2026 plans
We'll see how well I follow these
Well, it’s Sunday and usually I’d write what’s going on in my life this week, but it’s the first Sunday of the year so what’s been going on is plotting and scheming.
You got it: it’s New Year, New You time… well, New Pyra time. So let’s talk resolutions and goals and plans.
First up, truth be told, none of this stuff is really New Pyra outright. All are built on things I’ve either been starting to do or that I have done in the past but have let slide or new variations on old activities, etc.
So, let’s start with my work, huh?
1. Properly set up my business
I know, who does that in the artsy world? But I do want to do things properly, right down to the business license. I’ll also be setting up an Etsy, a Patreon, mailing lists and an honest-to-god filing system (versus just stacking important papers in front of the empty filing cabinet, lol…)
Back in the maQLu days, I hadn’t done the business license or anything, but I did have a business PayPal account set up and I did have a mailbox downtown so as to not have my personal address out there. And I sold my music on Bandcamp and iTunes, etc., so that’s kinda like having an Etsy.
I also need to be more consistent in marketing efforts and updating and maintaining my websites.
2. More consistency in my daily work habits
As opposed to, say, saying “I’ll paint all day Sunday” I’d prefer to start painting an hour a day for building the habit and staying on track if something comes up on Sunday. Currently, I paint in big blocks, and I like it, but also it’s susceptible to disruption.
Similarly, I want to be filming more for YouTube but working at it daily instead of filming/editing in big blocks.
This will also give more variation within each day (cartooning, drawing, painting, video stuff, blogging, every day) and streamline workflow since I won’t be trying to remember how I did something a week ago and searching for notes.
3. Finishing
Years ago a screenwriter ex-friend told me, “Pyra, you’re very prolific but: You. Must. FINISH THINGS!!!”
He was wrong about a great many things, hence why he’s an ex-friend, but he was right about that.
The first Noah’s Archipelago anthology book has been stalled at about 2 weeks of work away from completion for months now.
I have a book of Ricky B. The Rock N Roll Rat short stories about half-fininshed, and it’s been like that for about a year. Ditto a separate Ricky graphic novel.
And numerous other books planned that I can’t really start until I get the first Noah and Ricky books out (eg, further Noah anthologies and further Ricky books, an Ursula book series for kids, etc.)
And aside from the big projects, there’s things like only getting halfway through Inktober or other challenges.
4. Getting out there
Partly this relates to the marketing consistency thing, and I certainly haven’t run ads on Facebook for ages and my numbers have stagnated accordingly, so I need to get back with that.
But also I want to submit my paintings to several shows this year (Cowichan Valley Fine Arts Show, Sooke Fine Arts Show, some of the member exhibitions at Ladysmith Arts and Cowichan Valley Arts Council, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria’s Winter Small Works Show) and build up a body of work with an eye to doing a small solo show in 2027.
I’d also like to try my hand at an art market or two.
And start going to art gallery openings etc. to network more.
(And hopefully start actually selling my work..)
YouTube also comes into play here. I’ve been doing the Paint With Pyra videos for a month or so, ditto the Saturday Scuttlebutt videos. I also found when I was doing reels/shorts of drawing daily that really helped with visibility and I want to get back to posting reels more regularly.
I also have an idea for a weekly drawing livestream and another bigger more show-like livestream once a week that would involve comedy and puppets and maybe weird synth stuff… still nebulous but the idea has been bouncing around for a few years now.
5. More integration
What do I mean by this… well, I kinda alluded to it on Thursday: making space within my current practise for bits and pieces of past practises.
I just mentioned weird synths; to the extent that I am “known” for anything, it used to be for making weird experimental noise music as maQLu and DJing an industrial-heavy college radio show (The Vampire’s Ball, which rain on CiTR Radio and even got me a mention on Wikipedia). I also used to do a lot of podcasting and character voices, etc. And I did a bit of open-mic stand-up, too.
So… why just set those aside? Why not figure out a way to meld them all together?
I’m still figuring out how I might do that, but I have been feeling like making music is missing from my life the last few years, ditto having a weekly show of some sort, which was such a staple of my life for the better part of a 20 years, either The Vampire’s Ball on CiTR Radio for the decade-plus that was a thing (2002-2006 then 2009-2015) or my old weekly podcasts like The Zamo the Destroyer Show and Under My Skin… the latter two have been been superceded by the Ricky podcast (which I need to start doing again) and Scuttlebutt respectively, but I never did replace the Vampire’s Ball.
6. Better health habits
Now onto the personal stuff: weight loss. When I peaked out at 299.6 in late June, that was a wake-up call and over the summer I set a goal to drop 30 pounds by the end of the year. As of January 1, I was down 19 pounds, not quite the 30 but I’ll take it.
Still: I’m a lot better than I was in the first half of the year. I’ve set a 1-pound per week target of 229 as my big goal for 2026, but realistically, I’ll be very happy with getting to the 250s.
I haven’t done anything crazy to get this far. Hell, I haven’t even really given up sweets yet, just reduced the amounts of them. I drank more water and less soda. I tried to get more fiber and cook at home more and have more frozen pre-marinaded lunches prepped so all I had to do was take one out and thaw it the night before… but I still go to fast food joints with my dad on a regular basis. I made muffins at home instead of getting the store-bought ones.
I walked more but still not a ton since September when I started having some Achilles tendon issues after CowEx.
For 2026, I’ll be building up to 10000 steps a day. I got a cheap pedometer watch in December of 2024 and I decided to make a spreadsheet to began tracking my steps, but said cheap watch crapped out in January so I splurged on the Garmin Lily 2 which has been my constant companion—and often the bane of my existence–since. My average daily step count for 2025 was 5082, and that includes the 70 days I was either sick, too exhausted from burnout, or healing from an injury (or the week after having a bad tooth pulled when my dentist gave me strict orders to not do anything that would get my blood pumping). When I removed the sick days from my calculations, my 2025 average went up to 5445 steps a day… still needs improvement, of course.
I did get up to 10000 and even 12000 steps at times, but only about 3% of days. I was over 7000 steps—a common threshold for health improvements—18% of days. (And the majority of those days have been since August.)
For 2026, I want to improve on that, building slowly to more than 90% of days over 7000 steps and at least 50% over 10,000. To this end, I did breakdown and buy a cheap walking pad treadmill for days when the weather sucks or when I got busy and didn’t get a walk in outside. I’ve already started a nightly ritual this week of walking at an easy pace while watching an episode of Married… with Children and that usually gets me an extra 1800 steps.
Lastly, I’m on a waiting list for an autism assessment and my number should come up in the fall of 2026. In some ways, I dunno if there’s any actual point of having the assessment since I don’t work a regular job and decided against going back to university so I don’t have anywhere where I’d need the paperwork to show that I need accommodations, and it’s not cheap, but I guess it would be good to have the piece of paper for when people ask me to take on exec roles in different clubs I belong to. “See this? It means I have impaired executive function. And what little executive function I have I need to hoard for running my art and books business.”
(And keeping weirdly detailed spreadsheets about my step count, apparently.)
We’ll see when my number comes up if I bother or bow out.
The problem with being somewhat high functioning (and not coming across as a stereotypical autist) is you fool people (and yourself) into thinking you can do a lot more than you really can, then you overextend yourself and crashout burnout in spectacular fashion. What happened to me in October of 2025 was mild compared to some past crashouts in my life.
I’m pretty good at what I do but that’s also because I don’t do what I’m not good at.
So I guess another resolution for 2026 is to say “no” more often and mean it so as to avoid any repeats of October 2025.
Since stumbling upon the whole autism thing at the end of 2024, I’ve been doing a lot of reading and trying to work out systems I can put in place to balance productivity and trying to figure out how to monetize my talents and minimize stress from things I’m not good at, along with self-care and trying to almost force myself to take things easy so I can stay productive. Clearly, I don’t always get the balance right, hence the crashout burnouts, but I do think I’m doing better now.
This has meant dropping some prior commitments like CowEx (though I’ll still volunteer at next year’s CowEx in a more limited way), not rejoining the garden club (even though I like the people, I just have too much happening on the day of those meetings now), resigning from the exec of my parish’s CWL because of that whole executive function issue thing, and a few other such drops.
It’s also meant learning about “sensory diet”:
and bringing in things like fidget toys and swapping from iPad games with their irritating ad breaks to old-fashioned variety puzzle magazines, working with visual planners and a paper day planner and paper to-do lists and paying more attention to how my body feels when I haven’t walked or when I eat junk food etc. to try to level out my energy reserves and all that… even things like swapping from opaque storage to clear plastic boxes so I can see what art supplies I have so I can find things more quickly.
I guess adding in more painting has been good, too, for a more tactile artmaking experience versus just working digitally.
And like I said, I’m starting to miss playing with synths… you get the right sounds going and I find it’s like a sonic brain massage…
All this will need to continue and I’ll be trying to refine my “sensory diet” further.
Just finding ways to make my life easier and less stressful so I can be more productive and avoid crashouts.
7. Better home organization and vibes
I have too much stuff and not enough organization of it, and I’m noticing that increases stress, too.
So… I need to get my house in order.
It’s been an ongoing project/struggle, but lately I feel like I’ve been getting a better vision of how to proceed.
I got the master reorganized and have managed to keep it that way for a while and at the end of writing last week’s blog I had an idea for some rearranging that really unlocked the nook, the dining room, and the studio.
The studio and the dining room are still messy works-in-progress, but still vastly improved.
And last night I had an idea for the tiny room upstairs that must have been a nursery at some point but which the previous owner had as a clutter room. I made it an audio room but it also tends to be a clutter room when not being regularly used for recording podcasts or whatever (as was the case this year).
Namely, it occurred to me that it’s probably around the same size and shape as the first couple of rehearsal spaces I had that I used as studios in my maQLu years, dubbed either “maQLu Central” or “the synth cave.” (This was at Renegade Productions… nowadays they just have one large rehearsal studio and focus on theatre clients, but they used to have huge spaces subdivided into little rooms for bands to rent and jam in.)
And now I’m thinking of setting up my synths again… so… maybe… just maybe…
I dug through my old emails from 2011 and found the square footage of the second maQLu Central (Studio 16 at Renegade Main Street): 72 square feet. And it was long and skinny, I think about 6x12.
The current room is 6 1/2’x 12’, so actually ever so slightly bigger than maQLu Central 2.0, plus it has a closet and a bumpout for some shelves that currently have music memorabilia and Funko Pops. Point is: I should totally be able to tidy it up into a new synth cave.
It already has my ProTools computer and setup with monitors at one end and some sound dampening with foam pads under the area rugs.
And lava lamps. Can’t forget those.
So, we have purposes for the nook (sewing), the family room (art studio and filming YouTube), kitchen and dining rooms (duh), the new synth cave, the master bedroom, and the living room.
Even the back foyer now has a purpose: a sitting area to look out on the garden. Granted, it’s not much of a view at this time of the year, but it’ll be nice even in a couple months when the daffodils come up.
And I have plans for the spare room to become somewhat of a home gym, but it will still need to be a clutter staging ground for a few months longer until my house rearranging and decluttering is complete.
I also have plans to makeover my covered patio into a fun cheerful tiki-inspired space, but that will be a warm-weather project.
In the meantime, I’ll be working inside on purging and organizing, Konmari-style.
8. Listen to more audiobooks; better input
I have a subscription to Audible and I have a bunch of audiobooks I’ve downloaded, but I don’t use the stupid thing and then I get bored of what’s on my YouTube home page when I want to listen to something as I work.
Problem, meet solution…
In general, I think I need to consume better media. As it is, I have developed a habit of listening to symphonies and other classical performances first thing in the morning when writing my morning pages or planning the day, which is a huge improvement over 2024 as-is, but I still find I watch too many bitchy gossip videos and not enough more… educational? I guess… content, then I wonder why I feel like crap after a day of listening to crap all day.
I’d be better off just listening to vulgar Mötley Crüe songs about cocksucking groupies all day:
At least then I could admire the technical precision with which they placed the sound of the zipper (and I know from talking with Dave “Rave” Ogilvie many moons ago about Skinny Puppy using a Walkman and a zillion takes to get each of their samples precisely placed back in the 80s 2” tape days just how hard that was for the Crüe’s production team to get right in 1989, whereas it’s a 30 second job now in ProTools).
Anyway, garbage in, garbage out. I need to fix that this year.
9. Better skincare and beauty routine
Well… more like any skincare and beauty routine, because usually I don’t bother.
Then I wonder why my skin is dry and my nails look like crap and my hair is a mess held up in a cheap claw clip. (I do take it down for filming Scuttlebutt, but that’s because it looks bad up in a messy bun… yet I go out in public like that all the time…)
I do occasionally paint my nails and ever since I quit ceramics they’ve been growing nicely, but making a weekly routine out of a “spa day” on Sunday nights is something I once did and should do again. Complete with mud mask, deep conditioning treatment on my hair, and mani-pedi.
I tend to just sit and watch YouTube on a Sunday night anyway, might as well do some better self-care along with that.
And I really need to find a better daily hairstyle. Even if I still wear it up, I could braid it or do a French twist or some other mode of securing it.
I recently did my semi-anual chopping of 4-6” off the bottom of my hair to dispose of the current split ends before they get worse, but as I have layers in my hair, I probably need to trim more. And it’s still down to my ass, lol…
Speaking of hair, I had to stop dyeing it a few years ago because I developed sensitivites to the chemicals. I’ve grown to accept my natural color, but I do miss being a blonde or a redhead or having jet black hair.
It has occurred to me to try wearing wigs sometimes for a change-up. Back in my music scene days, there was a girl in a band I was friendly with who had a big collection of wigs in different styles and colors and she seemed to have a load of fun with it. More recently, I saw this video from Catherine Kay talking about her own use of wigs:
I don’t have the thin hair issues she has, but still: her wigs look awesome. And it would solve the problem of missing different colors but not being able to stand the scalp irritation.
Wigs are pricey, though, so we’ll see. But I am considering it.
And some nightly moisturizer would be nice… I do do that maybe once a week, but I really notice now in the winter as well as in the summer heat that I could stand to moisturize more. It doesn’t even take long to do, I just forget to do it.
Who knows… maybe by spring I’ll get really fancy and wear actual make-up once in a while…
10. Dress better and bolder
I guess this is kinda superficial, but I want to wear more outrageous stuff.
Plain black tanks and leggings with an unbuttoned button-down shirt over top might be my daily uniform of the last number of years, but frankly it’s unflattering. I look like shit most of the time in this uniform and I don’t exactly feel great in it, either. It’s utilitarian but only in a kinda short-term sorta way.
And not even all that practical: if I’m painting, I risk ruining my shirts and I ought to wear a smock but I hate extra layers. Then if I’m running errands I still need to haul a purse and tote anyway. It’s barely one step above wearing pajamas all day.
Actually, wearing PJs might be more practical, at least when painting, because who cares what happens to the PJs but if I get white paint on my black leggings, then I have to get changed before throwing a tunic over them to go to church or whatever.
I suppose what I wear is sorta comfortable but not necessarily, as I’m currently at an in-between stage in my weight where the bigger leggings (that fit 19 pounds ago) droop and bunch and become uncomfortable but others that seem to fit now don’t really and they pull in weird ways or want to fall down. I suppose I just have to be patient and keep dropping weight.
And I actually have a lot of nice stuff. Granted I don’t currently fit in a lot of it, but that’s starting to change as I lose weight. But even what I do fit in languishes in my closet while I live in t-shirts and leggings… I really need to dress nicer.
Not just clothes, by the way: I mean, I own a pair of Old Gringo boots that cost a lot, even on clearance, and I’ve worn them only a couple times. And I have a bunch of Fluevogs (also bought on clearance or sale) that I also rarely wear.
Plus silk wraps and skirts made from upcycled silk saris, and really nice alpaca scarves and jewelry that might not be expensive but is funky and colorful, etc. I also have a lot of nice batiks and Kaffe Fassett cotton yardages that I bought to sew colorful, funky clothes with but they’re languishing in those cabinets behind the sewing desk.
I used to dress up more. I mean, look at these old maQLu pics:
But I got lazy over the years… and, granted, I still wore plain black tank tops a lot back then:
Anyway, a while back I heard some lecture by Fr. Ripperger and he was talking about modesty and appropriateness in clothing. Aside from the expected comments about necklines and hemlines, he also made a couple comments that were seemingly asides about appropriateness for your station in life and career.
Which got me thinking: as an artist and specifically a cartoonist, what is appropriate for me? There’s the stereotype of all black and somber looking, and sure, that’s probably common in dour galleries in New York (but there I am: stereotyping again), but why should I follow that?
My work is brightly colored and whimsical and cartoony and even a bit silly. Maybe what I should be wearing is my bright yellow cartoony Fluevog heels and I could make a blazer out of that hot pink and yellow Kaffe Fassett plaid cotton that I have yardage of and I could wear a turquoise leopard print circle skirt and a purple silk camisole.
It would be an accurate representation of what my work looks like, that’s for sure.
(And almost certainly not what the good Father meant by his comments…)
Even if I didn’t go that extreme: wear the jacket and the shoes with black pants and a black tank top.
Etc.
Some of it on the sewing side is not wanting to cut into fabric for something that I will just have to remake in another 30 pounds, and for stuff like a tailored jacket that makes sense because of the work involved. But I could definitely make simple gathered skirts or wrap skirts or loose dresses that wouldn’t be so bad to remake later.
And I have things like a lime green suede jacket that fits perfectly now that I got at a thrift store and have worn twice. I should wear that weekly until it’s too big and it goes back to the thrift store for someone else to enjoy. And more regularly check in the storage bins of currently too-small clothes as I shrink.
And on that note, it’s time to bring this long blog to a close. I need to go fetch a couple things from Walmart and I think I shall throw on my purplish pink wool/cotton blend cardigan over my black tank top and leggings instead of the beige flannel shirt I’m currently wearing.
Happy 2026 to all!