A year (and a bit) in review - OCT 2023

It has been a while since I wrote a monthly blog post. In fact, the last time was over a year ago, in July 2022.

Usually, I would say that this is because not much has happened on my creative projects front, and that is actually true...I think.

Let's take stock of what has happened between July last year and today.

On creating more of the 1000 Paintings... I have completed another 9 paintings.

That's about it.

Okay, that's not true. There is also less noticeable progress that has been happening here and there over the last year and a bit. For example, I have completed the broad strokes planning of my first long form story idea. I have started broad strokes planning for my next long form story idea. I have also added a few more story ideas to my collection, many inspired by dreams I had while sleeping.

More recently, I have been making more progress on other aspects of my life that I believe will help me complete my creative projects. Roughly every two weeks, I have been going to a creative writing club, my attendance of which has helped me make more progress on my story idea planning.

I have also been meeting an old friend virtually to discuss our progress on our creative projects. We have done a couple of sessions of "show and tell" where we can show off our progress, our creative ideas and get feedback from each other. After we started to do a presentation style approach with PowerPoint slides, I felt like I was taking my creative projects more seriously.

This month,

I started work on a draft tutorial video that will become one of a series of tutorial videos.

I had a vivid dream, and made thumbnail sketches to document what I saw. I hope to turn those sketches into roughly 9 paintings to add to the 100 Other Worlds, thereby bringing me one step closer to completing 1000 Paintings.

A thumbnail sketch of a place I saw in my dream

I also registered my domain for my website again. This was prompted by my desire to turn my prototype Life gamification tool in Excel to something more practical with Power BI. I now have a dashboard that I can access on my laptop, iPad, or phone to record and track my meditation sessions. This dashboard is also still a prototype. It automatically updates daily and there are improvements I have in mind, but at least now I am creating data to analyse later in an analytics project of some sort.

My Power BI dashboard on my laptop

For my website, I have also finished posting the 100 Paintings of the Internet collection, along with text describing my story with each painting. I had been sitting on the completed paintings for a while and had not added them in to the database for the second set of 100 paintings.

I also started posting my 1000 Paintings on Reddit everyday.

Since I browse different subreddits for fun, I decided I can do that and work on my creative projects at the same time. for now, I am posting using "gut feel" and doing what is convenient.

When I have time during the day or evening, I will post my daily painting, using a standard (boring) title, and share the post to 1 subreddit. I pick a subreddit that seems at least a little relevant, and add an appropriate title.

Once I am comfortable with posting every day, I can use the data associated with the old posts as a baseline to analyse and improve my social media marketing.