Seen on Twitter: if 2013 was a battle for you, then take heart: it’s dead, and you’re still alive. Show 2014 the corpse of 2013, as a warning.

That’s right: it’s time for the year-in-review post!


New stage costume in progress, for GeekGirlCon

My 2013 was pretty good, most of the year. Actually, until October, it was really good. Honestly, it didn’t feel like I did all that much, but I’m looking at it, and thinking I must’ve been busier than I remember!

I did my first zouk solo on stage (and came away with a funny story), appeared on someone else’s album for the first time (as well as recording more than half of it), put out several episodes of a Geekmusic Podcast, appeared on The Cosmic Ray Show, played in Victoria, rebuilt this website, and toured briefly – eight shows – with Leannan Sidhe.

I fell really hard for Pacific Rim, and wrote a song about it for Jaegercon, recorded with help from fans tereshkova2001 and Kathryn Tewson, had fun at Clallam Bay Comicon and Virtual ComiCon and VCON and Harrison Hot Springs, got involved with fannish and gamer misogyny, including a fight with Penny Arcade’s Ben Kuchera on Twitter about something other than PAX, and performed a supervillain elfmetal operetta with Hello, the Future! and tereshkova2001 and Angela Highland and Amber Clark at GeekGirlCon, complete with a new stage costume (thanks to Leannan Sidhe for her help)…

…which is when things got annoying. Emergency eye surgery, rounds one and two. And Anna had to have major medical adventures of her own, which kept us both – aheh – homestuck for a couple of months.


Pan-Pacific Defence Corps

Also, we had Cat Pee Festival 2013, about which the less said, the better, but if you think that wasn’t a distraction, I have a bundle of WRONG for you.

None of that stopped me from doing my first voice acting during recovery, but damn, that was nasty. We had to miss Orycon and everything.

But then, at the end of the year? I got invited into the Mega-Music Download, which just made me go EEEEEEEEEEEEE because here I am surrounded by all these people who are better at this than me. so exciting I can’t believe I got included eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee 😀


Better than Me

And that doesn’t even talk about nwcMUSIC and the like, so… yeah. I’m not lying when I say I feel like I didn’t get much done this year. But then you stack it up in a list like that and I feel better about it.

Even if that damned soundtrack album got stalled out for a while. More recording is scheduled, at last, in January. There will be an album, goddammit. There will be.

As usual, there were a bunch of DIY highlights. I built a remote-control for Ardour, a remote-control ON AIR sign, made some retr0brite and de-yellowed some equipment; I identified the Lord Ruler of All Hard Drives while rebuilding and upgrading my digital audio workstation, modded the hell out of an old input switch to make a speaker-selector and warning device, made my DAW into a standing workstation, did some graphic design to make a nice, legal-size comp sheet to help in studio work (downloadable!), and found super-cheap but very effective ways to do speaker isolation and microphone cases.

Oh, plus, put together a buildout post for the Austin Microphones ribbon mic kit, and an even better buildout post for the pre-amp kit. I’ll be using this on that album.


Blinkinlights blinking!

So, yeah. It’s been a year. By most reasonable standards, it’s been a pretty big year. From a purely commercial standpoint, my two biggest download months are both this year, the second-largest being right now. (Downloads still pay-what-you-like, but not for much longer!)

But for all the everything, I don’t…

I don’t feel like I’ve been playing much, and not writing much, either. I did write some songs – not just Kaiju Meat – and even performed them out. But… yeah. Not so many.

I think that’s what’s missing; it’s been a year as much about engineering and talking than creating and playing. I think 2014 needs to be a kind of followup.

My tools are in pretty good shape, now – let’s get back to using them.

eta: Anna has posted an even longer, more detailed year-in-recap post of her own!