Okay, character meme thing. I was tagged by @prawnlegs and briefly thought “but I never see a fictional character and go ‘just like me!!!’” and panicked, but then realized all I had to do was find aspects of characters that resonated with me and it got much easier. Reaching from childhood to present day.
Honorable mention goes to Eleanor Vance from The Haunting of Hill House novel, who was originally in (book version) Samwell Tarly’s space before I realized I DON’T in fact want people to think of me when they read of her. It was like reading all my worst qualities and insecurities thrown back at me! (It’s an incredible book).
Sam Tarly is a fun case of “Character I have gotten as #1 in ‘what character are you (from among a huge range of media properties)?’ quizzes multiple times” and “character one of my actual friends is on the record as hating” 😅
I tried to do this as individual images like everyone else but it showed as rows of two (plus one at the bottom, bigger) instead of a 3x3 square. I’m STILL bad at Tumblr two decades or so on. So: One big combined image for now because I don’t know what I’m doing here.
a few favorites from the many altered key pendants i'll have with me this weekend at Yet Another Queer Pop-Up Market. i've been collecting the keys for years & it's very exciting to finally be doing what i want with them! the metal decorative elements on some of the keys come from a box of castoffs from a 1910s costume jewelry factory (lucky find 15+ years ago that i've been slowly working through). finding the right size quartz points for the hollow clock key tips is oddly satisfying!
don't worry, the human teeth are modern acrylic resin from a dental supply shop. i attach them to the key shafts (that have no bits of their own, they're sewing cabinet keys) with an epoxy sculpting material that i color-match to each key with metallic pigments. figuring out how to sculpt faux-metal is honestly changing the sculpture game for me.
they're saying spending 2 hours in the word doc changing words slightly to be more specific and evocative and moving endless commas around is one of the most noble and respected things that you can do
I dug a little deep in my folders to find some older OC stuff I didn't hate, and found this silly little one-page comic from 2020. Laszlo doesn't believe in buying anything that he could steal instead (and honestly he usually doesn't have the cash anyway). Toby comes from a wildly different background and finds this pretty nerve wracking. He's also contractually obligated to apologize due to being Canadian (I mean. Canada doesn't exactly exist as such in their future, but he's from. you know. former Canada).
This is... slightly less than 3/4 of a little comic I did last year, because I'm very silly and two out of three of the comics I drew last year I can't post, at least not in their entirety (the rest of this one is adult. As I'm sure you could tell. The other I can't post at all because gives away some character stuff that I want to keep secret). Planning to color this at some point.
(Drawn by me, scripted by my co-conspirator @sheydgarden. Neither of us speak Russian, apologies for any mistakes there. Original characters, more info here!)
Some character/world context for anyone who's curious:
This takes place on their ship, the Lilit. Yevgeny is the ship's medic, as much as he's able to be, anyway. He's not a doctor, he just has some field medicine training from his time in the army. Yeah, his stitching technique is unorthodox, that's on purpose. Don't worry, he autoclaves the thimble. He's claimed the recovery/observation room off of the sick bay as his bedroom, because he found the bunks in the regular crew rooms to be too cramped.
Laszlo was out at some bar on a space station (probably their ship is docked there?). There are a fair number of seedy space stations where anything goes. And Laszlo is... impulsive and has a bit of a drinking problem. Does he ever win bar fights? Absolutely not. Does this stop him? No. Boy's got a self-destructive streak.
I was lucky enough to see the full thing earlier, and I loved it then and I still love it now!
The facial expressions and body language are so well-observed and captured, and there’s such a great sense of physicality and volume to it all. Great emotional beats too.
Been treating myself to drawing OCs in between other stuff I've had to do. I'm not planning on doing age sheets for everyone, but I really wanted to do them for June and Laszlo, as well as put those two drawings of them aged 24 and 30 into an illustration together. And then the last piece is teenaged Laszlo with someone who was very important to him.
Fuck Meyer-Briggs whatever typology. This INTFP shit is only for redditors up their own asses to substitute for a personality. Use my new typology instead!
Another mug from last year, of bottle gentian and a bumblebee (because bottle gentian flowers never open, bumblebees are the only bees strong enough to push the petals open and pollinate them!).
The flowers were supposed to be dark purple, but the underglaze did something weird when it was fired and turned a translucent light blue, and glossy like a glaze?? That's what I get for not doing a test tile first. Still looks kinda cool.
My book is finally available today!! If this looks interesting, you can read some of it for free on my website. If it looks really interesting and you're feeling adventurous, the epub is cheap and you can get it from my ko-fi or from amazon! For the slightly less adventurous, maybe check out the reviews we got so far on Goodreads or Storygraph.
All the buying info for both the print and digital editions is under the cut, along with a text transcript of the synopsis!
First: I was asked to remind y'all you can request this one from your library, so here's me doing that!
The ISBNs for both covers are:
Variant cover (Phin and Ulrich): 979-8-9994625-0-3
Destination cover (Tower): 979-8-9994625-2-7
My distributor is Ingram and Sprawlworks is the publisher, if you need those too. If you know of any place that might be interested in working with me by carrying this and they need to get at me, you can direct them to the contact page on my author site!
For individuals, print copies are in my shop, and if you're in the US or the UK specifically you can also order a Destination or Variant edition direct from the distributor if you prefer (the only difference will be less cute packaging and no signature)! Despite the listing's confusing lack of cover images, both paperbacks are also available on the amazon page and through pretty much any bookseller in the Ingram network, but it'll be a bit more expensive in those places.
You can get the digital version of this book from:
My ko-fi shop and itch.io - DRM-free epubs!
The Kobo store and Amazon - Files automatically delivered to your account, and your device if you've got one! By the way, the Kobo file should be available through Overdrive too, so even if your library isn't interested in the print version for whatever reason you can still rent the epub that way with your library card.
Here's that text transcript for the back of the book:
In a world under the boot of its gods, Phineas Kidd is a heretic with a chip on her shoulder.
After her murder by the sun god, Phineas Kidd was resurrected as a commander- one who trades their soul for the ability to rewrite reality through sheer grit. Phineas uses it to punch things. Now grown and armed to the teeth with weaponized optimism, she sets out to catch the sun: an urban legend that will either help her liberate the world from the deities tearing it apart or destroy her in the process.
But first she'll need a ship, and a crew too.
When Phineas rolls into the desert outpost of Last Chance the only ship in sight belongs to Cold Hazard, the wizard terrorizing the town and its mining operation. Fortunately she also meets Ulrich, a perpetually irritable stage magician who only wants to kill her some of the time. With his pistols and her fists, it should be no trouble to climb the town's radio tower and deal with one crusty old dude.
...though, the things lurking in the depths below Last Chance might be more trouble than they or anyone else can handle.
Grist is the first novel in a humanist series about monsters who love each other, thriving in a world that wants them dead.
And hey, if you decide to give it a shot, please consider leaving a review or posting about it on social media! I'm all on my own out here, so visible reader interest really helps me out with those libraries and cute little book shops.
Thanks so much for being here for this! I hope it's a fun time! :D
read my book it's weird and not going to appeal to everyone but i can say with certainty it was crafted with more care than many many books with exponentially bigger price tags
I requested my local library acquire a copy, and they did!
Now, a month or two later, it arrived, and I get to be the first one to read this library copy. All the allure of cracking open a brand new book AND it was free to me and goes back into circulation for others to enjoy 😎
It’s currently third in the TBR queue behind Ship of Magic (which I’m about 2/3 through) and Song of Achilles (which doesn’t seem all that long), but after that! Excited to give this a go.
a totally handmade, fully-functional marionette created for the annual "Winter Exquisite" gallery show (this year's chosen medium was puppetry) at the Forbes Library in Northampton, MA - if you're local, you can visit anytime between the 7th & the end of the month!
for the winter theme, i designed a monster that blends my appreciation of this season's beauty with a more sinister, predatory element representing struggles against seasonal depression. bringing her to life was a huge learning experience & i got to try out a lot of new materials/techniques - i'd never made a marionette before! she took me all January but i'm very pleased with the result.
I found the “do X more” goals from last year hard to score so I tried to be more specific this time (I’m defining “semi-regularly” as “at least once a week more weeks than not and without falling off for months at a time”).
The “every month” goals are all things I want to do more often than that, but I found my biggest issue last year was inertia. The idea with this is to never go more than a month without doing the thing and to give myself a push to restart if I let it slip for more than a few weeks. I have a much easier time continuing things than starting them, so I’m hoping that will be enough to get me back on track for at least a little while.
Most of this is refinement on last year’s goals rather than new things, but some years are just like that.
