2025: RUSHING WATER
Things I've made or worked on this year:
- Massive chunk of Marisol’s character and backstory writing (VTM version)
- Continuously writing Marisol during VTM
- Created Vitrais (urban fantasy/magical realism/thriller), wrote ALL the worldbuilding, plot and character writing for it so far (a lot of Marisol's writing gets ported over also)
- Created Our Queen (xenofiction/horror), a short story about ants, also wrote all worldbuilding for it
- Entered a comics mentorship, picked Wanderers back up
- Reworked ALL of Wanderers from worldbuilding to character designs and writing, to plot
- Writing outline for Wanderers
- Created In My Head (one-shot for an anthology), scripted and thumbnailed it
- 180+ new drawings (counting sketches left colored in grayscale)
GODDAMN!
If I had to describe 2025 in a word it'd be "deluge".
I spent the better part of 2022-2024 in a creative rut of sorts. I had story ideas, but nothing that really clicked, and the idea of writing characters (multiple! all of them with their respective arcs!) and plot points just seemed too daunting for my mentally exhausted self. I didn't really feel I could handle writing a project and even the smallest of comic ideas seemed like a huge mountain to get over.
At the same time, storytelling is something that really makes my heart full and life doesn't feel the same if I'm not playing toys with myself and others, so I found myself in a position where I wanted to create so badly, but had no suitable active project. Feels awful.
All of that shifted when, in September 2024, I created my character Marisol. I don't know what it was, if it was the very strong concept I had for her right off the bat (a great kiskadee-themed vampire hunter who is herself a vampire, though I made her a LARPer instead of a real hunter almost immediately), or how cute she is, or how grounded her problems are, but something in my head shifted as soon as she popped into my head. She was easy to write, easy to design, easy to name, and even easier to handle because she came about as a Vampire the Masquerade character (though I knew right away she'd have an 100% original version of herself too) which meant I didn't have to worry about anything else other than her writing. No need to juggle plot points, or character arcs, or anything like that, I could have full focus on her and just her!!
my girl of all time
And that was enough to break me out of my rut, would you believe that?
2025 was one of these years where it feels nothing is happening, and yet everything is happening. I'm only going to go over the creative pursuits part of my life here, but there's some crazy things I've been setting up in other areas of my life that can, and will, be lifechanging if I just manage to stick the landing. Anyway! Art!
So when Marisol broke me out of the swamp, she caused a bit of a deluge of sorts. As I started doing the bulk of her character writing in January and continued onwards, (and god, it's so easy to write her!) it also became easy to write other things too. I started getting more and more ideas for other projects, including Marisol's own original character version: I knew right away when I created her that she wouldn't be just a VTM character, and I knew she'd be showcased in an original story of her own, and that world started taking shape into the project that's now known as Vitrais.
Vitrais is an urban fantasy/magical realism collection of stories set in present day in a state of São Paulo, Brazil, that has the presence of supernatural creatures. Like Marisol herself, this project is easy to write because this is my home both in setting and genre.
So it's not surprising that this whole thing gave me a burst of energy I haven't felt in years. I found myself jolting down ideas for completely separate works, like xenofiction comics (Our Queen was cerated this year, and Wanderers saw itself change so much compared to 2024) and anthology one-shots (In My Head, which is about OCD pretty much). I created so much and so intensely across so many different projects that it actually surprised me that they date from just this year. It feels they've been around for so much longer! Of course, I'm not working on all these projects actively all at the same time: I entered a comics mentorship and I picked up Wanderers (a dormant comic idea from 2024 still in very early development) and that's my current main project.
For someone who could barely even think of writing more than one character at once without feeling exhausted, this outpouring of work feels incredibly significant! I had to force myself to focus on just one thing!
I feel like myself again, it's wonderful. I'm very excited to see what 2026 has to offer to me in this area! I'm hoping to get Wanderers actually running sometime next year. Funny that it's all because I came up with this dork character I love so much. For her help and service I'm going to clobber her in two different stories now, haha.