate ringmaster costume for an ant circus. (It has an extra set of arms, so I look like I have six legs.) I’m doing one project at a time from now on. When I start a project I’ll either (1) finish it or (2) abandon it entirely to work on another. One of my main goals with Equip Story is to enjoy the process of making art more, and I think giving each project I work on more focus and care will help with that tremendously.
The stars are aligning for 2025 to suck. There are some things in 2025 that are beyond my control. For example, as far as I can tell, there won’t be a sequel to Frankie Freako next year, or even an animated prequel. That’s the biggest challenge we face as a nation. But there are things I can do to make the year feel better during bad times, like spending more time relaxing, hanging out with friends, volunteering, and developing (but not monitizing!) my hobbies.
Speaking of which, maybe I should stop writing this and enjoy the holidays with my family, lol. Get started on that New Years Resolution a few days early. After all, learning to relax and have fun is literally what Frankie Freako is all about.
🎲 Your Turn: Do you have a New Year’s Resolution for 2025? Are you a New Year’s Resolution person or a Why Bother I’m Just Gonna Break It In a Month person? Have you seen Frankie Freako?! Reply to the email directly, or tell the whole world by pushing the orange button below.
📨 See you in January! Speaking of doing less, I’m taking a two week break to unwind and reflect and all that jazz. Back in a few!
4 responses to “Next Year, I’m Doing Less!”
Some things I’d like to accomplish in 2025:
Get under 330 pounds. I think this is doable considering I was 390 December of 2023 and 355 as of yesterday. I’d like to get under 300 and BMI says I should be around 200, but losing weight isn’t worth starving myself or crippling myself because I pushed this body of mine too hard with exercise.
Do more writing. Ideally, I’d like to consistantly spend an hour a day either with fiction writing or writing up my thoughts on some random geeky or accessibility related thought I have, but with how my productivity has plummeted in the last year, I’d settle for one chapter or essay worth sharing a month.
Do more crafting. This one I’m off to a good start already as I made a few Christmas ornaments this year.
End 2025 with less debt than I’ll be starting it… and for a stronger goal, less credit card debt.
Finding a paid job to supplement my SSDI that isn’t trading my physical and/or mental well being for slightly faster debt reduction/slightly more spending money. Doubling how much I pay to each of my creditors each month, doubling my grocery budget, and doubling my disposable income would all be nice, but it ain’t worth being tortured for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week with physical labor my body can’t handle, mind numbing menial tasks almost anyone could do, or being the brunt of disgruntled customer’s anger over things I have no control over… Sadly, about the only work around here that isn’t retail, food service, or delivery driver require a degree different from the one I have. And that’s not getting into the fact I’m part of a group that, while legally protected, most employers are going to be prejudicially, pre-emptively searching for a legally acceptable reason to not hire or fire… and doesn’t help that being blind often means having to literally work twice as hard to get half as much done even when the work environment isn’t being hostile.
I hope you have a great 2025! I think these are solid goals. Love that you got a head start on crafting, and if you need motivation / inspiration to write, I find prompts are really helpful, even when I divert from them to do something else entirely.
It’d be awesome if you could get some solid WFH income, or even freelance WFH on a site like Upwork.
See my friends Amanda and Geoffrey more in 2025!
That’s the greatest resolution of them all!