Yeah, So I'm Moving

Well met, friends and enemies!

Big news: I am moving. And the reason for that is that I made the bold (unwise) decision to quit my full time job for a part time one with the explicit goal of focusing more on my creative work. It is the culmination of a year-long quarter life crisis in which I felt deeply unhappy with the office job I had and the place that I was living. I’ve been feeling very trapped in the full time office world so much so that I felt if I didn’t escape as soon as possible I would just stay there, stagnant, forever.

Which is a long-winded way to say I am very excited for this change and luckily I have the support network to make the switch! My new job is taking me closer to the arts (of the performing variety) and less hours means I will have more time to dedicate to my personal projects. I’ve already been devising a schedule for myself so I stay on task in my off-hours, maybe once it’s finalized I’ll share it with you all here.

A big part of this decision is that since attending AWP in the spring, I’ve been inspired to pursue my MFA in writing. The academia brain worms have completely parasitized me—I yearn for the structure of a class schedule and assignments, as well as to be entrenched in creative community which I’ve felt isolated from for over three years.

This means hopefully I will have more writing and art to share as I won’t be spending as much time working and more time creating!

$6 Moving Commissions

If you’d like to support my move, I’ve opened up super low price ($6) moving sketches. You can check them out on ko-fi if you’re interested! Absolutely no pressure though.

Latest Art

Can you tell I’m trying to work my way up to including more backgrounds in my work? Perspective is my enemy, but I remembered that references are my friend and ally against this evil.

Writing

Here’s a short story I wrote in a fugue state over the course of two days, with minimal editing for another Reedsy contest. I think it’s wildly bad, I hate looking at it, and want to blow it up with my mind. I’m sharing with you here because I’m trying to get better about sharing things I don’t like, but I AM strategically putting it at the end of the newsletter so maybe only dedicated readers will see it lol. (This one is NOT going into the MFA writing sample). Writing badly is part of writing so I guess I’m glad I did it in the end.

Content warnings for abuse and robot death.

Digital Downloads

Alejandro Bruzzese’s blog post about digital sketchbook templates inspired me to try to make my own. The idea is that when you’re sketching digitally, sometimes it’s so hard to get started when looking at the bright white blank page, so instead you give yourself a template with some stuff already on it (like texture, a grid, color fields, etc.) to make it more approachable, plus the grid helps you plan out compositional elements.

Alejandro has some available on the blog page linked above, however, for me these are still too clean, so I made my own by drawing on real sketchbook paper and photographing it. If you’re a digital artist or maybe a digital journaler, you might find it useful or fun to play with!

And here’s an example of some of the sketching I’ve been doing with it:

Recent Faves

Some media recs from the last couple of months:

• Pantheon (AMC) – I have been rotating this show in my mind for a month now. It’s a sci-fi that starts with a high school girl who thinks maybe her dead dad is alive and was kidnapped by the company he worked for and then it goes soo many places from there. Maddie Kim is everything to me.

• Five Ways to Forgiveness – Ursula LeGuin I love you forever.

• My Favorite Thing is Monsters 2 – Loved this and MFTiM 1. The ending felt rushed, but the journey to get there was incredible and the illustrations are so good.

• No Man’s Sky – I got this when it was on sale recently and am addicted to exploring planets, learning the alien languages, and giving animals silly names.

• Sol Cesto – This is a roguelike about delving into a dungeon, but that kind of undersells it. It has incredible tone setting through its art style, gameplay, and writing. While in practice it’s like neither of these games it reminds me of both Balatro and Inscryption combined.

Fare well until December :^)