Beginning of the End of MFA Applications

Well met, friends and enemies!

For the past three months I’ve been working on my creative writing MFA applications. At this point I’ve survived past several deadlines and am about halfway through. This process has been filled with a lot of alternating lows and highs, and I deliriously submitted a lot of the applications while dead tired so I’m just hoping I did everything properly lol. Now I’m over the hump of the big chunk of them that were all due at the beginning of December and have some breathing room!

I didn’t fully stick to my writing schedule I had planned, but I made a good show of waking up early before work to get a bit of writing done and I was really happy with that. I think I’ll try and stick to that after apps are done as well. A “something is better than nothing” mentality when it came to writing really helped my productivity by taking the pressure off to write a ton. Instead I just needed to write anything at all and usually that got me writing enough that continuing wasn’t hard. Also using a pomodoro timer was a good motivator as well and kept me taking breaks. I got super into these skyrim-themed pomodoro videos, so shout out to that channel for getting me through this.

I do have some new writing now after this intense period of drafting and editing, but I’m not sure when I’m going to share it. It’s been a while since I’ve sent my writing on submission, but I think I’m going to give it a go again in the new year with these two new short stories. I will keep you posted :^)

Sketchbook Tour

I finally filmed a sketchbook tour of my 2024-2025 sketchbook. This is maybe my favorite sketchbook I’ve ever filled. I’m not in love with every page, but I felt pretty consistently inspired to draw and try new page compositions. The filming part I am less confident about, but I think it turned out fun!

Latest Art

I love drawing foals! Their proportions are super funny to me. They have such long legs and little bodies. Also, I just found out that 2026 is the year of the horse, so I guess I was feeling that energy a little early 🏇

If you like this piece you can get it as a print!

Io Literary Journal

My guitar piece was accepted as the cover for Io Literary Journal volume 5! I also have another piece in the interior of this volume. I’m super grateful to Io for giving my art a home. In undergrad I was a copy editing intern for them and the crew has always been super supportive. If you have any writing or art you’re looking to submit, I can recommend sending it to Io next time they open up submissions.

I don’t get anything from the sales, but I thought I’d plug the preorder for volume 5 in case you’re interested in checking out the talented writers and artists I get to share this issue with!

Pet Portraits

I did my annual pet portrait for the Constellation Cat Cafe pet portrait fundraiser! I don’t live near it anymore, but I was glad to be able to support them again this year anyway. CCC is one of my favorite spots in Lansing, so if you can make the trip go hang out with some cats!

I’ve also opened up pet portrait commissions for the winter! If you want a portrait of your furry friend like the above piece you can check out my rates and other details below.

Top Secret Art

This isn’t actually secret art, I just didn’t get a very good photo of it before I mailed it out so I probably won’t share it anywhere else. This was a Christmas card of Mochi I painted to send to my grandmother :^) I need to break out the gouache more often, because I always have so much fun with it.

Recent Faves

Some media recs from the last couple of months:

• Tiger, Tiger: I binged this in its entirety over two very slow days at work. It’s a web comic about a noblewoman in a 1700s fantasy world who pretends to be her brother to sail off and pursue her passion of studying sea sponges, but runs into a lot of adventure and mystery along the way. I love the art and the writing, I can’t believe I hadn’t read this sooner.

• Wake Up, Dead Man: This is the newest Knives Out/Benoit Blanc mystery, and I really enjoyed it! Good mystery writing and you can tell they had fun playing with the Catholic imagery.

• ShortOneGaming’s Danganronpa V3 playthrough: Danganronpa is so interesting to me and I’m not really sure why. It’s a killing game, it’s a mystery/puzzle game a la Ace Attorney, and it’s trying so so hard to be edgy (often to ill effect), but at it’s heart it’s about the power of friendship and hope, and also about how being a high schooler sucks. I like ShortOne’s Danganronpa playthroughs in particular because they have a format where one host has already played the game and knows what happens while the other is experiencing it for the first time.

• A Dark Room: This is a browser game that starts out as an idle clicker and then becomes a narrative adventure game. I really like how it draws you in with the little narrative bits and makes you want to keep on going out for firewood and building things.

• TamaNOTchi: I was feeling a nostalgic itch for tamagotchi even though I never had one as a kid and then I found this virtual pet site that lets you make a knockoff keychain pet. It’s super cute and feeds my nostalgia for the internet from when I was 8 years old.

• Creative Block: I know I’ve mentioned them in a newsletter before, but they just announced their last regular episode and I’m soooo sad. Their interviews with creative professionals in animation, illustration, and comics are so insightful and shows there’s no one route to pursue creative interests.

Fare well until March and Best Wishes for the New Year :^)