Best of luck in 2022!

Our lives and minds are made out of stories. Just close your eyes, and you can become anything. The errant knight or the wandering gladium. The divine or the accursed. The boy saved from the gallows, the sundered shepherd. The dreamer, the realist or the broken spirit. You can don these masks for a breath, and then let them go with another.

Go and share yours.

This year was... well. It's a thing that happened, I suppose.

I failed to be anywhere near as productive as I'd hoped. I expected to publish at least three more stories by the time the year is over, but health, circumstance and my own incompetence cast me back a bit more than I'd like.

So I decided to allow for my backlog from this year to stop and have a bit of a fireside chat while I work on their respective tales.

There's the restart of Semper Fidelis, which is thankfully still on course for early 2022.

There's (among other charr things) Frostbound, my loveletter to Icebrood Saga, which went wildly beyond its original plans and is now whopping 17 pages long.

There will be November 1761, the first short pirate story about a new start for Thomas and his crew.

There's also Hollow, which could see some illustrations finished in the later part of the year.

And there's also the world of Eorzea that may see a short or two, because the ideas rattling around my head for a few long months now refuse to let go.

It is also, somewhat expectedly, a piece I honestly enjoyed making.

(I also swear my characters are a bit more varied than 1.5 flavors of a blond guy; coincidence, please, be damned.)

That said, none of the above would be here if it weren't for you. It may sound like a cliché you hear a lot these days, but I made it through this year largely on your kindness. I had the luxury of knowing that no matter how terrible things seem, my dog is fed, and no matter how spiteful I feel about my fears and my failures, there are people out there who like what I do, who enjoy my stories and the characters I bring.

Thank you.

May 2022 be kinder, calmer and gentler than you fear. I hope it brings you new opportunities, new stories and new starts.