These are my lofty audacious goals for 2015.
Someone brilliant once said that you should start your yearly planning by scheduling in all your vacations for the year. That’s where I’ll start. Goal #1 is to go cycle touring in Hawaii for three weeks at the end of March. I’m going to fly to Maui and then take ferries to visit the smaller islands of Moloka’i and Lana’i. It’s going to be an expensive trip but worth it, I’m sure. I was in Hawaii a very long time ago, as a toddler. My mother taught my sister and I to swim in a hotel pool in Honolulu. I’m most excited about cycling east Maui and the smaller islands. I’ve been pouring through guidebooks and now spend too much time daydreaming about all the great adventures I’ll have on the road to Hana.
My next goal for 2015 is to move to Japan at the end of the summer. I spent a few years teaching ESL in Taiwan. I’m studying Japanese at my community college. I miss living the expat lifestyle and I miss living in Asia. Japan looks like a crazy cool place to live and there are plenty of teaching jobs that I’m qualified for.
Goal #3 is to publish a graphic novel about my cycle tour adventures in the fall or winter. This goal has so many moving components that I may be way off in my time estimates. I want to hire an illustrator. The distance between what I want my comic to look like and my own ability to draw is too wide. And I’ve heard you need to hire an editor. I have a lot to learn about these things, so this goal is really out there for me. But, I think a comic strip would be a great medium to tell stories about cycle touring. A cycle tour and a comic book are both linear progressions with unexpected twists and turns. I’m sure there’s some talented artists out there who’d love to translate my stories into great drawings. I would like to run a Kickstarter campaign to fund my comic project. I know that comics are a big deal in Japan, so I want to try to publish there as well.
Anyway, those are my three goals in all their intimidatingly huge glory! I want 2015 to be my best year yet. I need to remind myself that I’d rather be the kind of person that does crazy stuff like ride my bike around Hawaii and move to Japan and publish graphic novels than the kind of person who doesn’t do those things.
Spinstera 