Way back in 2014, I drew this Apprentice Wise Woman.
…Mostly to play with the aesthetic. But also to practice drawing with some new pens I had acquired at the time.
In retrospect, I consider her a prototype for The Woman of the Woods. The face paint patterns are also proto-Nafrit, Nafrits being the nomadic women warrior peoples in The Legend of Jamie Roberts. The gang hasn’t met them yet.
Actually, I may draw more ladies like this one…
Oh! And she’s available as a hi-res download for Ko-Fi and Patreon.
I didn’t grow up watching Sailor Moon – unlike apparently 99% of other Millenials. I knew it existed, but I didn’t watch it regularly.
But when I DID watch it, I watched it for Sailor Mercury.
Mostly I watched for her because Mercury (the planet) rules Virgo, and that happens to be my astrological sign.
But also she’s smart. I REALLY liked smart girls in my cartoons who were also cute as heck. Surprisingly, not many girls on TV at the time were smart AND cute. You were one or the other. But Sailor Mercury dared to be BOTH.
So yeah. I drew her.
She’s available as a hi-res download now, too, on Ko-Fi and Patreon for just $1.
The original sketch will be listed on Storenvy soon.
The Witch and the Demon has been sitting in the sketchbook, the short story file, and my brain parts for the better part of two years now.
The above sketch came first…I think.
Then I wrote the short story. And…ok, to be blunt, it’s pornographic.
There’s a part of me that would love to adapt this into a wordless comic one-shot. But there’s also the logical part of me that says that 99% of printers out there would not print porn comics.
The paradox of America: American comic printers will happily run a comic with a dude getting his dick ripped off by possessed animals, but they WON’T run a comic with someone getting head.
There are oversea printers – even one or two in Canada that could do this – but I want to be positive before I move forward with it.
The other issue with doing an x-rated comic is: there are a LOT – and I mean A LOT – of readers who think my work is all kid-friendly because of the art style I draw in.
On the one hand, I get it. It’s cutesy.
On the other hand, the subject matter is not child-friendly most of the time.
Anytime this book is spotted on my table at shows, parents think it’s a book aimed at kids.
It’s not – it’s the story of a college student learning how to adult. While there’s no sex or cursing in it, it does tackle ideas that kids won’t understand, like existential dread and the meaning of life.
And I have to explain this more often than you’d think.
So because of all of those factors, The Witch and the Demon have been sitting in the rafters. And odds are high they will continue to sit there indefinitely.
We’ll see what the future holds for these two though. Auxaton as a story concept sat on the sidelines and was briefly abandoned… until I revived it for NaNoWriMo two years ago.
Who knows what will happen for the witch and her demon?
I’m inspired to write this as part of my Freelance Lifestyle blog series for one big reason: because I think all freelancers should have at LEAST one day off per week.
The inspiration came after I watched a video from The Personal Philosophy Project about freelancing. I liked her other videos, but I wanted to see if there was something new in her approach to freelancing that I hadn’t thought of.
Unfortunately, in her video, she says, “freelancers never have a day off.”
NOT. TRUE. AT ALL.
Freelancers ABSOLUTELY need days off. The difference is that freelancers have to plan for them.
I have always made it a personal point to keep one day off per week. Even if I had to take a part-time job working retail or (most recently) at a gas station, I made it clear from the start with people that I keep ONE day of the week off. No exceptions.
(Part of the reason I left the gas station was because they were beginning to break that. They kept trying to call me in to work on my ONE DAY OFF. I repeatedly had to tell them no.)
I’m so dedicated to keeping one day of the week absolutely work-free because of one super simple reason:
To avoid burnout.
When I had the “freelancers work 24/7!” mentality, I burned out frequently. I had high anxiety and nearly had panic attacks. I would be irritable with everyone around me, client, friend, or otherwise.
It’s not the best way for you to shine.
Also, working 24/7/365 is the best way to make your home an absolute mess that you never clean. Working constantly is also a good way to never cook for yourself, or make time for your friends or pets or family.
You. Need. A Day Off.
What day of the week should you keep off? That depends on the work that you do.
My recommendation is to find the slowest day of the week in your work schedule, and make that your day off.
For me, for the longest time, that was Sundays. But now that I’m back to freelancing full-time (and a surprising amount of work is only available on the weekends), I’m considering changing it to Wednesdays.
But whether it’s Sunday or Wednesday, I fully plan on keeping a day off.
Because dammit, I need a rest and a recharge.
In this way, we are like phones: if you keep your phone running 24/7, it WILL overheat, slow down, glitch, and run out of battery FAST.
Same goes for you.
So I urge you, if you truly want to embrace the freelance lifestyle: Give yourself one day out of the week to just shut off and recharge. You’ll thank yourself for it later. I promise.
Ollie (short for Olive) is a half-orc druid I’m currently playing in my D&D 5E group.
And BOY is she a lot of fun to play as.
(Everything she says in the sketches above are things I’ve said in character as her. Like I said, she’s fun).
The thing about Ollie is: she’s wise…but she’s not smart. Her wisdom HAS to be high to be effective as a druid, and it IS high. Currently her wisdom score is at a 16.
Her intelligence is 8.
For the uninitiated, if your skill score is below 10, that means that when you roll a dice to determine how successful you are, you have to subtract a number from what you rolled. If your skill score is ABOVE 10, you add a number to what you rolled.
So any intelligence-based check Ollie makes, I have to subtract 1 from what I roll. Any wisdom-based checks I make, I get to add 3 to what I roll.
This not only makes the mechanics of the game more interesting… this also means more fun in my roleplay.
Imagine this scenario: you’re in the woods, and you see a pack of wild dogs running off a cliff. Only, there’s something magical happening: the dogs are floating down, their paws still kicking in the air, and then they touch the ground below, unharmed.
What does Ollie do?
She runs to the top of the cliff and runs off the edge to see if this is an area-of-effect spell.
(I learned the hard way: no. It is NOT an area spell. The dogs were just magical).
But this is the kind of personality Ollie is: she learns from experience, not from books. In fact, if anything, classes put her to sleep.
She is also charismatic as heck. Her Charisma score is at a 16. So that means she’s REALLY good at making friends with people. Her typical greeting anytime she enters a room is, “MY DUDE!”
She calls bullshit when she sees it (hence the “passive aggressive” quote above). And she’s handy to have around to diffuse a tense situation.
More often than not, though, if something gets too tense, and she thinks people are going to make a fatal, terrible decision, she will physically pick them up and carry them out of the room.
(Hey, she’s still a half-orc. Half-orcs are strong, yo).
I hope you enjoyed Ollie as much as I enjoyed sharing her with you. I hope to draw more of her soon!
