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April 14, 2020April 13, 2020

Adventures In Moving: The Cats Edition

two pet cats, scarlet the black cat and bree bree the gray cat sitting on my lap

In this week’s installment of Adventures in Moving, I’ll be talking about…cats.

I have 2 cats, Scarlet and Bree Bree. Both will be 14 years old in May (next month!). In the times they have been in my family, they’ve moved 4 times.

The first move happened when they were kittens, going from my neighbor’s house to ours.

Second, from our old family home to our new home.

Third, when they lived with my younger sister for a while.

And fourth, when they moved back into my home.

When I DO finally get an apartment and move, that will be their fifth move in their life.

Like I mentioned before, they’re reaching 14 years old. They are, by all accounts, cranky old ladies. I’m not sure how well they will handle this next move, especially since this one will be across the state.

I WILL say – Scarlet has surprised me. I had to take her to see the vet last week, which meant putting her in a carrier. For the first time in nearly 4 years.

She handled it better than I expected.

Of course she trembled. But I gave her treats and pets. And she didn’t hiss or growl while in the carrier.

(Reacting to the vet is a different story).

This response to the carrier has me hopeful, though. Hopeful that the move will be easier than anticipated. I expected a lot of growling and hissing and I didn’t get that from Scarlet.

Bree Bree, on the other hand…

Well, I have to take her to the vet as well, so we’ll see how THAT goes.

That’s all for now. Thank you for reading!

You. Are. Awesome.

November 30, 2019November 30, 2019

Genghis Con Prep Time

It’s time for another livestream!

Today I trim minicomics for Genghis Con, while also talking about everything from freelancing (and what my freelance streams of income are); to goals I have for Fantasyville Productions.

The next stream will be Wednesday, December 4 at 1 pm EST. I’ll try to keep the stream short next time – I realize now that if I stream for more than an hour and a half, the first chunk of the stream gets cut off. That means that people who later watch the video as just a video will miss the first chunk.

You may notice that the livestream date for next week is on a Wednesday – that’s because I’m out of town the following weekend to visit friends (and go apartment touring) in the Toledo area.

That’s all for now. See you next week!

OR, if you’re in the Cleveland, OH area, I’ll see you TOMORROW for Genghis Con.

Thank you for watching!

You. Are. Awesome.

November 14, 2019November 14, 2019

I Got A New Laptop

Their name is Loki and you will show them respect.

Yes, I finally have a new laptop to replace my 7-year-old laptop, Odysseus. (Yes, I do name my devices after legendary figures, thank you).

I also replaced my dinky Wacom Bamboo with a Wacom Intuos Pro.

Full disclosure – I was able to replace these thanks to help from family. While I was able to save back some money of my own, they helped to chip in towards a new set-up. I wanted to point this out because:

the idea of a self-made entrepreneur is bogus and we need to stop promoting this idea. (For more context, look up the Amanda Palmer story “take the goddamn donuts.”)
and that’s it.

But now that I have this new set-up, it’s taking a little while for the arts-related work to fall into place.

For one thing, my program of choice, Clip Studio Paint, needs to be reconfigured all over again. So that’s taking a little extra time.

Long story short: The Legend of Jamie Roberts is being delayed. I’ll try to have an update up by tomorrow, but it may take longer than that. We’ll see how it goes.

Blog posts and KickStarter updates will continue as normal. (In fact, there’s only about 24 hours left on the Dragons: A Sketchbook KickStarter, wink wink).

Otherwise? That’s all I’ve got at the moment. Technical configurations are just going to take a hot day or two.

That’s all for now. Thank you for reading!

You. Are. Awesome.

October 24, 2019October 23, 2019

Dragons: A Sketchbook Coming Soon

lady dragon watercolor marker sketch for inktober 2019

My newest book – Dragons: A Sketchbook – is coming to KickStarter soon. As in, in the next few days.

The trend of these sketchbooks started with Witches: A Sketchbook, which collected all of my Inktober sketches of witches from 2017. (Inktober is the artist challenge to draw with ink every day during October. Usually there’s an official prompt list. I ignore all of them.)

Last year, I followed this up with Gods & Spirits: A Sketchbook, collecting all of my Inktober sketches of gods and spirits.

This year for Inktober, I’ve been drawing dragons and nothing but dragons. And I’m loving it.

And soon, they’ll be in a sketchbook.

In previous years, I ran a KickStarter campaign to fund book printings AFTER Inktober wrapped up.

This year, I wanted to start the pre-order ball rolling sooner, because November is going to be a bit of a schedule whack-a-mole for me.

So here’s the deal: email newsletter subscribers are the first to get the news of the Dragons: A Sketchbook KickStarter launch. If you are NOT an email subscriber yet, get on that ASAP. There will be early-bird backer rewards available, and the best way to get them is to be on the newsletter.

Then – I’ll be at New Dimension Comics this Saturday for Halloween ComicsFest. If you check out my table there and back the KickStarter campaign on the spot, you’ll get some goodies from me in person.

After that, I’ll be posting links to the KickStarter campaign on social media on Monday.

How long will the KickStarter campaign last? You’ll have to see the campaign when it launches to find out.

The initial asking goal will be to cover the basics to make this book project happen. Stretch goals after that include:

a KickStarter backer-exclusive miniprint
a baby dragon sticker sheet
an appearance at a large comicon (hopefully near you)!

In short…

Get on the email newsletter if you want to back this KickStarter ASAP and get your hands on an early copy of this book.

If you’re broke, though, don’t stress – just share the link to the campaign when it finally launches. Every share helps more than you know.

Thank you so much for your support!

You. Are. Awesome.

October 17, 2019October 16, 2019

The Email Newsletter is BACK!

The email newsletter is back, and I’m happy to introduce some new things to it!

I had put the newsletter on hiatus for a few weeks because of a fatal design flaw in MailChimp’s system. This design flaw deleted all of my subscribers, with no way of putting them back on the list.

So I deleted my MailChimp account, and started shopping around.

It took a little while to find a good substitute – for a hot minute I was afraid MailChimp had monopolized the free email client market.

But I found two services: Moosend and MailerLite.

I tried to make Moosend work, but it kept rejecting every email I tried to use. See, when you send emails, you need to specify who the sender is. And Moosend kept rejecting every. Dang. Email. That I wanted to use.

“This email is from a free client.” “This email is invalid.” Bleh bleh bleh.

So I didn’t want to dick around with them.

After a little more research, I found MailerLite.

And, for what I need it for, MailerLite has been working marvelously.

It’s a bit of a curve for me to get used to: it has different terminology and layouts than MailChimp. And I had been using MailChimp for like 3 years. So it’s still a process to unlearn MailChimp’s clunky-ass design and use MailerLite.

That said, now that I’m getting the hang of MailerLite, it’s smoother to handle than MailChimp. I also have zero fear of accidentally deleting all of my subscribers. And that’s worth everything right now.

Now that the email newsletter is back, I can bring in some new ideas: like exclusive offers for folks I meet at specific events, and even a Patreon-only newsletter.

That said, here’s the thing:

If you were on my email list before, odds are high that you got deleted. My back-up files were very limited. Not everyone was able to get back on.

So.

If you would like to get email updates from me once a week, you can re-sign up at this link.

If you’d rather not, that’s ok too. There’s still Facebook, Instagram, Patreon, and this blog.

(But newsletter subscribers get the news first when I launch KickStarter campaigns. Plus I make announcements of my convention appearances on the newsletter.)

But whatever choice you make is the right one.

That’s all for now. Thank you for reading!

You. Are. Awesome.