Deckard Holiday

Category: Blog

  • Welcome to 2026

    So I’ve been using a single Scrivener project for all my blog entries. I created the project assuming that I would want to split the posts I write for my personal site (the one you’re on right now) and the Audio Elk site, and being able to manage all my posts in a single project would be much easier than constantly navigating multiple files in order to find everything I need. I was planning a regular stream of writing output for both sites and wanted to plan ahead.

    Funny how that worked out, huh?

    Before I get into the negatives of last year, I will say I did have a few good moments. I was given the opportunity to be the sound designer for the Furality creative team, designing and implementing the environment sounds for Furality Somna. It was a hectic and challenging experience, but was ultimately quite rewarding to see it come together in the end.

    I also had small bursts of motivation and did a fair bit of work in Godot, experimenting with some point and click navigation controls and various UI ideas. It hasn’t amounted to much yet, but it was nice to do some development work again.

    Outside of hobbies I started taking my diet more seriously, reducing the amount of times I order food and started down the path of losing weight. I’m down almost 15 pounds as of last month, and I’m quite proud that I’ve been able to make consistent progress on it.

    However, this year ended up being a very difficult one for me near the end. I had many projects I wanted to work on this year, a lot of ideas I was excited to dive into and share with everyone, but instead I found myself struggling quite a bit to find any reason to work on anything.

    I know it’s not an uncommon thing to hit a brick wall like this. I figured last year was just a temporary thing, something that would eventually go away and let me return to work. It’s just a bit of burnout, you know? But as the months progressed, things only got worse. By November I wasn’t even sure if I ever liked doing anything I had before, including my job. I lost interest in my development projects, barely considered the idea of opening up Scrivener to write, and the idea of doing some audio work would stress me out so badly that I would sit at my desk, muscles tensed, staring at my screen until I ultimately gave up and closed Nuendo.

    I don’t think I’ve ever experienced this problem to the degree I had last year. I’d experienced burnout before plenty of times, but that would only ever last a few weeks max. Usually at some point I would get the itch to work on something and I’d find my groove again. Even right now I feel myself actively focusing on typing each letter in order to push through to write this up.

    Ultimately I have to make some changes.

    So what does this mean for 2026?

    It means I’m stepping away from things so I can focus on myself. I had a lot of goals set for myself last year, but this year my only goal is to take care of my own wellbeing instead of trying to push myself too hard. I’ll be stepping away from any work that isn’t my full time job, meaning that I will have no plans to do anything for Audio Elk this year. This also means that I will be stepping away from the Furality Creative team.

    Instead, I will be focusing on myself these first few months. I want to get out and exercise again, continue working on my diet, and just get out more in general. I’m also hoping to move out of my current place this year, which should hopefully remove some of the extra stress caused by my current living situation. I’ve also considered seeking out a therapist should I feel it’s necessary.

    The only real goal I have for this year is to use my free time as free time, letting myself use it without feeling the need to be productive. Last year I managed to read 15 books, which is crazy for me. I’d like to continue building that habit. I also want to generally stop watching YouTube as much as I currently do, instead replacing it with either watching movies/TV shows I haven’t watched yet, or playing games that have been on my ‘to play’ list for too long.

    So I guess I do have a few resolutions for this year:

    • Get to a point in my diet where I never feel the urge to order food
    • Get to the point where exercise is an effortless part of my daily routine
    • Be more active in seeking out new books/movies/shows/games to experience

    Overall I just want to get to a point where my free time feels like free time, and get away from the feeling of needing to use my free time “the right way”. I think that if I’m able to get to a point where I don’t have this constant stress to create or develop skills hanging over me, I’ll be able to start creating again without putting too much pressure on myself.

    So there you have it. To be frank I don’t have any idea how to end this post without relaying all the same stuff over again, so I’ll just say that if you’re reading this, I hope you have a wonderful 2026. I hope you’re able to make progress towards your own goals. I’m looking forward to seeing what this community creates next.

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  • So Here we Are.

    Finally, an Update.

    I have attempted to write up an update this year…5 or 6 different times now (now 7, as I return to this draft nearly a month after originally attempting it), all of which ended up going nowhere or being actively scrapped as I felt they were a bit more negative and I didn’t want that negativity to overshadow the good parts of the year.
    Outside of the general ‘everything’s on fire’ situation going on with the world, this year has actually been pretty good to me. I was able to pay off a few debts, work’s been going well, and I actually have a second part time job doing actual sound design/game audio implementation work which is really exciting! All in all things haven’t been bad for me.
    What’s really tripped me up trying to write up an update this year has probably been the fact that I haven’t actually done anything worth talking about. I’ve been mostly just surviving. I haven’t even come close to achieving any of what I wanted this year, and I think it’s been weighing on me much more than I realize.
    For the sake of getting everything down on paper, here were my main goals for this year:

    • Fix my diet (stop ordering out, reduce junk food intake, etc.)
    • Get into a regular exercise routine
    • Either get a demo build to a ‘complete enough’ state for my game project idea, or move into production on my practice audio drama snippets
    • Find a writing groove and finish one story per month.
    • Release a new, free foley sound library
    • Release updates to my free ambiance and footsteps libraries
    • Settle into a weekly stream where I work on audio/development projects

    And here’s what I’ve managed to get done this year:

    . . .

    Now, it’s not a massive deal that I haven’t achieved these goals yet, but it is still frustrating to have these goals in the back of my mind while in a state where it feels impossible to even chip away a bit at one of them.
    So I’ve decided to change up this list. First thing’s first, I’m probably going to be fully removing the sound library work. I think the majority of my sound design work this year will be going towards improving my abilities so I can do well at my part time job.
    Speaking of sound libraries though, I should mention that all my sound libraries are now free through the end of August, so feel free to grab them while you can!
    As far as streaming goes, I may stream a bit here and there. I’m not going to go for weekly unless I can find a good day to do so each week. I noticed when I was in a groove with my daily exercise and cooking for myself each night, I never really had a good time to stream, and was too tired to stay up too late to do so. Instead I might do a weekly Saturday stream or something when I feel like it. I’ll post updates when I go live as usual.
    Now for the big projects.
    I’ve had a game development project that I’ve been pretty excited about working on, but haven’t had much desire to dive into it lately. Its original purpose was to help get me excited to work on my audio drama project ideas, which it has done, so for now I’m probably going to set it aside while I work on writing. Which I guess leads me to writing…
    My biggest goal this year was to start writing regularly. I was doing some free writing at the end of last year, which gave me a bunch of little story ideas, plus some scripts I never returned to for my audio drama project. I’m going to turn my attention towards those, and try to write a little bit every day.
    I’m also going to let myself write up general blog posts with whatever musings I feel like talking about. I’ve had a few ideas that I even started writing already, so I’ll do my best to return to them. They’re mostly audio related. Musings on how loud the internet is, what it’s like to ditch streaming services altogether, stuff like that. Things I’d like to talk about that, hopefully, others are interested enough in to share their view on things.
    So, that’s that. Not a very exciting post, I know, but I mostly needed something to upload here so I can see how posts end up being formatted on my site, and now I’ve finally finished a piece of writing this year, so things are already looking up!
    I don’t have any deadlines planned for my next upload. Right now my focus is going to be rebuilding the habit of writing every day. Once I feel that I’m in a comfortable spot I’ll begin looking at setting deadlines for the stories I’m working on.
    I don’t have any ideas on how to end this so here we are. Have a good one y’all <3

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