I have plans to do some planning

I’ve got three weeks booked off as holiday from my day job over Christmas/New Year. There are two reasons for this: firstly because I haven’t taken any holiday since May and I need to use it up before I lose it, and secondly because I desperately need some time off because I’m exhausted.

Initially I need to rest and recuperate, and then, when I feel slightly more human again, I’m going to start planning out my artwork for 2025.

In these last few months since I've moved to Hastings my artistic practice has been a little…slow. I've done a couple of life-drawings and photoshoots with a model from Brighton I've worked with before, but I don't feel like I've fully established my artistic practice in Hastings.

Some disruption due to the move to Hastings was certainly expected, so I'm not beating myself up about this too much, but it needs addressing. So that's the aim for 2025, and the planning starts over those three weeks off.

I also want to integrate my Notes with my Bluesky account over those three weeks off, if I feel up to it. Over the past month Bluesky has gained a lot of new users for reasons I probably don’t need to explain, and as a result I’ve gained over 900 new followers, a massive leap from a slowly growing tally in the few hundreds since I started using Bluesky in September 2023.

So (hopefully) I’m going to code something that will automatically copy each new note I write over to Bluesky - in IndieWeb terms I’ll be implementing POSSE: Publishing (on my) Own Site, Syndicating Elsewhere.

Talking of numbers, this happens to be the 250^th blog post on the Artist’s Notebook blog, which I launched in August 2008 as a rather late addition to this website as a whole - the actual website first appeared online in 1996, although it’s been redesigned and rebuilt from the ground-up so many times since that we’re definitely in Ship of Theseus territory.