(Artist unknown)

So apparently, this blog turned a year old a few days ago. As of writing this today, I’m admittedly a little shocked that I’ve kept at it for this long, and that it has been getting the visits and likes that it has. The rest of this blog is going to be me boring you with several paragraphs of retrospective and reflection.

When I first started this blog, I did it for a number of reasons, the primary one being that I wanted/needed a project to focus on. In part, this was because I had felt that my writing had gotten somewhat rusty, and that I needed a means to keep at it with semi-regular blog posts. In part, I really wanted to just share my overwhelmingly nerdy side, and had been inspired to do so by a lot of the 40k blogs I frequent. And in part, it was because at the time, I had been suffering from intense depression, and I needed something external to focus on, to create, and to hopefully be consistent with. My girlfriend suggested the name “Ars Scripta,” which in retrospect, seems like the height of pretension: I don’t think anything I’ve written can qualify as “written art” by a long shot. Unfortunately, it’s a bit too late to change the name or the domain now.

I would like to say I’ve been proud of what I’ve achieved so far– and for many posts, I am — but unfortunately I have let myself fall behind far too often on this blog. Mainly, this has been due to a very tight schedule: most weekdays I work from 9 to 5 (plus two hours of transportation), then come home, walk the dog for an hour, eat dinner, and am too thoroughly mentally and physically exhausted for much else. That is it: that is essentially what my day boils down to, and it means that, except on weekends (where my ability to focus on anything at all flies out the window), writing one post can stretch across several days. My seemingly limited downtime/mental energy to devote to said downtime has been a sad state of affairs for these past two years.

The other half of things has just been my age-old enemy, indecision, as I often struggle to decide on what I want to write on. Unless it’s a batrep, or a random one-off post, or (more recently) an RPG recap, I haven’t felt that I have had anything worth saying lately. I have been told frequently by other bloggers and writers, however, that the trick is not to think of something worth writing, but just to write, period. Hence, what I am doing right now.

So, here is what I hope to do over the next year for this blog:

Write more, period– I have always wanted to find an outlet to do more in the way of writing– whether it be short stories, pretentious essays, or full on novellas. However, I have always been hampered by real-world time constraints, having other things to focus on, or simply suffering from good, old fashioned writer’s block. The end result is I’ll have a good idea, and then just sit on it, all the while my exhausting daily life continues to beat me down.

Moving forward, I hope to change that. I want to get more writing done: this is not because I have any pretensions of becoming a great novelist (I am far too terrible for that), but rather because it is something that I enjoy, and something I simply want to become better at. I am considering trying to write something short every weekend, or otherwise stretching a short piece out through the space of a week and seeing how that works out. Either way, I hope to have more fiction, or thought pieces or whatnot, contributed to this blog, so that hopefully it might at least superficially live up to its name.

More RPG recaps–  I have been involved in regular RPGs for a while now, and it is only recently that I started doing recaps of them for the Rogue Trader campaign I’m running. I was partially inspired by the lengthy write-ups that a friend of mine started doing, so I figured I would try a hand at it myself. Expect more RPG recaps, from the ones I’m running and from the ones I participate in.

More reviews/commentary– whether it be book or film reviews, or army book reviews (like the one I did for the current Drukhari book), I want to write more in the way of reviews, analyses or even just getting my thoughts down on a particular subject. Part of it is, I want to get more comfortable with getting my thoughts down on paper, and part of it goes back to my point about wanting to write more– I want to become more practised, and thus better, at writing. I general, I also kind of want my blog to evolve into something more than just a 40k-centric site, and as such I want to become more comfortable writing about more divergent topics.

More project logs– Earlier in the year, I started up on some project logs on my Sisters of Battle and Drukhari…and I pretty much let that fall by the wayside. Part of that is because lately, I’ve simply had no energy to do any modelling or painting, and as such my progress has been at a glacial pace. I honestly have no idea how much of this relates to stress and/or depression on my part or not. It hasn’t helped that, between damage incurred by my carrying cases and a few years of neglect, my Drukhari remain in shabby, non-photogenic shape. So, as a mini new years resolution, I am going to try to accomplish more on the modelling/painting front, get my minis painted to an approriate level of smexiness, and more importantly, to post more about it. Cool? Cool.

Other assorted stuff- In particular, I want to get a little more creative with writing articles. I already made a good head start on my “Your Army, Your Story” series with two articles, both of which I am happy to say I have received positive feedback on, so I want to try my hand at more that. Beyond that, is anyone else’s guess.

Things I look forward to doing– On the 40k side of things, I have been gaming only sparsely, and want to get more Kill Team games in, among other things. I am also particularly excited about (1) the upcoming Chapter Approved 2018 and its updated Adepta Sororitas list, and (2), Games Workshop’s upcoming Vigilus campaign, which will be the first worldwide campaign I’ve participated in since Medusa V countless years ago. On a personal front, I also have been more active in looking for my own place after a lifetime of living at home, and I might use the blog as a vehicle for chronicling my observations, hopes, frustrations and thoughts on that particular endeavour (plus I am hoping that writing about it will encourage persistence on my part).

Beyond that, to anyone who is subscribed to this blog and/or follows it regularly: thank you so very much for reading thus far! I am privately quite shocked that anyone would even be following anything I write, and so you must know that your readership has been quite appreciated. I’ll try to give you all more stuff to feast upon in the next few months. And if I fail to do so — or rather, fail to increase my volume of posts– then please bear with me. As I said, I often find myself working against my own intense schedule and mentally/psychologically draining weekly life, though I am trying to fix that. Hopefully, at least, writing more for this blog will be something to help me get through all of that.