Well met, friends and enemies!

Happy Pride Month! I am so excited because I have a less depressing newsletter for you this month! Seeing the sun cannot erase all the horrors of the world, but it sure does help with seasonal depression. Funnily enough, that has actually resulted in me making less stuff rather than more. I’ve been spending time outside and with friends and haven’t been all that creative.

The end of the MFA application cycle came and went with a final tally of 1 acceptance and 9 rejections. The school I got into was the speculative fiction program Sarah Lawrence, which is really cool and exciting except that it’s super expensive and they offered me limited funding (and also I would have had to live in a really expensive area). So, I was looking down the barrel of student loans and decided they weren’t worth it for an (in my own words) financially useless degree when economy=bad. I declined. Which hurt.

I resolved myself to keep up my daily early morning writing practice over the summer to produce some shiny new writing samples for the next cycle. And then proceeded to sleep in until work time instead. Oops. Slowly, I’m getting back into it, but it took me a month of almost 0 writing and digesting that I wouldn’t be going to grad school in the fall.

I do have a few new short stories in the works. If anyone here would like to be an early reader and give me some honest feedback, please reach out!

On the art side of things, I’ve mostly been doing commissions as you’ll see below.

I finally got approved for a VGen artist account which means I can now take commissions through there! The marketplace helps direct people to my work in-exchange for a per-commission fee, which so far has felt like a good deal. In order to be fully verified I need $100 in commissions within 30 days. So, I’ve been running a pride-month sale. If you are interested in 25% off my commissions, check out my offerings here.

Lots of new stuff is up on my online store! Stickers, prints, zines, and originals etc. Check them out!

I am also listing my products on Faire now, so you know, if you happen to run a storefront that wants to stock my stickers, you know where to go lol.

I’ve been applying to full-time marketing jobs again and a lot of them are now asking for some form of AI proficiency :^(. Things are tough for an AI hater out here. I’ve directed my rage into a blog post, which you can read here (please ignore my legal name on the account… I sometimes use my medium as professional writing samples so it needs to be there). I wrote it partially to keep my non-fiction writing skills in shape and partially a vent for my AI-based frustration.

Fun fact! I wrote most of this blog post at work! In order to pick up my writing practice again I’ve been returning to my go-to hack: opening a new email at work and writing my personal work into it. That way if my supervisors looks over my shoulder it looks like I’m working. It has the added benefit of feeling sneaky which somehow motivates me to write more.

Reza and I are going to be at Grand Rapids Zine Fest in August! If you’re in the area come say hi!

Painted this bowl at one of those pottery painting places and it is now my prized possession. Obsessed with my bowl!!!

I actually finished this comic, before I sent out last months newsletter, but I forgot to include it. This is a short comic about my pathfinder character and Otari from the Abomination Vaults module. You can read the whole thing here.

I don’t have a high-quality photo of the cover yet, but my painting made it on the cover of The Alembic!

The original of the painting on the cover sold at Lansing Independent Comics and Zine Fest, but you can still get prints!

I’ve been trying to get back into submitting my writing to lit mags, so I made myself a chart of various markets, their submission windows, rates, genres etc as a submission tracker. Today, I offer you a copy of it to use for your own purposes. It has a heavy emphasis on SFF/Speculative Fiction, but there’s a few lit fic mags there as well. Also because I am primarily a fiction writer I only documented if a mag accepts fiction. Some of them also accept poetry, but I didn’t make note of it.

So, feel free to make a copy of this for yourself if you’re of the writerly persuasion. Also if you have any leads on any of the boxes marked with a question mark let me know!

Some recs from the last couple of months: