2013. Briefly.

This past year has been a weird one for me, and it's been an excellent lesson on how drastically things can change in a very short period of time.

When I started 2013, I felt stuck and frustrated and a little overwhelmed, honestly. I was still hating most of what I was doing and saw little outside of the walls of my studio aside from the various hotels and convention centers for Magic events. Meanwhile, Amy was working longer days than seemed humanly possible with 100 hours per week being about average during the first few months.

By April, we'd settled on leaving the northeast to find a place we actually wanted to live. Amy quit her job and we began to actively explore our options.

Then boom. Seattle.

That the job offered to Amy came out of the blue, was in the place we were most interested in moving and was so well timed still freaks me out a little. I don't completely trust it. It was too easy. The fact that the physical relocation itself went so smoothly doesn't help either. But as the months have passed, I've begun to relax a bit. I am, after all, living in a place I actually like for the first time in years and have actively been attempting to take advantage of the fact.

Point is, I guess, that things got a whole lot better in 2013, though it didn't feel like it was going to be a noteworthy year at its start. In fact, it looked like it was going to be a bit of a downer. But a year (despite how it might feel) is a long time and a lot can happen.

All that being said, there are still issues with the work. The biggest thing I've learned this year is that the dissatisfaction I feel about my work is a very real thing and I think I'm beginning to fully understand the cause. I also think I'm beginning to understand the solution. While I love the challenges that my client work provides, I'm finding a lot of the work less fulfilling as time goes on. I certainly don't blame the clients — it's not their job to provide me with such things. No, I'm pretty sure that I need to find that kind of thing in my own work and in my own way. Unfortunately, I'm not really sure what my own way even is.

So, as this year has come to its end, I am asking a lot of big questions about my work. What do I want from my efforts? Where do I want the work to take me? What is the end game? I'm hopeful that answering these queries will give me a goal. And maybe help me form a plan to reach that goal. I am in desperate need of a point on the horizon to start moving toward.

2014 is just a flipped page on the calendar, but it feels bigger than that. Either way I'm ready for it and I'm itching to get started.

Here's the last piece of the year. It's 7" x 5" and is for the heck of it.