What I've Been Up to In Dec 2024 - Jan 2025
... a belated annual reflection, and looking forward to the new year.
Hope you had a restful and wonderful holiday season. Mine was packed with busy work, a business trip to Paris, two ski trips, and many failed attempts to get back on track with the creative works… Sorry for missing the last issue!
For this special issue, instead of review the past path, let’s reflect back on the year of 2024: This year I went through a few attempts to re-define “Heta Studio” - in addition to my drawings, writings, and building games, I reworked the website, reworked the social media engagement model, attempted to make long and short form videos, and also published another book. None of these were successful, but all of them taught me valuable lessons. It taught me the prevalent business model built with SEO in general, the temptation of FOMO when it comes to social media, and the alternative paths to publishing and marketing a book.
I am not there yet. But I can see the paths a bit clearer now.
In 2025 - I hope to maintain my creative cadence, but also continue to try building something with the lessons learned.
Here are the things that kept me busy these past two months, aside from the day-to-day ‘job’ related stuff…
Creating and hacking stuffs
Game Dev
No updates, but feel free to play my game#1 Qin!
Drawing
Weekly comics - comic strips are posted on all major social feeds, but of course, the best place to access this would be my (paid) Patreon page
Study drawings (#inktober52 ) - can you guess what is the prompt word for each of these?
#FanArt (always fun to do!) I continued to make illustrations for each of the 14 ‘wuxia’ (or Martial art…) novels by the legendary Jin Yong. - Only one piece done in these two months…
Writing
This month not much happened on my substack “Echo of the Worlds”
“100 Drawings of Tang Dynasty Poems” (唐詩一百畫) - book 1: available as a hardcover on Amazon. I’ve started to edit book 2 or this 3-part series 😊
The pre-released drafts of this book are all available on my Patreon
The Web
No updates (is a good update 😉)
Consuming Stuffs
Reading - Continue with Book 5 “A Dance with Dragons”
Gaming - Continued on God of War and Bioshock 2; completed A Plague Tale: Requiem and DarQ (with both DLCs).
TV/Movies - Didi, First Slam Dunk, Bridge of Spies, Gone Girl (very enjoyable!); Only Murder in the Building s2; 知否知否应是绿肥红瘦 (Story of Minglan - started binging this great Chinese show… and can’t stop)
Learning: not yet gotten back to learning…
That’s it for this issue of my newsletter! If you really finished reading the above, I thank you, and wish that my sharing would either entertain you, or inspire you (if you’ve been thinking about your own creative projects).